mmalabanan
While it has been a longstanding, widely-held belief that we should get eight hours of sleep, scientists recently revealed that six or seven hours is the natural amount after analyzing the habits of hunter-gatherer tribes.
Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles examined the traditional lifestyles of the San of Namibia, the Hadza of Tanzania, and the Tsimane of Bolivia. Their lack of a modern lifestyle apparently resembles that of our ancestors.
To obtain 1,000 days’ worth of data for 94 adults, they utilized watch-sized devices that measured sleeping and waking times as well as light exposure.
Most of the participants slept for less than seven hours a night, averaging six hours and 25 minutes. Interestingly, the participants were found to be fitter and in good health with better blood pressure, lower rates of obesity, and healthier hearts compared to people in industrialized societies.
“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 researchers said.
Moreover, the findings of the study contradict the idea that modern living has reduced our sleep time compared to the amount our ancestors got.
“There’s this expectation that we should all be sleeping for eight or nine hours a night, and if you took away modern technology, people would be sleeping more. But now, for the first time, we are showing that’s not true,” lead author Ghandi Yetish explained.
Featured image credits to myhousecallmd.com.
