As a popular saying goes: “The one who sets ambitious goals for the next day better sleeps through the night before to be filled up with enough of energy.” But contrary to this saying, the sleep medicine has discovered long ago that waking up regularly during nighttime sleeping is a normal phenomenon and not necessarily a pathological sleeping disorder.
With some people these sleep disturbances are very distinctive. In some cases, the nightly sleep gets interrupted up to 23 times. But even experienced sleep medics, doctors and psychologists, don’t immediately classify such cases as sleep disturbance. Because, the least affected persons notice these incidents knowingly. The reason for that is, that they only wake up for a couple of seconds and continue sleeping afterwards. Only, when they are waking up for more than five minutes, the body is deliberately noticing it as sleep disturbance.
Looked at it in this way, waking up a couple of times is not automatically a sleep disturbance but a “heirloom” of our ancestors. From an evolutionary perspective, this can be valued as a protective mechanism. From the vantage point of the present, the accomodations and sleeping places of prehistoric men where not really safe. To be prepared for possible danger caused by predators during nighttime, too, the human body got used to shortly wake up during the night and check the safety of the surroundings. The human being never really got rid of this “natural law”. And out of this reason, he still is waking up several times – even if only for a couple of seconds. So don’t act on the assumption of having a sleeping disorder, when you wake up several times during the night. Only, when you are really lying awake for a longer time and the body is not well rested in the morning it is advisable to look for help.
This post is also available in / Diesen Beitrag gibt es auch in: German
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