Study of primitive tribes shows we're all still 'Paleo' sleepers
People in modern societies get about the same amount of sleep as those in pre-industrial communities in Africa and Latin America - who average a little less than 6.5 hours a night, and don't take naps - UCLA study finds
The trappings of modern life, such as television and the internet, as well as increased caffeine usage, are often blamed for shortening our sleep duration from “natural” levels and disrupting our circadian rhythms. But a new study that investigated sleep in three ancient groups of hunter-gatherers living in Africa and Bolivia shows these preindustrial societies don’t get any more sleep than we do.
These traditional people were found to sleep between 5.7 to 7.1 hours a night – on average, a little under 6.5 hours a night. They don’t take regular naps. And they go to sleep on average three hours after sunset and typically awaken before sunrise.
In other words, their sleep habits aren’t so different from ours, say the researchers in their study in the journal Current Biology published on October 15.
"The short sleep in these populations challenges the belief that sleep has been greatly reduced in the 'modern world,'" says Jerome Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles. "This has important implications for the idea that we need to take sleeping pills because sleep has been reduced from its 'natural level' by the widespread use of electricity, TV, the Internet, and so on."
The US National Sleep Foundation recommends adults get seven to nine hours of sleep a night. Many Hongkongers fail to do so: the latest Health Department statistics from 2011 found that 35.5 per cent of adults slept fewer than seven hours a day on average. Only 6.4 per cent of the 2,000 adults polled got more than eight hours of sleep a night.
The purported reduction in sleep duration has been linked to obesity, mood disorders, and a host of other physical and mental illnesses thought to have increased recently.