Waking at night is a natural pattern

Monday, January 20, 2014

A reader asks, “Why do I wake up at exactly the same time every night, without any stimulus? It has happened all my life, and it doesn’t even matter what time I went to bed.”

What he is experiencing is probably a normal period of relative alertness that happens in the middle of the night, said Dr. Carl W. Bazil, director of the division of epilepsy and sleep at New York-Presbyterian/ Columbia University Medical Center.

“Most people realize that there is a natural drowsiness midday, usually around lunchtime,” Bazil said. “This is why many fortunate cultures developed the siesta.”

But the reverse normally happens at night. The two interludes are part of the body’s circadian rhythm, which he said is “controlled by an internal clock but of course influenced by lots of external things,” like caffeine, light, exercise and stress.

Bazil said it might also help those who wake up midsleep to know that “before the advent of electrical lighting, it was normal for people to go to bed at sundown, sleep for about four hours and arise during that natural alertness for a few hours before returning for a ‘second sleep.’”

ActiveStyle, Pages 28 on 01/20/2014