The 8-Hour Sleep Myth: How I Learned That Everything I Knew About Sleep Was Wrong
I’ve always been at odds with sleep. Starting around adolescence, morning became a special form of hell. Long school commutes meant rising in 6am darkness, then huddling miserably near the bathroom heating vent as I struggled to wrest myself from near-paralysis. The sight of eggs turned my not-yet-wakened stomach, so I scuttled off without breakfast. In fourth grade, my mother noticed that instead of playing outside after school with the other kids, I lay zonked in front of the TV, dozing until dinner. “Lethargy of unknown cause,” pronounced the doctor.
High school trigonometry commenced at 7:50am. I flunked, stupefied with sleepiness. Only when college allowed me to schedule courses in the afternoon did the joy of education return. My decision to opt for grad school was partly traceable to a horror of returning to the treadmill of too little sleep and exhaustion, which a 9-to-5 job would surely bring.
In my late 20s, I began to wake up often for a couple of hours in the middle of the night – a phenomenon linked to female hormonal shifts. I’ve met these vigils with dread, obsessed with lost sleep and the next day’s dysfunction. Beside my bed I stash an arsenal of weapons against insomnia: lavender sachets, sleep CDs, a stuffed sheep that makes muffled ocean noises, and drugstore remedies from valerian to melatonin which cause me "rebound insomnia" the moment I stop taking them.
The Sleep Fairy continued to elude me.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154424/the_8-hour_sleep_myth%3A_how_i_learned_that_everything_i_knew_about_sleep_was_wrong?page=1
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