With the discovery of electric light bulb our nights have been changed into bright days with passage of time. So our waking up and sleeping timings got damaged. It took almost one and a half century to reach this day. But finally, now we are no more the characters of Jungle Legends.
Thanks to Thomas Alva Edison (1879). Light bulb gave us the ability to see in nights. Perhaps being unable to see in darkness was a great blessing of Nature.
Most of the people, who stay all or half of the night awake, are some sort of hunted people by vampires. Because being awake all night break their psychological patterns out of line. In fact, there is hormone in our body called Melatonin. It is also called “The Sleep Hormone”. It is a hormone that only secretes at night, and is responsible for regulating the circadian rhythm. That is, to differentiate the functions of our body between wakefulness and sleep.
Melatonin Hormone is mainly discharged by the pineal gland. As a medical aid, it is frequently used to temporarily cure trouble sleeping for example from jet lag or shift work. Evidences of usefulness of this medical treatment, however, are inexact.
What is a body Clock or Circadian Clock?
A circadian rhythm is any biological process that exhibits an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours. These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and they have been extensively detected in plants, animals, fungi, and cyanobacteria.
In biology, circadian rhythms (from Latin circa, meaning ‘around’ and dies, meaning ‘day’) are oscillations of biological variables at regular intervals of time.
All animals, plants and all organisms show some type of physiological rhythmic variation (metabolic rate, heat production, flowering, etc.). That is usually associated with a rhythmic environmental change.
In all Eukaryotic Organisms as well as many Prokaryotes, different rhythms have been documented with periods ranging from fractions of a second to years. Although they are modifiable by exogenous signals, these rhythms persist in laboratory conditions, even without external stimuli.
In general human language we call it a body clock. A body clock is a system, notably a biological system that makes your body like a clock. Your body responds to different time of the day and night automatically.
Our Bodies are Perfect Clocks
When sun goes down, entire system of your body changes with that great shift of electromagnetic waves in the environment. Your body is itself a black body. A black body is an object that radiates waves. Someone detecting the radiation from a far away galaxy would identify our bodies just by using a black-body detecting device. Because our bodies are being radiated all the time. Maybe, you have heard about the Euglena, a living organism, who’s antenna’s like cilia detect electromagnetic waves in environment and it responds as immediately, as we can see it responding. Evidence is overwhelming that our bodies are automatic duration-detectors. Therefore, our bodies are perfect clocks.
So if our body is a perfect clock, it must have set some alarms in order to maintain its clockness. Those alarms shout if we don’t listen to them. They shout and shout and shout but then they get tired and hopeless of you. They go silent gradually. Now! You can’t listen to them. Not anymore.
If your new patterns are regular your clock reset themselves and it’s least okay because you may have your professional problems. But if you are not regular in life. You change your patterns all the time then your body clock is so very confused and it could not decide how to react.
In short, you should go to bed early in the night for a good sleep for about seven to eight hours. This habit is the accepted norm of sleep and is considered optimal.
Other epoch, other customs: used to sleep twice
History professor A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech University published a study in 2001 , in which he presented his results on the sleep behavior of 16 years of research: Until the 17th century, people slept not in eight hours at a stretch, but in stages over a longer period Period of about 12 hours. This started with a first sleep, which lasted three to four hours. Then followed by a two to three hours long awake phase, before you lay down for the second sleep until the morning on the ear.
In his 2005 book, “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past,” Ekirch substantiates his thesis for multi-part early-modern sleep behavior (circa 1500-1750) with over 500 references from journals, court documents, medical records, and literature by Homer’s Odyssey up to anthropological reports.
The numerous references show that two-phase sleep was the accepted form of sleep.
During the waking phase, people often stayed in their bedrooms and used the time to relax, read, pray, talk, wood in the fire, or to maintain amorous relationships. Some even went out and visited neighbors
The emergence of 8-hour sleep
In the pre-industrial era, the night was considered Satan’s season. Good people, according to the faith, are tired from the work done at night and therefore remain in their beds. Only bad people drifted around in the streets after dark. In addition, there was still no electric light, which is why the hours of sunshine greatly influenced the sleep pattern.
In 1667, Paris was the first city in the world to illuminate its streets with glass candles in wax lamps. With the spread of street lighting, electric interior lighting and street cafes, the night became a legitimate time for activity. Several sleep units were increasingly considered a waste of time.
At the end of the 17th century, the practice of first and second sleep finally disappeared into the urban upper classes of northern Europe. In the following 200 years, this trend spread throughout Western society. So, that in the 1920s, the concept of first and second sleep completely disappeared from our social consciousness.
Staying asleep? What we can learn from the two-phase sleep
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and have desperately but unsuccessfully tried to fall asleep again? Although eight-hour sleep is established today, Ekirch believes that the cause of drowsiness may be our predisposition to two-phase sleep and the ubiquity of light.
A look at the sleeping patterns of our ancestors shows that a waking phase does not have to be a nuisance: instead of rolling around in bed, our ancestors enjoyed the unique tranquility of the night to relax and rest.
The findings about the two-phase sleep suggest that the compulsive re-sleep may be counterproductive. So if you cannot sleep through one night, just try to accept your waking phase and enjoy the moment of rest, as our ancestors used to do.
Waking Up on Time
Taking in account all the evidence, we need to, at least, give a permanent alarm setting to our clock, just for the waking time. Sleeping on time is of course the most necessary thing to achieve the goal of becoming not-tensed and sober personality. But sleeping on-time doesn’t much matter in order to change yourself.
All you need is to wake up on time and that’s all and rest is assured. It’s obvious that when you will care about your waking alarm and you will push yourself to wake after all, it will automatically change your sleeping time within in a week. You wake up on time and you’ll sleep on time automatically.
Once you have made your body clock working again, you will see the results immediately within a few days.