> One study, for example, found that first-time mothers in Germany on average get an hour less of sleep per night in the first three months after their baby is born than they did pre-pregnancy. Fathers lose a third of an hour.

Yeah but how many times were they woken up in the night?

With a baby you might still get 8 hours total but you’re woken up 4 times a night which makes that sleep way less effective.

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rahidz 13 hours ago | parent [-]

According to the article:

"It's not that modern parents are waking up more often. Work by Samson and others has found that people in hunter-gatherer societies usually wake more frequently through the night than we do."

But I think there's a difference between waking up at night because your baby is crying, calming them down, going back to sleep, etc etc. when you have a 9-to-5 job, versus if you're a hunter-gatherer.

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zhivota 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I spend a lot of time in the rural Philippines and I notice that locals out here don't sleep that well and it doesn't seem to bother them. They get up extremely early with the sun, roosters are crowing even before that, cats are fighting randomly through the night, storms kick up many nights in the area through the year, and then they sometimes stay up late singing karaoke, though most of the time they are in bed early.

In compensation I noticed they nap frequently in the day time, often in the hottest part of the day when it's unpleasant to work.

It put my own sleep issues in perspective, I realized I had been a little too precious about it and I can indeed do fine on more fractured sleep. Often I form a judgment in the morning about my sleep and if I feel bad about it, I carry that through the day. I'm more convinced now it's a psychosomatic thing, I'm convincing myself I should be tired! So I try not to do that now and think of the people out here who live every day like this.

	▲	pitched 12 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		On studies showing napping increases lifespan and all the good things, a common complaint is that presence of naps is also an indicator of high socioeconomic status. This anecdote is a good counter to that!
	▲	mschuster91 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> In compensation I noticed they nap frequently in the day time, often in the hottest part of the day when it's unpleasant to work. Yeah, a common thing in the Mediterranean as well. But unfortunately, capitalism does NOT like downtimes during "productive" daytime.

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MarkSweep 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To put a name to it, “biphasic sleep” used to be more common:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...

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lumost 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The 9-5 is doing a major part of that comment. Irregular sleep isn’t the end of the world if you can sleep in and recover. Modern parents don’t get a chance to recover.

	▲	magicalhippo 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Or take a nap during the day while some of the others watch your kid... When I work from home and have a bad night, a 20-30 minute power nap during the day does wonders.
	▲	binary132 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To be fair, if you have other kids you don’t exactly get to just sleep in and recover either.