Job keeping you up? Don’t fret; report suggests 8 hours of sleep is unnatural

Sometimes, PR practitioners lie awake at night fretting over any number of issues. That means they’re not getting the eight hours of sleep we hear so much about—yet another thing to stress over.

Thankfully, there’s some good news on this front. A growing body of evidence suggests that the vaunted eight-hour sleep, long touted as a key to productivity, may be unnecessary or even unnatural.

A wealth of accounts reveal that humans once slept in two distinct chunks of about four hours. Generally, these were “a first sleep, which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep,” according to a BBC report.