Sleep isn't necessarily meant to be 8 solid hours a night

Aside from being woken by the neighbors dogs at 4:30am I usually get a reasonable night's sleep.  However, I don't always feel rested and often have a sense that I should be feeling a lot more full of spritely energy in the day.  A recent presentation by Jessa Gamble on TEDTalks supports the notion that we are actually, naturally, designed to sleep twice at night, once from 8pm to midnight, then again from 2am to sunrise.  The period between midnight and 2am is apparently spent in a state of meditative restfulness.  The result, according to studies, is that we then feel overwhelmingly awake during the day - with some subjects reporting that they feel more awake than ever before in their lives.  It's a remarkable thought and I think worth pursuing to see whether it really does have an impact on how we feel.