Research raises questions about the importance of sleeping through the night, reports Psychology Today.
In my experience, people who report waking up in the middle of the night most commonly do so around 3 a.m. This alone may not be very significant, but many people with insomnia say that they have a hard time falling back asleep. We usually attribute this to being an awakening that occurs after the deep sleep of the night has ended and the time of increasing dream sleep has started. At the end of a sleep cycle we are almost awake and it may not take much, even a full bladder or a sound, to fully wake us.
I am a Clinical Sleep Educator and have been telling people about this for several years. So many people wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake for 15-90 minutes. This time is a good time to enjoy relaxing, or read or good sex. You will fall back to sleep. So many complain to their MD’s and end up taking sleeping medications, when it really, just isn’t necessary.
Using common sense or the concept of the medical differential diagnosis, I am persuaded that emphasis on the “naturalness” of middle of the night awakenings is premature. First, the individual or the patient or the doctor must ask the question why did you wake up? When attention is directed toward uncovering a reason for the awakening, instead of automatically declaring it spontaneous or natural, we more commonly find a problem that can be addressed. I would rarely if ever inform a patient not to worry about middle of the night awakenings until we completed an overnight sleep study to search for a cause.
Our research study on this very point is quite interesting and worth reading about:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23204611