I just had dinner with my friend Emily Hurson, a talented actor, singer and all-round hoopy frood. When I asked her about her longtime struggle with insomnia, she mentioned that her life was much better since she embraced second sleep, a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night. According to its proponents, this sleep pattern is the one that humans naturally fall into when they don't have electric lighting, and was common until a few hundred years ago. I've been reading up on it this morning and I'm intrigued. Emily sez, "I've embraced that not getting 8 hours of sleep in a row is okay. When I wake up in the night, sometimes for a few hours, I don't get frustrated or worried about a lack of sleep." Have any of you tried it? Discuss it in the comments.
See also: The myth of the 8-hour sleep
