Technology can be wrong blaming for bad sleep
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Much has been written about how modern lifestyle means that we no longer get enough sleep, as opposed to our anenstors, who lived in less technologically advanced times. But an analysis of 54 sleep studies conducted worldwide has found that people in small, non-industrialized communities actually get less sleep than those in more industrialized regions.
“Everyone I talk to in Canada and the US talks about how terrible their sleep is,” says Leela McKinnon at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada. “The numbers don’t show that.”
It is often assumed that the emergence of gadgets such as big-screen TVs and smartphones means that people today sleep less than in the recent previous so-called sleep loss epidemic.
However, many studies reporting a fall asleep in the last few decades are based on asking people how long they sleep, which is an unreliable measure. Even using this method, the results are mixed where Mary -Studies find no change or even an increase in sleep duration.
Research based on more reliable measures, such as physical activity monitors or using electrodes to monitor brain waves, have not found a decrease in recent decades. For example, a 2016 review of 168 studies found no fall in sleep duration in the last 50 years.
But these studies we conducted in the industrialized country, which left the question that people became very soft for industrialization. With the availability of wrist-based activity monitors, it has become easier to study sleep in non-industrialized communities.
Such studies have dreams surprising shorts Suleep durations. For example, among hunter-collectors, San Sleep for 6.7 hours at night, on average, Hadza for 6.2 hours and Bayaka for 5.9 hours. The short-term duration found so far is the 5.5-hour sleep of the Himba community in Namibia, which is nomadic Liststock shepherds.
McKinnon and her colleague David Samson, also at the University of Toronto Mississauga, have been involved in several such studies. They have now compared sleeping habits in industrialized communities, including the United States, Australia and Sri Lanka, with them in smaller, non-industrialized communities, including original people in the Amazon, Madagascar and Tanna Island in the Pacific.
Alterner is the analysis based on 54 studies involving direct measurements of sleep in people over the age of 18 who had no serious health conditions. While these involve studies only 866 people in total, the data set is the most understandable to date, Samson says. “That’s the best thing that is right now.”
Generally, these individuals slept for 6.8 hours on angrage, goals in non-industrialized communities, the average was 6.4 hours compared to 7.1 hours in industrial communities.
The couple also found that people in non-industrialized communities slept in 74 per year. Hundreds of the time they were in bed, compared to 88 percent in industrial communities, a measure known as sleep efficiency.
McKinnon and Samson also evaluated the regularity of people’s circadian rhythms using a measure called the 24 -hour function index, where a score of 1 is perfect. In non-industrialized communities, the average was 0.7 compared to 0.63 in industrial communities.
Samson attributes the higher sleep duration and greater sleep efficiency in industrialized societies to the conditions that are more divisted to sleep. “We see you that we have achieved some real gains in the safety and safety of our sleep sites,” he says. “We don’t have to feel with rival human groups at night or predators.”
On the flip side, people in industrial regions are less exposed to the signals that help keep circadian rhythms, such as lower temperures at night and exposure to light light during the day. While not assessing this, McKinnon and Samson both suspect that having less regular circadian rhythms could have side effects explaining why Mary People Pierive their sleep is poor.
What is not clear from the paper is how representative individuals in these 54 studies are of their total population, says Nathaniel Marshall at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “In order to give statements about spread in epidemiology, you must have representative sampling,” he says.
Samson says he was watching if it could change the results and they concluded that it would not make a big difference.
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