D&D 3E/3.5 Natural Healing 3.0 vs. 3.5

[Quasqueton]

According to the 3.5 rules:

SRD

Natural Healing: With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night.
If you undergo complete bed rest for an entire day and night, you recover twice your character level in hit points.

So you heal 1 hp/level for 8 hours of overnight rest. But it takes 16 hours of "daylight" rest to recover the same 1 hp/level. ?

I like the allowance for healing some overnight, but why does the daylight hours heal half as fast? And what happened to the difference between "rest" and "complete bed rest" (from 3.0)? Although I don't see it in the SRD, I think the 3.5 PH mentions "rest" and "complete bed rest" under the Heal skill. Was that a bad edit? Or is the lack of this mention in the Combat chapter the bad edit?

I'm thinking of house ruling healing to work every 8 hours, possibly with differentation between rest and complete bed rest, but I want to make sure I'm reading and understanding the core rules on it first.

Quasqueton

 

[Nail]

... why does the daylight hours heal half as fast?

Really: Don't worry about it.

Frankly, there are larger problems. For example: Why do wizards heal 2 to 3 times as fast as fighters and barbarians?

 

[Henry]

I know that applying science to fantasy can be bad, but for one thing, studies have shown that human growth hormone (HGH)is released into the body only during the first few hours of your first sleep period. Human growth hormone is believed to enhance tissue growth, healing factors, and generally heal you faster than your normal levels of it during the day would allow. So, it's not that the first 16 hours are less effective than the last 8, it's that sleep offers a point of diminishing returns on the amount of healing done during a given day.

Have you ever noticed that cuts that stay with you all day seem to heal slightly faster after a good nights' sleep? The theory is that PART of this is simple perception, but the other part is HGH levels increasing during your first sleep period.