Sleep: Long-Held Belief Challenged by New Study

Modern thinking about how much sleep you should get questioned by new study. Modern thinking about how much sleep you should get questioned by new study. Has modern life really reduced our sleep to less than our ancestors used to get? In fact the sleep habits of ancient hunter-gatherer societies were little different to our own, a new study finds. They probably slept 6.5 hours a night, didn’t take any naps or go to bed at sunset. Dr Jerome Siegel, one of the study’s authors, said: “The short sleep in these populations challenges the belief that sleep has been greatly reduced in the modern world. 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.” To reach these conclusions researchers examined three traditional hunter-gatherer societies: the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Bolivia.