NY Times: Sleeping in Pieces

Sweetgum
Tue, 11 Jul 2023 18:08:46 +0000

The pandemic, she writes, has permitted those who are working from home and thus have more control over their schedules, like Ali, to embrace two-part sleeping. One person Danielle spoke with sleeps from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., then from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. Another does 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

“Embracing” is a term that implies they like it. If they were struggling with segmented sleep a better term might be “resort to” or “suffer through”, etc.

Experts and former insomnia sufferers beg to differ. In The Times Magazine in 2016, Jesse Barron wrote a letter of recommendation for segmented sleep. He learned to love the hours between snooze segments that the French called dorveille, or wakesleep. “Waking into them is different, childlike,” he wrote. “The time feels freer. The urge to be busy abates.”

Sounds pretty much like he is more than okay with segmented sleep if he’s writing letters of recommendation for it.

I think it’s great if it works for them. I think my husband does this sometimes, but he’s one of those guys who doesn’t need much sleep (regularly runs on about 5 or 6 hours) and can fall asleep at the drop of a hat and sleep through all sorts of stuff. I am a light sleeper and it takes me awhile to fall asleep and if I get waked up it takes me awhile to fall back asleep. I cannot nap at all.