SOMETIME in the dark stretch of the night it happens. Perhaps it’s the chime of an incoming text message. Or your iPhone screen lights up to alert you to a new e-mail. Or you find yourself staring at the ceiling, replaying the day in your head. Next thing you know, you’re out of bed and engaged with the world, once again ignoring the often quoted fact that eight straight hours of sleep is essential.
在伸手不见五指的静谧午夜，有时会发生一些小插曲：或许是一个短信到来的声音，或许是iPhone手机提醒您收到新邮件的屏幕闪动，又或许是发现自己在盯着天花板，脑海中如放映电影般回顾一天的事情。如你所知，接下来你会不顾“连续8小时睡眠是必不可少的”这一常常被提起的告诫，起床，回到现实世界。
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Thanks in part to technology and its constant pinging and chiming, roughly 41 million people in the United States — nearly a third of all working adults — get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.
听起来很熟悉吧？并非只有你是这样。美国疾病控制和预防中心的最新报告显示，在美国大概有4100万人口(接近总工作人口的1/3)每晚睡6小时，或者更短，这部分要归罪于科技，如它带来的短信声、屏幕闪动等。睡眠不足困扰着经济领域中的各行各业的人。 大概42%的矿工反映睡眠不足，而又27%的金融保险从业者也抱怨缺觉。
Typically, mention of our ever increasing sleeplessness is followed by calls for earlier bedtimes and a longer night’s sleep. But this directive may be part of the problem. Rather than helping us to get more rest, the tyranny of the eight-hour block reinforces a narrow conception of sleep and how we should approach it. Some of the time we spend tossing and turning may even result from misconceptions about sleep and our bodily needs: in fact neither our bodies nor our brains are built for the roughly one-third of our lives that we spend in bed.
一般来说，提到越来越多的睡眠不足问题，就不得不提“晚上早睡，多睡”这一倡导。然而，这个倡导也许正是问题部分症结所在。因为这个倡导不能帮助我们获得更多的休息，“8小时连续睡眠”武断地把睡眠的概念以及如何实现好睡眠框在一个很窄的观念框里。有些时候的辗转反侧也许就是来自我们对睡眠和身体需要的错误认识。事实是，无论是我们的身体还是大脑都不是专门为那耗在床上的1/3人生时间设计的。
The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.
人们应该在晚上连续睡8个小时的观念是最近被提起的。世界各地人口以各种各样的、令人惊奇的方式睡觉。例如，上百万的中国工人仍会在午饭后趴在桌子上睡上个把小时，白天小睡在印度和西班牙等地区也很普遍。
One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep。” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.
弗吉尼亚理工学院历史学教授罗格·艾瑞克在20世纪90年代早期就首先证实连续睡眠8小时是不可信的。他花费数小时研究夜的历史并且开始注意到关于睡眠的奇怪文献。《坎特伯雷故事集》中的一个人物决定在“第一段睡眠”后继续睡觉。英格兰的一位医生写到，在“第一段睡眠”和“第二段睡眠”之间的时间是学习和沉思的最好时间。一位16世纪的法国内科医生总结到，工人能够生出更多的孩子是因为他们等到“第一段睡眠”后才做爱。Ekirch教授很快发现到他并不是唯一一个认识到睡眠周期交替这一历史性存在的人。一位名叫Thomas A. Wehr的精神病专家在位于马里兰州贝塞斯达的国家心理卫生研究所工作，他做了个实验，实验中处在没有人工照明环境中。没有照明，没有电灯泡、电视或者电脑的干扰，被试者最初在晚上睡觉，但是，Wehr博士注意到被试者在午夜后不久醒来，数个小时候再度入睡。这与艾瑞克教授在历史文献和早期文学作品中发现的阶段性睡眠模式相同。
It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.
如果我们有机会远离现代生活，貌似我们的身体将会很自然地适应分段睡眠模式。被试者渐渐喜欢以一种新的方式经历黑夜。一旦他们抛弃“睡眠模式应该怎样怎样”的念头，他们会渴望午夜时间的到来，届时他们有深思的机会，无论是自我反省，还是给自己的一天一个跳跃式的启动，或者是想情爱的事。然而，我们大部分人并不认为午夜醒来时正常运作的信号。
Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has called “the ironic processes of mental control”.
医生们兜售帮助睡眠药物，并且提倡更多的睡眠，这些行为无意中强化了这样的观念：睡眠中断是有问题的或者状态不好的。我们认为自己在夜里应该获得一个好的休息，而如果我们在夜间醒来，我们就认为自己是不正常的，这样，睡眠焦虑的出现就不足为奇了。一系列的焦虑使我们失眠，一些人甚至要求助于药物或者睡眠帮助，这是个被哈佛心理学家称之为“具有讽刺意味的精神控制过程”的恶性循环。