Your Ancestors Didn’t Sleep Like You
Ok, maybe your grandparents probably slept like you. And your great, great-grandparents. But once you go back before the 1800s, sleep starts to look a lot different. Your ancestors slept in a way that modern sleepers would find bizarre – they slept twice. And so can you.
The History
The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.
His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.
References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.
“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.
An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her “firste sleep.” And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.
Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is replete with such examples.
But just what did people do with these extra twilight hours? Pretty much what you might expect.
Most stayed in their beds and bedrooms, sometimes reading, and often they would use the time to pray. Religious manuals included special prayers to be said in the mid-sleep hours.
Others might smoke, talk with co-sleepers, or have sex. Some were more active and would leave to visit with neighbours.
As we know, this practice eventually died out. Ekirch attributes the change to the advent of street lighting and eventually electric indoor light, as well as the popularity of coffee houses. Author Craig Koslofsky offers a further theory in his book Evening’s Empire. With the rise of more street lighting, night stopped being the domain of criminals and sub-classes and became a time for work or socializing. Two sleeps were eventually considered a wasteful way to spend these hours.
No matter why the change happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished from common knowledge.
Until about 1990.
The Science
Two sleeps per night may have been the method of antiquity, but tendencies towards it still linger in modern man. There could be an innate biological preference for two sleeps, given the right circumstances.
In the early ‘90s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of National Institutes of Mental Health conducted a study on photoperiodicity (exposure to light), and its effect on sleep patterns.
In his study, fifteen men spent four weeks with their daylight artificially restricted. Rather than staying up and active the usual sixteen hours per day, they would stay up only ten. The other fourteen hours they would be in a closed, dark room, where they would rest or sleep as much as possible. This mimics the days in mid-winter, with short daylight and long nights.
At first, the participants would sleep huge stretches of time, likely making up for sleep debt that’s common among modern people. Once they had caught up on their sleep though, a strange thing started to happen.
They began to have two sleeps.
Over a twelve hour period, the participants would typically sleep for about four or five hours initially, then wake for several hours, then sleep again until morning. They slept not more than eight hours total.
The middle hours of the night, between two sleeps, was characterized by unusual calmness, likened to meditation. This was not the middle-of-the-night toss-and-turn that many of us experienced. The individuals did not stress about falling back asleep, but used the time to relax.
Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, points out that even with standard sleep patterns, this night waking isn’t always cause for concern. “Many people wake up at night and panic,” he says. “I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”
Outside of a scientific setting, this kind of sleep pattern is still attainable, but it does require changing our modern, electric lifestyle. Very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that. He and his family intentionally went an entire month with no electric light.
In the winter months, this meant a lot of darkness and a lot of sleep. Moyer writes “…I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am. This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days. When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.”
Moyer didn’t set out to reproduce our ancestors sleep pattern, it just happened as a byproduct of a lot of dark hours.
Should We Revive Two Sleeps?
Although history shows that two sleeping was common, and science indicates that it is (in some conditions) natural, there is no indication that it is better. Two sleeps may leave you feeling more rested, but this could simply be because you are intentionally giving yourself more time to rest, relax, and sleep. Giving the same respect to the single, eight-hour sleep should be just as effective.
Note too that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness – darkness that is only possible naturally during the winter months. The greater levels of daylight during summer and other seasons would make two sleeping difficult, or even impossible.
Perhaps two sleeping is merely a coping mechanism to get through the long, cold, boring nights of the winter. Today, we don’t need to cope. So long as we give our sleep the time and respect it needs, getting the “standard” eight hours of sleep should be fine.
But next time you wake up at 2 AM and can’t sleep, just remember your great, great, great, great, great grandfather. He did the same thing every night.
Update
Well this article proved exceedingly popular! Thank you to everyone who visited, or took the time to leave a comment. I would encourage new visitors to have a read through the comments below for some interesting ideas and perspectives. I learned two things in particular:
1. This is far more common that I thought. A lot of commenters either practice, or used to practice this kind of sleep.
2. Another possible reason for two sleeps is tending the fire during the night. Several clever readers noted that in order to keep a fire running through the night, we would need to get up and tend it.
Commenters also raised questions regarding non-European and non-Western cultures, which we’ll be digging into in future articles. For anyone who wants to learn more about this kind of sleep, I’ve linked below to two books referenced in the writing of this article, available on Amazon.
I am a waitress and typically go to work between 4 and six pm. Sometimes I’m home by ten and sometimes after midnight and I’m typically wired for sound after all the chaos and interaction and events of the evening at work so I typically am up quite late depending….When I finally hit the sack, I usually wake up waaay too early, like three to four hours later and try going back to sleep and just toss and turn for hours and if I’m lucky, I fall asleep for another hour or so before I have to get up and live my life a little bit before I have to get up and face the world again. Menopause has made this even worse. I could go on for days with this, but two sleeps, with getting up and doing stuff makes more sense to me….I just have to try to make my mate understand my strange sleep pattern, he’s an early bird who gets up around 5:30 am, who naps around ten am and is in bed by ten pm no problem.
Strangely, I have two sleeps most days. (Well, I thought it was strange.) I came to realize that I’ve been doing what my body needs. Now I see that I’m not alone in this situation. Thanks for the very interesting, informative article.
Sleep patterns are a fairly individual thing. For most of my thirty-two year Post Office career I worked from midnight to 8:30 AM and slept from 9 AM to noon and from 6PM to 11 PM. Since my retirement I have usually slept from 10PM to 3 AM read and watched TV for about one or two hours and then slept until 8 or 9 AM. It works for me.
W.
Being that I am a gentleman sheep farmer, I can see the need to check the barn for newborns and difficult labor during the night. I commonly get up and work with the animals during the night. Most lambs are born then.
Read about this a few years ago and, funnily enough, occasionally doing it lately because of my teenage son’s work pattern. In fact I’m doing it right now! Went to bed at 8 o’clock, woke up at around midnight to pick him up; I’ll stay awake ’til 2 or 3am now, then go back to bed until around 8am in the morning.
Strange thing is, on the days I do this I always feel much better the next day.
I haven’t experienced this where I now live, Oregon, nor in Philly & NY where I was raised. I did experience it in Florida, where I was for six years until October 2015. In Florida, during the spring through late November, the “hot months,” I found my sleeping pattern in two stages. I guess it was the heat, thinking about it now. I’d fall asleep after commuting, walking, errands, most of it done on foot in the heat since I lived in an urban area, then making dinner. This was right around sunset. Then, I’d wake up between one and three, read a book, watch a movie, make a cocktail, even go to the condo pool (very quietly!) for a night swim, or give the dog a walk some nights. It almost always involved me going outside. Then I’d go home happy — anxious even — to go back & pile into bed. I’d wake up very refreshed.
Ha, another thing I used to do during those small hours some nights: the dishes! I was refreshed enough to get them all done, haha.
Like this :)
My sleep pattern consists of 2 cycles, deeper sleep for 4 – 5 hours then i ether go to the loo or i wake-up, take a look around for a couple mins, look at my phone and i’m like “no… too early” and i go back to sleep for another 3 – 4 hours then i snooze for another 30 mins – 1 hour until i’m ready to get up, i have no problems going back to sleep, takes me less longer than when i first go to sleep because i’m relaxed and in the sleep mode, takes me about half hour compared to 40 – 60 mins when i first go to sleep.
I have however been having problems with my sleeping pattern for a long time and i couldn’t figure out why… id be going to bed when the sun rises and waking up when the sun sets even in winter, i figured out it was the sun i’m most sensitive to, i adjust very quickly to when the sun rises and sets, i’ve not had any proper curtains for some time, just some cheap broken blinds and recently i’ve had to take the curtains i had up on some curtain wire down, soon as i did that i had sun light shining through, but only recently since Spring has arrived i’ve quickly adjusted within 5 days to the sun rising from 8am then fully risen at 9 – 10am, now i’m waking up at 8am, then snoozing until 9:30 – 10am, today i got up at 9:30am.
I’ve taken the blinds down and put my curtains back up and i’m going to put another pair up to block out more light, but i honesty found myself freaking out a little because my current curtains is blocking out far more light without the blinds on including the street lamps, and i found it didn’t add to the quality of my sleep but it did make me fall asleep a tad bit faster and since i’ve adjusted to the sun rising and setting i go to bed at 11pm, start getting tired around 9pm. I found it’s really helped me to be tired enough for bed, and then i have to open my curtains from the moment i wake-up to keep this pattern and i don’t close them until 9pm where i now start settling down, this seems to be my natural sleep pattern which is triggured by when the sun rises and sets, the same thing happened on holiday last year, i fell out of it again 2 weeks after i came home, but i’m trilled to find what my sleep triggure is, i just sense the sun a lot more than other humans, i never turn my room light on until the sun has set too, so less exposure to artificial light, i feel MUCH better in general. Humans in the past always used to sleep outside and the sun light as well as being exposed to fresh air helped their sleeping pattern and health immensely, i keep my window open too to help sense the atmosphere changes to give my body the right cues.
Ah yes I have a similar problem with sensitivity to sunlight, try doing what I do, sleep during the day in an air tight coffin. You’ll find keeping completely out of the sunlight will leave you most refreshed for your “evening” “activities”. However my evening refreshments have arrived, I’m afraid I must bid thee farewell and I wish thee the best of luck with your affliction
Yours truly, Count Dracula
That we would have to get up to tend a fire would only make sense to someone who has never lived with wood heat. A properly banked fire can be stoked and have a good fire going after 10 or more hours. The part of the country I come from, wood heat is fairly common and I’ve never heard of anyone waking in the middle of the night to attend to it, nor have I done it myself.
What determines my first and second sleep is the bowel movement.
I would like to sleep longer, but I can’t fight it. And the second sleep
is not happening until it happens.
Is there any reference to this in the literature?
Am I the only one?
Here in the Canadian prairies winter nights can get to as low as minus 40 degrees and one gets up to feed the fire- a banked fire would get you frozen to death.
D. Rienks, good point. No doubt fire stoking dates to the control of fire.
I grew up with wood fire heat and agree that a correctly banked fire will easily burn 10 hours. The only thing I can see is it takes more wood to bank a fire and in distant times people simply would not know how to do it.
Most people around here heat with wood in winter. I will get up in the night to put wood in the woodstove. It’s a bad drafty stove and it goes out fast. I also will put wood in the kiva fireplace for the same reason. You’re lucky to have such an airtight stove!
This is how I normally sleep. I go to bed at ten and then wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep after an hour or two. One thing not to do if you wake up in the middle of the night, is to look at electronic devices because the blue under screen of most laptops will make it more difficult to get back to sleep. Never work on your laptop right before going to sleep.
This is how I sleep naturally, but it isn’t very convenient with my morning commute and expected arrival time at the office, so I either don’t get enough sleep during the week or I have to take something to sleep longer. I feel less like an incurable insomniac and more like I’m just old-fashioned. Thank you for the article!
I almost always wake up during the middle of the night. For the 2-3 hours spoke of here. Worrying about not getting enough sleep…….or staying asleep…. I got sleeping meds. The hours I worked as a nurse 12 plus 5-6 day a week required me to sleep and be rested well to have a clear mind. Since I no longer work I let my body do its thing….. It seems I do rest much better. I will also say this……. people this many years ago also all slept in the same beds. Entire family’s. Perhaps not the wealthy……. but it was a huge family bed……and the breaks in sleep were made to have more children when the others were up. They would stuff one bed instead of several. Of course that went out the window also. Thank Goodness! However i have seen show’s that some family’s are doing this again to save money as well as electric….and when the kids are spoke to about it …..they are quiet… because yes they they are on the same huge mattress as the parents when the deed is done. The oldest boy of one family said hes been saving what little money he could to leave ASAP because of it. When his Girlfriend told him that was not right. And the day the film crew left so did the 16 year old.
That’s pretty messed up. Like, if you need to share a bed with your teenage kids, you should certainly not be trying to have more.
I have been doing that same thing! Wake up about 4am or 5am and stay awake for an hour or so doing FB usually, peaceful, quiet time! Then I go back to sleep til I wake up finally at 9am or so. Love it.
A friend once told me that when she had asked the doctor why her ill husband got worse or woke up around 3am, he had replied that waking up at that time had been normal for mankind in the past, because it was at that time that the predators where most active and one had to keep watch (and tend the fire, perhaps, as it says above), so given certain conditions one could easily revert to that behavior.
I thought fire keeping was shared between the Larks and Owls, now it seems there is a change over period too, handy for bed sharing!
I have often thought all the peculiarities between us add up to a useful, functioning tribe.
I thought I had sleeping problems. I would sleep until 1-2 am then wide awake and reading for few hours. But always stressed that I do not have enough sleep and next day I won’t be able to function properly at work. Sometimes I was wasting a lot of energy and stressing myself trying to get back to sleep. Reading this article helped me to embrace the situation as something that can happen and it is almost normal. Maybe like this I would have 2 sleeps and have a good rest.
Just came back to note that I have circulated this article today for what must be the sixth or seventh time. This research changed my life: I no longer describe myself as having insomnia, I feel far more rested and I’ve listed to one hell of a lot of fascinating World Service Radio/
While traveling in Spain, with friends, during the heat of summer (28-39°C, they had a wind off of the Sahara that year) our sleep changed just for the duration. 6 or 7am wakeup/breakfast, touring until 12 or 1pm, lunch, siesta from 1pm until 4 or 5pm, more touring (or sometimes we slept through until dinner), dinner at 10:30pm, bed around 12-1am. We never had trouble nodding off for siesta or at night.
I get really REALLY tired at around 5-6pm and feel as if I could go to sleep and sleep for hours.
Then I feel a little tired at 10.30 or 11pm or so and go to bed. But I commonly toss and turn until 2am or later before eventually falling asleep. It means I am really tired when I wake up in the morning… even if I sleep in til 8am or so!
I had to search sleep since I have been waking up, to the point where I know about what time it is, and not able to go back to sleep for a while. I heard of this pattern before, but forgot about it until I read this article. My mother in law is a night owl and insists on sleeping with her light on. And she wonders why she can’t sleep properly. She is also depressed, over eats, and has other health problems she insists that is part of her body that cannot be resolved. I think personally she should just turn off the light at night which may help some. But as for me, I may just have to learn to settle for “two sleeps”.
One way I overcome some of this is to take a benedril and an asprin before going to bed which helps me sleep *most* of the night. I still get up early, before or at 5AM without a clock, which is fine, I can make coffee and be ready when my wife wakes up…eventually. As for my wife, she can sleep anywhere, any time, and for most of the time.
I’m jealous.
But here I am, between my “two sleeps” researching and writing.
I thought i wasnt normal because i do this naturally since i was 10 and now i’m 27 . i allways go to bed around 2 . am , sleep 3 ou 4 hours . then wake up . clean my stuff cheking my email and then go to sleep for an other 3-4 hours . i’ma working on mid day shift so i can do that easily , and i dont feel good if i dont do that .
Thanks , now i know i’m not like everbody else , but not even the only one .
I have done this for years. More commonly for me, when I am rested and not “over tired.” My wife has always thought it bizarre. I am sharing this with her. Thanks you for reinforcing this “throwback” behavior that now feels VERY NORMAL.
I have over the last year suffered a bout of poor health, and now find myself working fiver hours per day. During the winter’s months I have found myself enacting what is written in your article before I knew of it: I would fall into a sleep around 8pm wake in the early hours of the next day, then fall asleep for the final four hours.
Reading this has actually helped me. Thank you.
I used to practice 2 sleeps in order to go lucid at night. Sleeping a few hours, then getting up and moving around for a while, then returning to sleep was almost guaranteed to produce lucid dreaming.
Interesting. I seem to have always had this pattern. Originally from the Finnish Lapland, so perhaps this has something to do with it. It definitely has nothing to do with light, as it’s the same summer or winter.
I think i’ll be going to bed at 9 o’clock tonight…
And here i thought there was something drastically wrong with me, waking up after 4-5 hours and feeling wide awake, then getting sleepy after a couple of hours…
Thank you! :)
Daniel Lieberman discusses this topic in his book: The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. It’s a very good read. I highly recommend it.
Parents with infants and young children often have divided sleep. And I used to take the puppy out in the middle of the night which was not at all unpleasant.
When they’re squeezing more and more hours out of you with less and less pay, seems pretty unlikely that we’ll be creating 2 periods of sleep within a 12 hour window. This might be possible for teenagers.
So I take it me never turning on the lights effects my sleep pattern but it doesn’t explain it completely I usually sleep 4 times a day 2 hours at a time
I’m reading this between my two sleeps. Actually, since I retired I usually have THREE sleeps! I tire around 4pm, sleep until 6 or so. Then I’m up till between 12 and 2, sleep until about 3 or 4, going back to bed after about 2 hours and sleeping until 9.
I’d probably bring that to two sleeps but there’s TV, you see.
When unemployed (as I have no idea how you could work this with a job), I quickly develop into a two-sleeper – but a bit different. When left to my own, uninterrupted devices, I will get up once the sun is well-up, be active through the morning and early afternoon, go back to bed (not nap, I’m out for 4-5 hours) in the mid-afternoon, wake up around suppertime, and be up until after midnight, when I’ll go back to bed. A typical day will be a little bit like “get up at 7am, go back to bed at 2pm, wake up at 7pm, go back to bed at 2am” – I feel a lot better when I’m able to have that sleep pattern, but it’s pretty much impossible to maintain while you’re dependent on a wage.
This is what I would like to do at the moment. It is what my body asks me to do. At the moment just doesn’t fir with social activity around me.
I can understand when there was no electricity and one has worked hard all day that going to sleep when the sun goes down would be perfect, then after at least 4 hours of sleep waking to do a few things, then back to sleep until the sun would come back up. I totally get it.
I am not crazy!!!! I have done this for years!!!! docs were trying to put me on meds to make me sleep all night. I feel so much better knowing that for me it is normal!!!!!
I work 3rd shift. In order to sleep in the day time, I darken my windows. I always sleep 3 to 5 hours before I wake up to use the bathroom and many times cannot go back to sleep. So I’m up for a while, then go back to bed for the rest of my sleep. I was told that it is common to wake up after about 4 hours because that is the pattern that sleep takes. There are stages that go from light sleep to deep. The dream stage being one of those.
I work as a wilderness therapy backpacking guide; some nights I get to bed at about 8pm, latest 9pm, due to the cold temps and sun setting about 6 PM. I often awake mid-night to urinate and write with a clear mind, recalling my dreams, interpreting them, and sorting out challenges that are easier to focus on when the mind is calm and distractions are minimal. I may write creatively at this time as well, depending on what I feel guided to do that night.
Thanks for the article!
Ah I forgot to add, perhaps this would be neat to study in such people, like me, who camp half the year and have the opportunity to do this. I say I find it very helpful as I can remember dreams more vividly and feel a deeper sense of connection to myself. I wouldn’t say I necessarily feel more rested though
Great use of that time.
I often wake up in the middle of the night. I find it a good time to turn on my shortwave radio and tune around the bands to see what I can hear. After about an hour or so, I go back to bed.
I am in my 70s and find that I can never make it through the night without waking up and staying awake for a few hours. This article was revealing and I now will no longer panic as I try to go back to sleep. I have always thought that it was not a good idea to read or even get some work done during these hours. I now have a new outlook on my sleeping patterns.
I am 68 and I was recently in hospital for two nights. Almost everyone in the ward was male and approximately the same age or older. What surprised me was the number of times during the night that these patients got up to go to the loo. I discussed this with one of the night nurses and she said it is extremely common and it had surprised her when she first started working nights. Obviously at this age, prostrate problems are one factor, but not the only one – people just do not sleep right through as we normally imagine. Over the country as a whole, millions of people must be getting up several times a night. There also seem to be many who do not need the loo, but just wake up and lie there for a while before going back to sleep.
I am 82 and have had the same experience for the past few years. I used to toss and turn, worrying about the next day. Then I began to leave simple chores to do during my wakeful period, had a cup of Sleepytime, before returning to bed and found I felt rested in the morning. Certainly felt better than after hours of tossing and turning.
A cup of sleepy time
By that I assume you mean a cup of gin?
That works for me also…
Hahaha! Gin would work, but Sleepytime is a variety of herbal tea. :)
This was an interesting read I was under the influence that if you woke up during of the night you were not resting properly.
I too thought there was a problem with my resting. I was told that I suffered from depression because I was waking half-way through the night. Thank you for the article.
And then there is the fact that plumbing used to be outside… Perhaps the end of first sleep was a brave trip into the elements outside. There seem to be a confluence of things here.
Which raises the question about the connection between chamberpots and sleep patterns…
What I have heard and read about, people didn’t wander outside in the elements to relieve themselves, but used the inside chamber pots
Unless you were so poor you didn’t have a pot to piss in.
Didn’t have a pot to piss in is a reference to people that used to use urine to cure leather. The poorest people didn’t have a pot to save their urine in so it could be sold.
I believe this specific polyphasic sleep pattern would have evolved as a way to provide security for oneself and progeny. Wouldn’t nocturnal predators prowl in the darkest time of night when their diurnal prey are most susceptible?
You know, as I was reading through your article suddenly everything made sense=P
I am (south) Italian and if someone wakes you from a deep sleep we have an idiomatic expression that should sound something like: “Ehy! I was still in my first sleep (Ehi! Stavo ancora nel primo sonno!)”
Before your article I used to give to the phrase the meaning of “I was at the beginning of my sleep”, but since it is a very old expression, maybe with the information you provided it does make more sense as a literal “FIRST SLEEP”.
Nice work here, thank you.
I’m first generation Italian living in the US. I always heard that expression here and while visiting Italy. I thought about it the way you did. Very nice observation.
I have a very unusual sleep problem. I can sleep for 5 minutes and feel as though I have slept all night, same as 8 hours. This happens very often. I feel energized, healthy and ready to go. Sometimes I sleep longer, same results. I can not go back to sleep. Then I worry about what is wrong with me. I have asked hubby to please never wake me because I can’t go back to sleep. If I don’t wake up I sleep 6 hours, but that is very rare. I have timed it at times., 5 minutes, 10, 30, same results. Fit and eager to start the day. I am almost 66 , retired. It’s a good thing because I don’t know what would happen if I had to go to work. By the way, this insanity started during menopause at 50 and won’t go away.
Odd that you refer to needing very little sleep as a problem rather than a superpower…
Where’s the like button? Superpower indeed!
I’m in my menopause, and i’m always tired, even with eight hours of sleep, you’re blessed! It’s so hard for me to get everything done, sure wish I had more hours in my wake time…
I’m the same. 5 minutes can be as good as a standard 8 hours. I can never sleep more than 5 hours at a time though so I’m always sleeping and awake at odd hours when I’m not working. I’d like to think that it’s a super power but in reality when you have a child it can be hell especially when you’be been up since 4 am and it’s now 12pm and you need to sleep but the child is well beyond a midday nap
Hello. Is it possible that you wake up a lot because you look at the clock and keep thinking about it. I wake up quite often, with hot moments!, but find if I Don’t look at the clock or think about things, I go back to sleep
I was wondering why my female friends and I have a sleeping problem after the age of 50. Doesn’t matter what time we go to bed, we wake during the night for several hours and sometimes go back to sleep and sometimes don’t. When you are still employed, this sleep pattern is very hard on the job. You wake/get up tired and have to go to work. Is this only a female thing? My mother had the same problem as do most of my female friends.
Women waking in the middle of the night after the age of 50 is a hormone issue. OR lack of. It also happens to pregnant women. Waking around 12-2 am and then falling back to sleep a couple hours later.
It should be noted this practice of two sleeps is still very common today in places with lots of darkness AND tending of fires. In Alaska many people still live in cabins or houses heated by wood stoves or fireplaces. Not only that, but many people around the state live off the grid, and thus do not use normal electric light (or only sparingly). So, many in norther areas of the world live this lifestyle.
I remember my dad doing this often when we visited our getaway cabin. He commonly would wake the rest of us up for a little bit in the middle of the night, as he started tinkering after tending the wood stove. He was quiet, but the littlest noise in a small cabin can get a persons attention.
My late uncle used to live in Indochine (Vietnam as a french colony) in the 50’s. He told us that it would be common for the people where he was to wake up every night, chat, eat in the middle of the night, and then go back to sleep.
Pretty common to have split sleep onboard US Navy ships when standing watches. However, usually you have a longer 4-6 hour sleep period and then another 2-4 hour sleep period. But sometimes is shrinks to 3-4 hours a day during heavy operational tempo.
Unless you’re not qualed yet… Then no sleep ;)
I have always slept this way! It is relieving to know I am not the only one. Sometimes it’s hard fitting in to the modern lifestyle, but it seems to be my natural rhythm.
Thank goodness – I have slept this way for as long as I can remember. Now that I am retired, I naturally fall asleep in the armchair for three to five hours, wake and then make my way upstairs to bed. Sometimes I fall asleep straight away, other times I make tea, watch tele, etc. for an hour or two. When I was working I found that the middle of the night was the best time to write letters or articles that had been “at the back of my mind” for several days. Sometimes, personal problems can surface and resolve themselves at this time.. Also “forgotten” memories can come back with get clarity.
Incidentally, I never need an alarm clock. When I relax into my second sleep, I know what I intend to do the following day, and generally awaken at the right time.
For many years(I am retired and in my 60’s) I have often woken at 2 or 3 am, and I always get up have a cup of tea and work on my family tree or read. I enjoy this time and when I feel tired again at 5 or 6 am I go back to bed and sleep easily. I look forward to these periods which I very calming and relaxing with no distractions. My grandparents used to do this also, and knowing this allowed me to see it as normal.
Many great and helpful comments, I wish I had time to read them all.
I am going to give two sleeps a try as I find I am often wide awake in the midnight hours and then stress about trying to get back to sleep.
However a very common theme seems to be feeding the cat! I need to get my self a kitty! :-)
The whole thing about going to bed with the sunset and rising with the dawn never made sense to me because the year has such uneven daylight hours, but the two-sleep pattern makes much more sense, especially for peasant farmers who must get up in the “middle of the night” to tend their animals. In the summer, perhaps there were shorter sleep cycles than in the winter, but the needs of the livestock guaranteed an interval. The supportive evidence is everywhere — in military “watches” and the above mentioned monastic prayer cycles, as well as letters written by men like Thomas Cromewll and John Adams, both of whom not only dated their letters but often noted the time. I plan to give this routine a try once I “retire” from the daily grind of other people’s iron clad work schedules.
To achieve this kind of sleep pattern we must not stare at artificial light during our “between sleeps” time. No TV, no Cell Phone, no computer. This very bright light prevents the body from relaxing for the next “sleep period”. Also room darkening curtains or blinds for full moons help. A soft light for reading or writing, meditation or prayer are not bright enough to be negative to your experiment.
I installed a program on my computer called f-lux (it changes the tones on the screen) and had my glasses (and my kids!) coated with a blue-light filtering protectant from Cryzal. It lessens the melatonin-altering blue light from computer screens and gaming consoles, and helps you sleep better.
Occasionally, I’ll wake in the middle of the night, grab a book and read by a book light for an hour or two. I think it’s great!
Not necessarily… I know “electric screens are evil” is all the rage these days, but I’ve largely followed a two sleep pattern most of my adult life. (Jobs with flexible work hours are wonderful things.) Between sleeps I regularly get up and sew or quilt which both require good lighting. Or I surf the internet on my laptop, phone, or tablet. Sometimes *in* bed. As my use of technology has ramped up over the course of my life I haven’t really detected an impact. Artificial light certainly impacts some people but not everyone and not always to a disruptive extent.
I recently retired fully. I am diabetic so often I awake around 2AM and eat a bowl of cereal and turn on the news channel on TV. I usually begin to get sleepy about an hour or so, and then go back to bed and sleep very good until around 7 AM. I find that I feel much better rested since I started this. I had never heard of this before, but now I am delighted to know that I am not crazy! This is giving me a better waking period and I rest better than I ever have!
I was wondering about my odd sleeping schedule and I can never really find anything but this is close enough! I usually only sleep about 4-6 hours. Usually it’s always 4. I’ll go to bed fairly early. (11 PM is early for me.) And I’ll always wake up at a very early time. I try to sleep afterward but it’s like I don’t need it, I already feel energized and awake.
I ended up going to sleep at 3 AM the other night and was worried that I’d wake up very late but I ended up waking at around 7:3o AM.
It was bothersome when I discovered this a couple months ago and I wanted some good ol’ long sleep. Unfortunately the method I chose to get this long sleep was terrible. I stayed up until I passed out of exhaustion. My eyes wouldn’t be able to stay open and I couldn’t comprehend my reading. Then I would fall asleep and sleep for 10 hours. It was terrible and have since fixed my sleeping schedule but I only get 4-6 hours roughly.
I also usually sleep about 5 hours a night. I tried the getting exhausted thing, medicine, etc because others had me convinced that less than 8 hours is bad for my health. Finally I gave into it. I simply have more time to be productive than others. I’ve read articles about some people need 12 hrs a night and others only need 4.
I say don’t street over it, if you feel healthy and rested then you’re fine.
Are you Tanya from the sleep center? Write me if you are. Thanks
I am the same way. Sleep from 10 or 11pm until 2Am, then up for an hour or 2 and wake up for the day at 6AM. Get 5 to 6 hours of sleep a night and I am fine. If perhaps I do sleep 7 or 8 hours straight, I feel more tired throughout the day
My great grandma says, and I quote “Where do you think midnight snacks came from?”. She grew up in rural Texas in the 1920’s without electricity. She said, she and her mother would get up around midnight, pull the milk pail up from the well(that’s how they kept their milk cool), and have a glass of milk with a slice of bread with butter and sugar on top. Then her mom would tell her a story, and they’d go back to bed.
Reading this reminds me of how my son sleeps (he’s 4 months old). He goes to sleep as soon as it gets dark but always wakes up around 1-3am (usually about 6 hours of sleep). He stays awake for sometimes up to an hour then sleeps until the sun comes up (about 4 hours). During the day he usually only takes one nap for about 4-6 hours. Ever since he got on this schedule I really haven’t been tired like I was before. The only thing that stresses me out is worrying that I’m not getting enough sleep or that he’s sleeping wrong.
I totally agree that if I had heard about this pattern that I would have been so much less stressed when my kids were babies! It totally makes sense and I wouldn’t have panicked when we were up at 3am! Great info!
Actually, this study suggests that two sleep cycles is biologically encoded and NOT the result of sociological factors:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/19/want-to-experience-the-deep-mystical-sleep-of-our-ancestors-turn-your-lights-off-at-dusk/?postshare=7321432145152480
I have an unusual sleep pattern. I come home from work at six. I usually read for an hour then fall asleep. I wake up around nine, eat dinner , watch TV and go to bed around 1:30 or 2:00. I read some more and fall asleep around 3:00. I wake up around 8:30 am and read for about an hour then sleep until 11:30.
I get up have a meal (breakfast) go to work at 2:30 pm.
You work for 3.5 hours a day, and only have two meals?
Food for some people isn’t a necessity if they aren’t doing heavy lifting/sweating! Owning a dog has been the greatest thing ever for understanding my eating habits! He only eats what he needs! As long as there’s enough of the right foods out, he does just fine. I apply that to my diet! If I’m going for a run/walk with my dog, I’ll eat and drink enough food/water before and make sure he does the same but if I’m just sitting in the office, I just snack healthily all day
We get so wrapped up in these social constructs! It’s ok to be different, so long as you are healthy!
Add another to the list of 2 time sleepers! I venture back and forth. Sometimes I sleep once, sometimes twice. When I sleep twice, I feel much better. I can concentrate better, I don’t get day drowsy and my nights are productive… A long time ago, I used to be a day sleeper with two sleep times. Experts would say that’s unhealthy.
I really feel like the majority of the time the “experts” say something is recommended or something is bad or good for us, it is because the industry looks at the human body as the same across the board. They aren’t. We are ALL different with different needs that changes as the seasons of the earth change and as the seasons of our lives change. The only truth is really that we are the best experts for our body if we will only listen.
The major side effect of two sleeping was left unmentioned: people used to remember their dreams better.
Definitely! I’m a teacher, and I sleep in during summer holidays. I have much better recall of my dreams because I wake, fall back asleep, wake, etc. I really enjoy recalling the crazy dreams.
Another “reason” for two sleeps is that many families all slept in the same room. In order for the parents to have time alone for personal interaction (sex, conversation,planning) the two sleep thing would have afforded them that opportunity.
Years ago when flipping through the Benedictine Rule, the first successful monastic regulation, I noticed monks went to bed early. But then they got up at midnight to gather in the chapel, pray and sing hymns. Then after an hour or so they’d go back to bed. I remember thinking WTF? Why interrupt a good night’s sleep for that ostentatious piety? It’s not like they don’t do any praying during the day. But now I understand. Thanks!
Having been on retreats at a Benedictine monastery, I can tell you that they still do this!
In the Holy Mountain in Macedonia (Greece) the Monks wake-up at midnight (24.00) to pray for three hours in their rooms (doing hundreds of prostrations) then they gather in the Catholikon (Chapel) and participate in the daily Holy Liturgy that lasts for a few hours (from four to fifteen according to the feast). They have their first meal of the day (breakfast) and afterwards they take a small nap (siesta). They get up and go for work. After the work they gather again for the evening prayer and afterwards they have the second and last meal for the day. Then they either take a nap or they attend the visitors. At midnight their programme starts all over again. Besieds normal prayers they recite the Jesus Prayer 24 hours a day: Jesus Christ (Son of God) have mercy on me a sinner. When the All-Holy Theotokos finds it correct She makes the prayer self-recited and then there is no need for real sleeping again, as we understand sleeping ourselves, that is! That is the Monks relax for an hour a day or so but they keep praying; this is the prayer that the Saint Apostle Paul mentions!
Whilst a doctoral student, I also had a 60 hour a week job. Around 8 I would often take a “nap” after dinner and a double espresso, then get up around 11, then back to bed around 1:30 or 2, and up in the morning at 6. During this midnight period I would study and write, and sometimes I would take the dog out for a walk, and just think. These midnight sessions often resulted in my most productive study, writing, and thinking. The dog thought so too. I never suffered from daytime fatigue.
I started sleeping in 2 segments when i was working 3 shift… Went home got kids off to school or went straight to bed then got back up when they got home from school then slept another 2 hours before going to work… Did that for 7 years… And now i sleep better going to bed about 5 pm wake up an hour or two later then stay up till ten then go back to bed till 5 am for work… Or break it up in similar patterns.. It gives me more of a chance of getting better sleep before going to work at 5 am… But when work wants to schedule to work from 11 to 8 then have to be back up at 7 am the next day, that really drains me and i don’t get much done except a lot of yawning…And it really pisses me off that they seem to not understand not everybody can operate on a straight 8 hour sleep schedule like most ppl..
I do two sleeps quite often. I put my two young kids to sleep at about 7:30PM. I read to them and sing them a quiet song, and that usually makes all of us very drowsy. Then I’ll go across the hall and lie down in bed. Then I wake up 3 or 4 hours later when my wife comes home from work and comes to bed. I usually go back to sleep (or struggle to), but thanks to this article, I’m going to spend that time a bit better!
This IS me…who knew I am just a throwback to my forefathers/mothers!
I disagree with the paragraph “Note too that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness – darkness that is only possible naturally during the winter months. The greater levels of daylight during summer and other seasons would make two sleeping difficult, or even impossible.”
I started segmented sleep only after starting night shifts. I get home at 8 a.m. and sleep for four hours, even though my window faces the east and has just thin, white blinds. The light doesn’t stop me. Then, I can’t sleep for four hours, and then I sleep another for four more hours.
Note also that in many cultures a siesta is commonly taken around 15:00, when it is the bright and warm.
Watches, that is period of duty on ships, are typically split into periods shorter than eight hours, such as four hours on duty, four hours off, so sleep is broken into segments shorter than four hours.
I heard about second sleep about a year ago, I started calling my insomnia second sleep this Summer. I have much less stress related to these wakeful times now. I try to embrace these times, however, my husband does not sleep in this manner. I think we need to sound proof the bedroom, ha ha! Great article, thank you!
The part that’s most interesting to me about this is the new perspective it gives to descriptions of the working hours of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. Their correspondence shows they’d be writing in the small hours, and Richelieu made a practice of sleeping a while, getting up and doing paperwork, then getting some more sleep. I’d always assumed that was because of insomnia and his chronic ill health, but it may have reflected a more general habit as well. Thanks for the article!
I began sleeping this way several years ago. i am 53 now. I work full time, so I thought at first that this was unhealthy, but as I read about it and realized how common it is, it became normal to me. I tend to fall asleep around 8 to 8;30, wake up anywhere from 12-2 and stay up til about 3. I get up at 6. On the weekends however, I tend to get up at 4.
Hi, I’m from Spain and I find it very interesting theme, I started researching a little more, and found this article in Spanish http://politikon.es/2011/04/25/at-days-close-una-historia-social-de-la-noche/ which speaks, even musical compositions described as they were evenings in 18th century, here is a sample in the film “Master And Commander” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZVN5Y6dtOk
Greetings
One thing to consider for the summer months is the afternoon siesta. Two nighttime sleeps may be too much to attain in the midst of summer, but a two-hour nap mid-day would not be. Consider also that our forefathers did not have daylight savings time artificially pushing the daylight hours ahead an hour so that it is still daylight at 8:30-9:00. The sun would be setting at 7:30-8:00 pm in most parts. The sun would not begin rising until 5:00-6:00 am during the summer. That still affords a little more than 8 hours of sleep. With a mid-day nap thrown in and the heat, summertime might still allow for two sleeps. (I know I have difficulty sleeping through the night on hot nights when the A/C doesn’t keep up. Imagine what it would have been like before air conditioning. That, or they may have just gotten up earlier and not felt the need for as much sleep due to more daylight hours. They could have needed just as much sleep in the summer despite awaking in the middle of the night, but simply moved that extra bit around to a mid-day nap.
I agree, but the houses of that era were different, the walls, at least in the area where I live, which is quite hot: Andalucia, were made with very thick walls with earth and lime and this ayudadaba to maintain a high degree of humidity, say an air conditioner would not be necessary. Clear that it is true that the nap was a break during the day to rest and divide, as it were in two parts, curiously like at night, practically almost all animals do. Greetings
forgiveness “and this helped” no “ayudadaba” Google translator ;)
“ayudadaba”
I think “Adobe” might be the word you’re looking for. Like mud, applied to the outside of a wall, right?
he’s saying he used Google translator to post. It left the word ayudadaba in Spanish so he clarified what it meant.
I usually wake up at about 2am, desperate for a shit. Could this be a throwback to an older way of sleeping?
I was sure I was the only one up at 3am needing the other “rest room”. Could it be that sleep allows for a relaxed bowel, which is when the bowel movement occurs most easily?
I have had this new habit two years now.
I struggle to embrace “interrupted sleep”, however, learning I am not alone may considerably reduce my 3 am anxiety.
Or an older way of shitting? Wait until you’re my age and have to get up at least once a night for a pee.
Two doctors told me to pee more often in the daytime, even without the urge,, and there will be not middle of the night peeing. Seems to be working!
Victorian literature makes regular mention of “night soil” collected in chamber pots, as a euphemism for excrement.
I wonder if the slightly skewed version of this seen in many Latin American countries (with the siesta tradition) is because of their typically hotter weather? Speaking from experience of heatwaves in Australia, it’s impossible to sleep at all when the night-time ambient temperature is >35C (and even when it’s 30C it’s still pretty hard to get to sleep) but I haven’t wondered if having siesta here would help – getting out of the sun during the hottest part of the day to catch up on sleep, and then being able to stay up until it’s cool enough to get to sleep. (Conversely, it’s pretty easy to fall asleep in cold weather, provided that you’re warm enough. From my understanding, our core temperature drops very slightly just before/as we fall asleep, so presumably that’s easier when it’s cold than when it’s hot.)
But, a question: What happens to our sleep in a total absence of light? Stuff like when miners are trapped underground for weeks and weeks, or up in the Arctic? What happens to sleeping patterns when we no longer have a way of differentiating between day and night? Conversely, what would happen if there was no night-time?
Also, I feel I should add: this kind of segmented sleep is actually what’s recommended for babies (!) and a *lot* of older people seem to drop into this kind of pattern almost automatically. My mother is 60, and ever since her late 40s she’s slept this way. She’s usually in bed by 9pm, awake again around 1-2am until 3-4am, and then wakes up again normally around 6-7am (the only time she sleeps in any later is if she’s extremely unwell). It’s hard to say if it’s an age thing or an energy levels thing – she has a very high-stress job and is usually very tired by the end of the day; perhaps someone whose job doesn’t exhaust them so much would not sleep like this,
We have that in Shetland. 3 hours daylight in the winter, 23 hours in the summer. Many people can’t cope and use blackout blinds, special lamps, or medication. Personally, I have no problem. I work from home and take random naps throughout the day and night with no regard to the actual time of the day, just whenever I feel tired. More like 4 or 5 sleeps a day, always around 2 hours each. Most people think I’m lazy, or “sleep all day”, when they’ve dropped in even once and found me napping. But I work an average of 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and spend the remainder out walking. I’ve long given up explaining…
Very interesting article, even though I’m not concerned. My sleep time can range anywhere from 6 hours (today for example, I’ve oddly woken up refreshed at 5 am even though I was out at 11 pm) to 12 hours.
But my most common sleep time is around 10 hours. And I almost never nap (not even as a kid).
I’m 25 but I seem to have the sleeping pattern of a teenager o.O
Oh, well… I’ve always been a late bloomer lol
I began 2 sleeps 24 years ago when I became a mother. Getting up around 2:00 am to listen to the sounds of the sleeping house, take a wander, look out the window, and listen to the news just seemed to be natural “mommy” thing to do. I assumed my ancestors came awake once through the night to make sure all is safe and well. However, I still do this nightly ritual and the kids have grown and flown.
I sleep twice a day. I go to bed approx midnight, get up at 4.30. go to work from 6am till midday or 2pm. have two hours own time shoppin , washing n chilling.. then sleep another 2 hous approx. i like to get up about 5pm at the latest to start tea or dinner, do a few more chores, then chill from 9 till midnight and start the routeen again. days off i sleep for an extra hr in morning and have an hr nap in the afteroon, unless im out for the day ..day tripping.. its the only way , i feel I can work ,spend time with partner n children, friends n do house hold chores without the feeling of dropping dead and becoming exhausted
I happened to discover this term “segmented sleep” just this morning (it’s 3:38 AM now), and read the article above. I have been a “segmented sleeper” for over 40 years, and it works splendidly. I never until just now discovered that everyone in olden times slept in this fashion, but I can easily believe it.
After college I started doing hard manual labor and was too tired to involve my mind in the finer things of life in the evenings, like reading or art. So I started sleeping in TWO shifts every day. I go to sleep shortly after dinner, at dusk. This is my main sleep period, varying from 4 to 6 hours. Then I rise and in the darkness and solitude of the night I feel like I am MUCH more mentally (and physically) powerful than any other time of the day. Finally, around 4:30-5:30 AM I go to sleep a second time, but for only about 3 hours. My total period of sleep time each 24 hours is usually about 8 hours , if that’s a “magic” number (which I doubt).
I never have trouble falling asleep. My wife complains how I am able to fall asleep virtually instantly — literally in seconds. Before or after sleep I am never “half asleep” or groggy. And I get far more accomplished in my day than those who flop down out-of-energy on the couch and vegetate before the TV all evening. (Another GREAT benefit is that I have not seen primetime American network TV shows since the mid 70s… and I don’t think I’ve missed much. Besides, there are always DVDs of the few decent shows to watch during my early morning waking hours.)
It is also said that it’s unhealthy to go to sleep immediately after dinner, which is what I’ve done for 40 years. So I should mention that I am in perfect health and not the least bit overweight at 63 years. And very active.
It’s now almost 4 AM — time to read for a few hours. (How many of you can do that every day of your life?)
A person Sleeping on bed will lead with an unhealthy life with ailments such as diabetes etc.
It starts like this,
Our back gets heatedup. And leads to disruption of Insulin and sugar proportion in the body. This leads to all types of ailments which shortens life.
But a person sleeping on floor with simple mat, with one or two blankets and with a simple pillow, will lead long healthy life.
Surely Researchers can find their analysis on subject.
What the…?
eh?? Sleeping on a bed gives you diabetes. I am outraged !! Surely all these so called experts should have warned me about that! Oh wait !! I am 43 years old andnhave been sleeping on a bed for 43 years, I am diabetes free, so maybe thats the biggest load of codswallop I have ever heard in my entire 43 years. Oh wait !! My 15 stone father has diabetes, he too sleeps in a bed!! Must be true.
One of the dumbest comments I’ve ever read.
Poppycock! Crazy talk “Giblet Head”
This makes perfect sense to me, always thought I was an insomniac, because I have done this for years and always feel better if I just go ahead and get up and do something, then I have no trouble going to sleep when I lay back down….because when I first lay down for sleep unless I am completely exhausted and worn out I have a horrible time getting to sleep but when I finally do it is usually in multiples of two or three hours, never more than four and I am awake…I have done this since childhood….am aged now and still have this habit and require less sleep now…but still sleep in multiples or second sleep as you call it…
I learned about this two-sleep pattern (or segmented sleep) last year in a Post-Marxisms class. I’ve been fascinated ever since. This summer, I am solely working on my dissertation, so I decided to try out segmented sleep for 20 days. If you’re interested to see how it’s going, check out my blog at my website: vrobinphd.com
This was very helpful…. I’m doing research paper on sleep!
I sleep like that! Family thinks I have bad ‘sleep hygiene’. And I know I disturbed the kids when they were young..as I’d put the TV on low.. But I also read, FB, let the dog out and in a few times.. I love my ‘me time’!
And to think… for 40 years I’ve called myself an insomniac! I LOVE that second sleep and wake very rested when I’m having a “2-sleep” night.
I too have been sleeping as such, do fb, give dogwater take pills, take dog out. (11pm-2-3am up for 2-3 hours then sleep from 5-6am till 10-11am) everyone thinksI sleep too much and its nonsense to be up that late in the middle of the night. I am not working now not sure it would be feisable if I were working dayshift. But for now Iwill enjoy it.
I am the same glad to find I’m not the only one that has this strange sleep pattern well it’s not strange to me but strange to others :)
Glad I found this. I too sleep in 4 hour blocks. After the first sleep I would get anxious and nervous about not falling back to sleep. This article and the research is definitely changing my tune :)
One thing I would suggest the researchers do when conducting the experiments with humans is to check their cortisol levels throughout the night (at 6pm, 10, 4am, 8am). You would want to make sure that someone isn’t suffering from adrenal exhaustion and they just produce too much cortisol at certain hours of the night.
I used to suffer from bad insomnia (never falling asleep early at all) and after a cortisol saliva test I saw that my cortisol began to increase at night (you want the opposite to happen).
Thanks
Jason
This might be true of some cultures in some areas but not most of the population of the world at the time. There were night owls so to speak back then too who actually slept in the day but they usually did some kind of work at night by candlelight if indoors but much cleaning was needed outdoors at night in upper class areas where the poor would work at night using lanterns as light and some Towns even had poles with lanterns hung that were lit all night giving off a soft light.
Most people slept several to a bedroom and not many had more than one or two changes of clothes so closets were small even up until the 1960s if you have seen an older house with small closets and wonder how on earth did they keep clothes and towels. Most didn’t bath much and used a dry cloth for cleansing as water was fitly unless boiled first thus; wine was the prime drink of breakfast and most meals of all ages especially in Europe.
The majority of humans would tend to go to sleep soon after the Sun went down or time after lovemaking in a crowded room and would sleep about 8 hours then wake earl while it was still dark out, light the house with candles and later other types of non electric lamps and start the cooking of the day while the men started to get ready for work a mile or so away that might take three hours in the dark to get there on time in a buggy or on a horse in deep snows or mud from summer rains.
It wasn’t much like this article says but am sure a minority did do as in the article. Most people took naps in the DAYTIME and especially the proper female so there were naps and in Germany, France and other nations, that tradition continues to this day which is why the States has low productivity compared and is going down hill worse than Haiti.
I’m French, I know some people take naps during lunch break or when they get home after work (more often females around 18-30 y-o), but it’s not a real tradition… Except for little kids in most preschools who have a mandatory nap time in the afternoon (which I absolutely hated when I was a child, as I don’t nap at all unless very sleep deprived haha).
I liked the rest of your comment, very informative :)
How do you know this is exactly what happened?! from where do you take this information? you seem to be so sure of it…
I began sleeping twice per night about ten years ago, when I started using wood to heat my house. It seemed to me then, and it still does, that when my body sensed that the house was getting too cold for my likes I would automatically wake up.
After stoking the fire and feeding the cat, I usually hang out for well over an hour, doing laundry, checking mail and news on my computer, playing solitaire. Falling back to sleep is never a problem for me, and I feel very rested after the second sleep period.
The two-sleep pattern has become a way of life for me, even in the warm months when there’s lots more sunlight.
What occurs to me as I read peoples’ posts on the two-sleep thesis is that most of them write as though they are single and sleep alone. I am married and I can’t just turn the light on when I wake up. I do tend to sleep in two chunks, but it’s problematic, because my wife goes to be around 10:00 – 10:30 and gets up at 6:15. She’s a teacher so she has no choice. I run my own business on the Internet so when I sleep is more flexible for me, but I like to get up with her and start the day together. So if I go to bed at, say, 11:00 PM and sleep till 3 or 4 AM, then get up for a couple hours, when I go back to sleep at 5:30, she’ll soon be getting up, and if I get up with her I’ll be tired all day – unless I sleep again!! But if I don’t, I feel like I’ve missed and important part of the day with her – breakfast!
I find myself also resorting to this kind of sleep pattern – last night I spent 4 hours on the couch, then woke up – did some computing – then went to bed to sleep another 4-5 hours. I am somewhat rested but still sleep-drowsy. And this happens quite often nowadays.
This is exactly how I sleep, when I am not committed to something early in the morning. I am a bit of a night owl, I do love the quite of the night time. I usually go to bed around 2 a.m. and sleep until about 5 or 6 a.m. then I am up again for a few hours, dawn comes and I get really tired and sleepy again… I go back to sleep and will sleep for 5 hours- very restful and rejuvenated.
It’s nice to know that this comes from a previous effective and well accepted sleep pattern.
I do have REM cycles with both sleep times and wake up easily both time. However, if I have to wake up before 4 hours in the second sleep, I have a REALLY difficult time and often sleep though alarm clocks, phone calls, door pounding… and then I will wake up naturally about 30 to 45 minutes later. LOL
Lynn, you are the only one in here that sounds just like me. Everyone else is very similar, but I do the same thing. The disruptions and all. Lol. I was told I have insomnia, and have had it since I was a little kid. Even before kindergarten. I also find it odd that I can recall bits and pieces of being an infant. Although I believe I’m more in tuned with my body and therfore try to heal naturally. And my body forces me to sleep this way. I have tried for years to be so called normal in my sleep patterns, but let something like getting sick happen, and I’m right back to being a night owl again. But when in a night owl, I tend not to get sick at all. Interesting to day the least. Happy sleeping.
I spent a lot of my life doing two sleep. Actually more like a midday nap for 15 to 30 minutes and then regular sleep. at 71 I nap about 2 hours in the afternoon, then regular sleep, 11 p m until 5 a m. My father at 89 would six sleep. My first memories were of sleeping in a cold room. Seeing my breath in the morning was common. We had a wood stove in the kitchen used for heat and cooking/baking all year around. My parents moved to a home with central heat around 1965. I lived in a dorm at college with central heat starting in 1961. It is a little of topic, but I believe that heating our millions of homes and businesses with gas is not going to last. We need sustainable heat such as solar, or a digest er, or possibly even some wood again. We need a way to heat our structures that will last for decades and eventually centuries. We don’t have that right now.
SO um, I am looking for the two books linked to amazon.
Even if they are out of print, I would love them as a starting point.
OH LOOK, I am up am 3 am, after going to bed at 10pm, second sleep. DOH
When I was a teenager I was a two sleeper. I had a paper route and I would get up around 3 AM, stoke the furnace and deliver my paper route and then come back to bed until I had to get up and go to school. But with school and paper route and church and other activities, I did not average 8 hours, but closer to 6. This average number of hours of sleep continued to be my norm, and my average even now, 50+ years later, is around 6 hours!
I found this article searching for info on multiple sleep periods, because of this: If I fall asleep before about 10PM, I can only sleep for about 3-4 hours, then I wake up wide awake sometime before midnight and can’t get back to sleep right away… if instead I fall asleep well after 10pm, I can sleep the whole night no issue whatsoever. This especially happens when I’m really tired after a long day of work, and crash hard after dinner (say, 7-8pm), and is definitely more common in the winter. Anyway, your article and other readers’ comments suggests that this is more common than I thought – I’m going to try to find a way to make this work as others have :D Many thanks!
Two comments; first I would amend electric light to ” artificial” light; the first eight years or so my wife and i were together we lived off the grid, but typically in winter I would stay up two to four hours after she went to bed reading with the light of a Coleman lantern and watching the wood stove.
The other thing I’d like to point out is that our caveman ancestors very likely had a watch system where several of the adults took turns guarding the perimeter at night from predators and intruders. That would naturally lend itself to a two sleep pattern and a tendency to be able to wake up and be alert in the middle of the night would be an advantage where night attacks were common.
I do this all the time. On Weekends it’s no problem but having to get up at a certain time during the week leaves me tired. Sometimes I can’t fall back asleep mainly because I stay up fretting about not being able to go back to sleep. Maybe now since I know it’s more common I’ll have an easier time going back to sleep.
I have read this with much interest as for years I have been in the habit of awaking about two O’clock going to the lounge to read for about a couple of hours then going back to bed & I feel much fresher than when I try to sleep through it
Yes I’m hoping for the same results as you Lori I wake in the middle of the night after say 4 hours sleep I am going to stop worrying when this happens and see how I get on.
This explains my waking at 3am to 3.30 am every night .It also explains why every house I have had that has been haunted at aroubd this time I smell food.Everyone always says midnight they ought to try this time
I usually go to bed around midnight and wake up around 5:30. Then I go downstairs, feed my kitties, have a cup of coffee and retire to the recliner with the TV on. Then around 7:00 I fall asleep with a cat on my lap, and don’t wake up till around 11:00! Here I thought I was a wierdo!
In the early 1990’s, while I was finishing my last year of undergrad work, and starting my grad school program, I was a full-time student, worked part-time, and also was mom to three active children. I found by accident the two-sleep method was a great help to me. I would use the waking interlude as my time to study and work on papers I had due. My best and most creative writing came out during this time period. I recommend it. Didn’t know there was a study about it, I was just doing what I had to do to keep up and get good grades.
What a great article. Seems my sleep patterns aren’t weird. I’m just repeating the practices of my predecessors. When I began sleeping in this way ( around 12 months ago) i.e. waking up between 3 and 5 am I was quite concerned at first. But I think I’m accepting it over time and I’m enjoying very much watching the middle of the nite shopping channels.
Unrelated, I came here since I had difficulties getting sleep this night and having only two hours until I have to be well-rested, and get up to do an exam.. Sometimes if the habitual pattern is just slightly off I tend to get troubles getting to sleep, to alert. My habitual pattern is annoyingly mostly media-based nowadays since I usually have to use the computer-by-the-bed to get tranquil (or sedated) enough to relax. I do this by listening to a fairly interesting (to keep me distracted, from the silence or what? :/) , yet boring or calm, repetative podcast/public service show/book. I dont feel otherwise troubled, I am generally quite serene and positive inside in nightime, but before I had much more of a peace of mind and didnt need multimedia or distraction. would like to get back to that, perhaps reading a real book would help since multimedia makes you too alert and it is to unpredicative and..flashy.
My grandmother however always slept heavy the first few hours, then she got up, went into the kitchen, laid a patience card game, ate a few bisquits, comfortably talked (or whistled) back to the undulat birds and listened to the night talk shows on the radio, laughed a bit with them until she got back to bed one or two hours later. It s good to know she actually just did what folks do, but I (sleeping over on the side of her bed on her velvet green couch cushions) always woke up and felt it was kinda cozy having her there in the kitchen, mostly enyoying her blue hours. It makes sense, but not if you get to sleep as late as modern humans, and a state that is impossible with an attention-havocing computer by your side. Habits are changable though.
I love this! I dont’ know why but this article just makes me happy – you can smell the “stoking of the fire” and the simple life style. Really cool.
I haven’t googled this, but I have a weird sleep style ( or maybe its completely normal) where I could ( not that I do) sleep for 12 hours a night. Completely knocked out. Bam – I’m out. My head hits the pillow every night and I’m gone in about 5 minutes. What’s interesting, is I can STILL do this if I’ve only been awake for say, 6-8 hours, or even if I didn’t really “do” anything.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a busy girl, but on my days off I take advantage of the opportunity to relax as my full time job requires me to be on my feet for long period of time ( 5-8 hours) and usually in motion ( I’m a server). Overall I’m in great general health, eat well etc. Any curious ideas to why I could win a sleeping contest? Does this sound like you, too?
I am the exact same way. I can sleep for 12-15 hours easily…. I’m healthy too. Everyone makes fun of me because of how much I sleep. I will sleep so long that people will come to my house to check on me because they can’t get ahold of me lol
I can only sleep as long as my bladder will allow. In my youth, that was 12-15 hours. Now 8-10.
I also love my sleep! I have always been able to sleep 10-12 hours at a stretch, if it is up to me, I would go to bed at 8pm and get up at 10am. However, I have married a US Marine (ret.) who has the screwiest sleep. This is apparently common in the military, because all his marine buddies have a similar schedule, which is basically up all the time.
I have tried to keep up with him, but I have grown depressed, fat and frustrated. I’m exhausted all of the time, and having our daughter hasn’t helped since she just sleeps whenever and likes to party like a rock star when she’s awake.
Tonight though, I laid down with her at 8pm and ignored my husband’s insistence on going with him to the living room, instead falling asleep with this article in mind. It is 12:30am, and I just had four straight hours of uninterrupted sleep!! Not my old 12 hours, but I will take it!
Hopefully we will all lay down in an hour or two and pass out until 11am as usual. Only this time, I am really hoping I will not wake up groggy and exhausted.
When circumstances are ideal, I find I am naturally inclined to sleep five hours, be awake ten, then sleep five more. Repeat as long as possible. Alas, a 24 hour a day cycle does not allow that 28 hour rotation for long… stupid responsibilities!
You know, I think this explains a lot about my mother’s sleeping patterns, though she has been blocking this with pills for some time now. She goes to bed around 9 and always wakes up between 2 and 3:30 (of course blaming me and my brother for waking her) then if she didn’t use lunesta or anything she would probably experience exactly what you are describing. I am curious though, I found this article on Google trying to find an explanation for MY problem, not hers. I can go to bed at any time, but I will never fall asleep until way later than I should. If I wake at 6 and go to bed at any time, I still fall asleep at 1 or 2. If I wake at 8 I will fall asleep around 2 or 3. If I wake at 10 or later I fall asleep anytime between 3 and 6, and it stops there. I can’t wake up any earlier than 9 or 10 without loosing sleep, and this causes me some serious issues. It isn’t typical insomnia, and it isn’t new. I don’t remember when I started sleeping like this but I know I have been a night owl since childhood, but missing sleep and waking late didn’t man as much back then. My earliest memory of this sleep habit I was probably around seven. As it is, I’m writing this at almost 6 o’clock new years day, and I am 18 years old. Why do I sleep like this? Or rather, why do I not sleep? Please if anyone has any ideas, please reply.
Fastly growing people between 13 and well up until their twenties need more sleep, is what I have heard, and are generally night owls.. It is actually the society that needs to change their schedules one hour forward to make everything go smoother. I don’t know, I’m still up late, but if I fall to sleep in midnight I may need 7 hours, but well onto 4, I’ve had enough sleep 6 hours later. I think it would be interesting to hear about how the night owl people’s psyches motivates them to stay up late and how it correlates or writes over our biological clock, when we’ve had the heavy early sleep after a hard days work in darkness for so long ? or can it be a thing of plasticity, with artificial light and distraction? perhaps your trait is an alternative biological clock?
oh and I meant 5 hours later. 4-5 hours can be enough, it depends on your luck (or healing rem sleep phases)! :) wish I had something more substantial to say but it’s still a mystery how we sleep individually.
You are just a night owl. The natural night owl schedule is to fall asleep in the early morning hours and wake in the afternoon. Nothing strange about it. Although morning people “rule the world” making everything start so damned early in the morning, there are millions of us night people too. It is just as normal. If left to my natural preference, I would go to bed at 6 or 7 am, and wake at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and be happy and fully rested. Unfortunately work and school often don’t accommodate this schedule. So I constantly fight it and try to “flip” to a daytime schedule which is very difficult. One thing I can tell you after 40 years of trying – a night person does not change. A day person can adjust to another schedule but a night person will never change into a day person. You can force yourself and be sleep-deprived (as I always was for years working) but the second it was the weekend I was back to my natural schedule and so sleep-deprived I would sleep 12 or 14 hours straight. So don’t think there is something wrong with you. It is just a biological fact that some of us are meant to be up and alert at night. Probably from the “night shift” in our ancestors’ days.
Same problems mostly. I take anti-depressants, melatonin, benadryl, ibuprophen, aspirin, magnesium (except it gives me diarrhea) to get to sleep, every other night it works.
good luck, sue
MAGNESIUM – we ALL need so much more than our bowel-tolerance will allow. Our ancestors bathed in water and ate foods grown in soil, both RICH in magnesium. I buy magnesium from a great source: health-and-wisdom . com. I personally soak my feet, body in the granules for 20 or so minutes many days (and now have a solution of their Magnesium Oil diluted with a few tablespoons of distilled water that I spray on my body once or twice a day). VERY effective for many bodily functions, including calming and relaxing for sleep.
Again, great article, makes a lot of sense, and good to see so many people doing same. Like other comments, for thousands of years (before Islam) Indian spiritual faiths and texts have all instructed to sleep in this manner, and wake from around 2/3 am to 6 am is called the amrit vela, or ambrosial hours, which are the best for meditation and praying. They say its because the world is sleeping and less energy and interference coming into your mind, and gates of heaven are open etc etc, but i think as the article says its also a metaphor to do with whats going inside you body, as it is in a state which is conducive to being calm, focused and so helps you achieve higher levels of meditation etc. This also ties in well with instructions to always sleep before midnight, so if you sleep at around 11, your first sleep cycle finishes around 2, which fits in perfectly with this. As for the summer months having less darkness, I think this is balanced out with the idea that during summer months, mabe you need less sleep, as it seems with animals, they still sleep and wake with the hours of darkness and light, ie with sunset and sunrise. I think more sunlight being absorbed, more energy, higher temps, means maybe your body needs less hours of sleep and recovery so you just still go to sleep when it gets dark (just an idea though..)
“This also ties in well with instructions to always sleep before midnight” wow still are tey idio.. back people who belive in this myth ? “Myths about our sleep abound. Is every hour of sleep before midnight worth more than the hours after? There’s little evidence to support this, although one study showed that people performed better when they’d had more sleep after midnight, contradicting the myth.”
http://mediacenter.dw.de/english/video/item/1263793/Myths_about_Sleep/
MYTH: One hour before midnight is worth two hours after midnight.
FACT: “This myth is pervasive, but sleep doesn’t really work that way,” says Dr. W. Christopher Winter. Your first three or four hours of shut-eye are deep sleep—the kind that recharges your batteries and prevents you from falling asleep at work; the second half of sleep is lighter, dream-filled REM sleep, which keeps you sharp and determines your mood for the day.” You need equal amounts of both,” Winter says
Read More http://www.details.com/blogs/daily-details/2012/10/the-biggest-sleep-myths.html#ixzz2pC89P32z
This is interesting and romantic, but what would they say to allow people to reach that serene state when you fall asleep around 2 or 3? Are there any theories about staying up late- sleep through the wolf hours in past times, or did the artists, philosophers and poets that stayed up late at night in our history actually always prefer the time before the “second sleep”?
I think J has come the closest to my personal experience. I am an ‘escape sleeper’. I start to yawn at the first sign of trouble. I have always been a night owl, as well.
My favorite, most restful sleep pattern is 2 a.m. to 10 a.m. with a bladder control break and a crossword puzzle in the middle.
I believe this pattern works well for me because it allows me to avoid those times of day when stress is typically greatest – the beginning of a day shift job or school day and the dreaded ‘appropriate bedtime hour’.
I tend to get broken sleep too and I’m hoping to get projects done during those 2 hours awake. To induce segmented sleep, we don’t really need to give up electrical lighting. We can use red/yellow LEDs which do not block melatonin to a large degree.
I have made my bedroom a haven for my 2 a.m. to 10 a.m. sleep pattern with a room-darkening shade, curtains, and drapes significantly wider than the window frame so no annoying little cracks of light can squeeze past the edges.
I too sleep twice in a night, often waking between 1 and 4 am. If I don’t have to go to work, I often turn the light on and read or puzzle-book for a couple hours, long enough to feel sleepy again, and back to sleep I go. I thought for years there was something wrong with this. Now I just accept it and go with the flow.
I like to give myself 12 hours for a night’s sleep, including my waking hours in the middle of the night. Now I know this is quite normal.
Is this in winter time or all year around?
I typically sleep in two sleep sessions. I sleep for 3-5 hours wake up and do the parts of my work that require concentration and mental alertness. After a few hours I begin to feel sleepy again and sleep for a few hours more. The period between my sleeps varies quite a bit. If can be as short as an hour, is typically 4 hours, but can be much longer if I am working on something complicated. I also find that if I stay up until what would be the normal end of my first sleep (around 2:00am) I am wide awake for several hours.
I have 2 sleeps quite often as I fall asleep next to my daughter reading her stories. I usually sleep 8:30-midnight then I’m up for about 2 hours then back to bed. It doesn’t feel any different than the typical 7-8 hour chunk I get and sometimes I even feel more rested after this type of sleeping night.
Very interesting article; and I had no idea that happened in the past. I wondered initially if it was because beds were scarce so they had to organise sleeping rotas or that it was co-ordinated around working hours (shift work). But now reading through what you have discovered from historical references I think that I clearly live sometimes in the past as I often have two sleeps! It tends to be with me waking around 3 or 4am and having a cup of tea, perhaps a slice of toast and butter, I then hit the keys of my computer and write. It is quite often, waking from the ‘first sleep’ that I am so full of ideas for my story writing that it makes sense to just get on and write without making notes, to then follow through in the morning.
Thank you for sharing!
I find it easy to then slip back to sleep, and wake full refreshed at some later hour in the morning. I will definitely take note, from now on, that when it happens if I do indeed get a full eight hours sleep. I have a feeling it is longer!
Great article….I didn’t have time to read all the comments, but I wonder if the 2 sleep pattern was (or is?) as prevalent near the equator , where relative to northern and southern latitudes the number of day light hours does not vary so dramatically from winter to summer.
Trust me, it is all over the world! Equatorial seems to sleep in four hour shifts because it is so hot during the day and cooler at night, so they stay awake longer at night. I think it is biological, not environmental.
The two sleep pattern actually becomes my normal sleeping habit in the winter. I live in the mountains and keep the wood burning stove going through the night. By about 3-4 am, generally the coldest time of the night, I naturally wake up, to my surprise feeling very refreshed.
Here I was thinking that something was wrong with me, only to find that my sleep experience is normal. I always wake up somewhere between 3-5 hours of sleep. I usually try to fight it because I have been trained to believe that I need to sleep 8 straight hours. However, sometimes I do get up and read, watch tv or do other things for an hour or two. When I do this I then go back to bed and sleep that second half very well. Otherwise, when I toss and turn to fight it, the second half is usually made up of a lot of waking every 30 minutes or so until I actually have to get up for work. Very, very interesting article and very enlightening. Thank you. Now I feel better about this.
Find that thgis is often the way I sleep during the longer darkness in the winter. It has the big advantage that I can get some of my work done inbetween the two sleeps and often find that I am more productive because there is less noise and other distractions.
I find that when I’m not drinking, I’ll wake up ealier than usual, somewhere between 3:30 am and 5:00 am. This DOES sound like a good time for meditation. I’ll try that. I also find that having a meal at this time helps me get back to sleep. Sleep Hygiene is an issue that is too often ignored and may be worth looking into for a more relaxed and productive life.
The time between 3:00 and 6:00 is known as Brahma Muhurtam in Indian/vedic tradition – THE ideal time for meditation
Besides tending a fire, tending animals may be another reason to get up in the middle of long, cold winter nights. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Farmer Boy, about her husband’s childhood on a farm in New York in the 1850s, the father got up in the middle of winter nights for the animals. They had a lot of livestock, more than could all fit in their great barns. For the cows who had to stay outside in a corral, he would get up and rouse them, getting them to run around and around in circles in the corral until they were warmed up, to keep them from freezing/getting frostbite. (I don’t know if he did this nightly, or just on nights when the temperature dipped below a certain danger point.)
Muslims still do this all over the world, we are required to. First sleep then wake up for Fajr prayer then second sleep.
Don’t you know that, 2 sleep is islamic teaching. in islam you could use time between sleep to pray, not a must (waajib) but sunnah (better if you do it). the first sleep is longer than the second sleep. I think the second sleep is no more than 1 hour maybe lesser, you can ask this from the scholar of islam. you can do first sleep after you do isya prayer. and you must wake up from the second sleep before fajr prayer. you can download app in play.google to check muslim prayer time. I guarantee you it is the best method to sleep, because it’s method is from the creator of us and the creator of the universe.
additional note:
you are encourage also to do short sleep in the afternoon.
I am reading about sleep patterns of recent history here. I would think sleep patterns may have changed throughout history. I would think from the time of the caveman till now, people have adapted to sleep patterns depending on the environment presented to them. I know here in hot regions of Arizona, many people will work at night in the summer, and sleep during the day, especially in construction. They will work and sleep normal hours during the cooler months. I think with humans adaptation is the key when it comes to sleep patterns. I however do 2 sleeps about twice a week. Only in the last 10 years. Rarely when I was younger.
The two sleep practice continued well in to the 20th century and died out with the generation born in the fifties and sixties. My father and his siblings were born in the nineteen hundreds in a remote rural community and up to his passing in the nineteen sixties my father would sleep early and get up in the middle of the night so did may others who were born and raised in the early part of the 20th century
Very interesting article indeed.
I’ve always thought how hard it must have been for monks and nuns in the middle ages to get up for prayer in the middle of the night (and some orders still do, though not many). Given this, perhaps it wasn’t quite as unusual or difficult to them as it would seem to us.
Clearly modern culture and technology reflect the ‘one-sleep’ model of the past century of Western Civilization. Just look at ‘prime-time TV programming’ that is designed to accommodate the sleep patterns of adults who stay up late to watch programming designed for mature audiences while still getting the appropriate amount of sleep to rise early and go to work the next day. It will be interesting to see how sleep patterns change due to technology that doesn’t force TV watchers into certain time slots like the use of DVRs and personal computing and communication devices that allow viewers to select what shows they want to view and when. Another contributing factor will be how people work. As the ‘work at home’ trend seems to be subsiding –or at least is purported to be by some, the choice to sleep when, how long and how often might become more (or less) a matter of personal choice.
For myself, I recently retired and moved into a house that is undergoing remodeling and left my belongings (including TV’s and computers) in storage for the first couple of months. For years, I found my need for sleep had decreased from about 8 hours in my 20’s to about 4 or 5 hours continuously in my 50’s. What I discovered, was that without the preoccupation with viewing media, I found myself falling asleep earlier and earlier –so that even though it was still summer and the days were longer, I would fall asleep pretty much as soon as the sun went down. Reading just made me sleepy. Still, I would wake up after about 4 or 5 hours, be up for a couple more doing whatever I could to fill this time and then falling back to sleep again. Thus, I’ve found myself in a
two sleeps per night pattern that continues even though we now have our modern conveniences out of storage. I should note that my second sleep is shorter than the first one –about two or three hours. I don’t take naps during the day or I can’t sleep at all at night. My husband, on the other hand, is a one sleep sleeper. Goes to bed late early in the evening and sleeps until he has to get up early to go to work about 5 a.m. He has no problem sleeping for about 8 to 10 hours a night.
As a Sleep tech (I perform Nocturnal Polysomnograms…sleep studies), and this is a really intriguing article..thanks!!!! I will share this with my co-workers…..
Two things, 1st manny families lived together and older members get up often for many reasons. Young families needed to tend to young children. I also would get up to tend a wood stove while living in a school house during cold months. Summer brought later bedtime giving time for the home to cool some. When I was young and did much physcial activity I needed the rest. now that I am retired I’m up most every night. During this time I watch foreign news channels for different perspectives on world events.
You can learn a lot of things at night if you use the right, contructive channels. :) I wonder how the morning procedure went off in those days in the northern hemisphere without electricity nor light. But obviously someone must have tended the fire and the stoves. It must have been really cold for the first one to get up at five to get the kitchen going, this being large drafty houses, not tents.
Just some input. A while back I lived with my girlfriend in the winter garden of her father. In the winter. It was more or a less a big glass house with a stove. No isolation or what so ever. Believe me, it was freakishly cold. In order to avoid freezing to death we had to keep the fire going the whole night.
I did not have to set my self an alarm clock. I just woke up by myself every time the fire went out.
After putting more wood on the fire I went back to bed. I had to get up 3 times per night.
The surprising part for me was that I was actually rested the next day. Even thou I always considered myself a person who needs a lot of sleep but simple just not get’s it due to my IT focused life style and doing a great deal of work from 23 – 2 in the morning.
I don’t sleep this way, but around 8pm, I get very drowsy. On my own devises, I’d fall asleep for an hour or so. Instead, I fight to stay awake (while watching TV, after a meal, on the couch). I’m not ready for bed until 1am, and sleep until 8a. But I’ll bet if I did go to sleep at 8, I’d feel a lot better!
When visiting Rio, many people went to bed when they got home from work. They got up at 10 and went out to eat or dancing until the wee hours. I liked that system!
This is precisely the natural sleep pattern I fall into when left to my own devices. Like, eerily so. I’d love to read more about this, as I’ve always felt like I didn’t have the same internal clock as other folks – but maybe it’s just that I don’t feel the need to have it dictated to me by outside forces. Being single helps that LOL.
THIS IS HOW I HAVE ALWAYS SLEPT!!!!
I remember, as a teenager, I was criticized for sleeping more hours than the, “usual” person. Freaking out my relatives when I wasn’t awake all morning and woke up early afternoon instead. But it’s actually a proven scientific fact that teens need to sleep longer. This article just reminded me of that. It’s pretty neat too.
Amen!! (actually, I think most teens are like this, but are ‘guilted’ in to sleeping less for fear of being labeled “Lazy!!”
I’ve read that teens need as much sleep as toddlers……
With reference to teens needing more sleep: I believe IQ plays a role in how much sleep is needed too. My son’s grades were lower than his sister’s. He needed a few more hours sleep than she did. He also needed three alarm clocks to waken him once out and on his own. Now he has no difficulty in getting up to go to work. He is an independent contractor. My daughter owns her own business as well. Going back to when they were born: my son was born in the afternoon. He liked to sleep late. My daughter was born at night. She was a night owl. Adjusting their feeding times is how their sleep patterns were also adjusted as infants and young children.
Very cool article. I do this when I’m plodding through my first draft of a new book(which is the hardest draft for me), but I had no idea it was anything other than another example of me being weird :)
I noticed that my word counts were much higher if I woke up and immediately began to write, but that after a couple hours, the words dried up. So I decided to sleep twice and it really did increase my ability to focus and kept the writing easy and fluid. I had no idea why, but it’s the pattern I’ve adopted and stick with at least through the first draft of a new project.
about 20 yrs ago a psych mag article sedd folks naturally sleep 4 hours at a shot. i had noticed that i sleep basically 3.
coffee, anyone?
sedd is my better spelling.
“sedd” just makes you look STUPID!
Unfortunately that is true.
Last week research findings were released regarding the function of sleep – they have evidence to show during sleep the brain is cleaned of toxins built up during daytime functioning. The researchers are pondering whether Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia, which is related to poorer sleep patterns, might come about because the toxins are not cleared from the brain sufficiently. Early day research, but I wonder if 2 sleeps will be as effective at cleaning the brain of toxins as a single sleep? I am most often a 2 sleep person and really can’t change this pattern, so I think this will be important to find out.
Interesting point Juliana. I would love to hear more about this finding.
As a brain injury survivor I was given medication to help me sleep. Without the medication I had more difficulty in formulating my thoughts. Even to this day I repeat a prayer before I get up in the mornings. Once I can repeat the prayer in my mind without stopping and having to start over, then I am ready to get up. That injury was over 25 years ago.
I have also had sleep apnea and went 6 weeks without any sleep at all. I have had 3 sleep apnea tests done on me and I no longer have sleep apnea.
When a sleep apnea test is done, you ate placed in a dark room with no windows and no light. If you have to go to the restroom you have to punch a button and somebody then turns the overhead light on so you can go to the restroom. They have to first disconnect you and of course the reverse is done when you get back to your room.
Nowadays there is too much light. There are too many wireless currents floating around in ones home and in a person’s bedroom if they keep their wireless computer there.
Being on the computer right before bedtime is not a good practice because of the flickering lights from the monitor. We are not cognitively aware of that flickering and it is not as bad as it used to be with the improvement in computer monitors.
Our mind is going like 90mph and then expected to slow down and rest when a person is on their computer just before bedtime. These are scientific data.
As a child growing up we didn’t have central heat and air like we have today. We had a gas furnace that had to be lit an hour before everybody got up. My parents took turns lighting that heater. At my grandparents house they had space heaters. Someone had to get up and lite them too.
We had more darkness because nightlights were not kept on. There were corner streetlights but they did not shine through a window.
There were not as many cars and trucks driving around at nighttime. Where I live now my bedroom door is kitty corner from a big arch window in the dining area. When vehicles pass by at night, the light from their headlights shines in my bedroom. I either have to close the door or wear a sleep mask.
There were times in the not so distant past when I would awaken during the night around 2 am and write. Many of my writings came from those early morning hours. It’s quiet time.
At the ranch we had a pot belly stove for heat. Somebody had to get up and stoke the fire. There were no street lights. There was the sound of cattle and coyotes. It was peaceful sleep. However, during the hot hours of the day we worked on puzzles, played cards, dominos or took naps. Sleep was from sun down to sun up. And sleep was more peaceful there than at home unless my father in law was there. He snored extremely loudly. The ranch house was one great room with a partition separating it from the bathroom.
Our ancestors had more darkness when they slept. Going back several generations there we no headlights from cars and trucks passing by. There were not as many paved roads back then either. They also had to stoke the fires in the winter time. And too, many slept with windows open. Windows and doors were opposite each other for cross ventilation.
I had an apartment that had cross ventilation like that. There was no central heat and air in that apartment either. I slept soundly looking at the moon from my high bedroom window.
Two sleeps may be the norm for some people but others have been trained to sleep straight through the night.
I wake up after 4 hours but I dont stay awake or do any activities cos I worry I wont be able to get back to sleep if I fully awaken
I read something similar a few years ago that female astronauts experienced inconsistent menstrual cycles when in space for extended periods since their natural sunlight was interrupted and their bodies could not regulate themselves. I’m wondering if this is a similar type situation since our ancestors while never in space did have long winters to deal with physically as well–or perhaps it is the reverse situation.
The fertility cycle in women is actually regulated by moonlight. Those with cycle irregularities are advised to either have a low level light on in their sleeping room at night, or to black out all nighttime light (even the flourescent face of a clock), depending on the irregularity. In African countries when the woman has her period, she is said to be “in the moon” . All women will experience on shorter and one longer than average cycle per annum at opposite ends of the year, again corresponding to the lunar cycle.
Fascinating isn’t it!
Light and lifestyle definitely define sleep patterns. In the land of the midnight sun everyone tends to have great energy and needs little sleep from spring through early autumn. The subsistence lifestyle of fishing, foraging, hunting, gardening and putting up requires many more hours than the more sedentary winter tasks. Longer stretches of winter darkness encourage sleep, planning and reflection on the longer days to come. Thanks for sharing!
I love this article. I will now recommend this to new parents along with the New York Times Sunday Magazine article “The Sleep-Industrial Complex”. Its helpful for parents to know that that they can get restorative sleep even if its not a continual 8 hours. Its also helpful to know that oxytocin is their safe sleep “drug”. Moms can get a huge boost in oxytocin from breastfeeding. Both dads and moms can get a boost from skin contact with their baby. This oxytocin boost helps them to drop back into deep sleep after their baby wakes them up at night. Similarly, having the baby sleep close enough so that they can hear their baby and their baby can hear them helps everyone drift into similar sleep rhythms which is less disruptive. Amazingly most parents don’t know that the highest risk of SIDS (36% higher) occurs when young babies sleep in a separate room where they can’t hear their baby and their baby can’t hear them.
Personally, I have always been at least a bimodal and sometimes even a trimodal sleeper. I am resurrecting my afternoon nap again now that my son is in high school with a heavy duty homework load. He sometimes asks me to help him at night past my normal bedtime. Then he has to leave early for school and come home and takes a nap in the afternoon. So, I started taking a nap too if I get home from work early. Fortunately, I work for myself so I can set my own work rhythms and don’t have to settle for the compressed 8 hour sleep cycle during the hours when you are supposed to turn off the light.
This is interesting. I was waiting to read a comment referencing new mom’s sleep. I didn’t know that about oxytocin but it does make sense – I couldn’t have slept at all without co-sleeping, it saved my sanity.
Yes! I have done this most of my adult life when I’ve had a flexible work schedule that would accommodate it.
The “standard 8 hour sleep” is something I only experienced –probably- during childhood.
I only experience a one stretch of 6 hour sleep once or twice a year.
My standard is 5:30 to 6 hours in 3 stretches. the first of which can be of up to 3 hours,
after which I am productive (this is in fact when I read your excellent article and subscribed to your newsletter
I tend to have 2 sleeps regardless of season. i find that if i fall asleep at 8 or 9 pm i tend to wake up at 2 or 3 am and then go back to sleep at 4 or 5 am. I don’t know if this makes me feel more rested then a full 8 hours straight, it just seems to be how i’m wired.
This is most comfortable for me as well. More energy during the day…until naptime. My final wake-up is 8: to 9:00 a.m.
I also read that people are the most creative during the hours of 2 to 4 am. I would definitely like to experiment with this idea. I usually wake up in the middle of the night to eat a bowl of cereal. :)
I had two sleeps my entire pregnancy. My sleep pattern changed quite abruptly when I got pregnant, waking from about 2-5 or 1-4, every night. I had not watched tv in years, so i got caught up on my favorite shows on Netflix. Not exactly productive, but I didn’t feel like getting out of bed and disturbing the family.
I have always slept this way it never seems that I can never sleep over 3-4 hours at a time and need 2 hrs in the night to read or just sit and meditate. When I was younger I have been known to go fishing in the late night with a fire it seems to draw in the fish.
Other non-Western cultures did indeed practice two sleeps. Jared Diamond in his book “The World Until Yesterday” looks at the people of Papua New Guinea and tells a tale in which he mentions their habit of being awake in the middle of the night talking with each other.
Perhaps some of our modern sleep disorders are due to this ancient rhythm being upset by our practice of trying to condense sleep into shorter time periods.
I have had a “sleep disorder” with this mid-way-through-the-8-hours waking, all my life. Often, the wakeful time was spent reading, weaving, sewing, or in some quiet, but not idle, occupation, then I’d get sleepy again, and drift off. I suspect that the electrified lifestyle that eliminates the long nights, and causes us to feel somehow guilty about our “laziness” also produces other stresses that contribute to the “sleep disorder-caused illnesses” like fibromyalgia, which I have had for years, and perhaps other health problems as well. What a can of worms you have, there!
Jody-
This will help close that can of worms: the cure for fibromyalgia is in the book “Healing Back Pain” by John Sarno, M.D. Every time he writes about back pain, read fibromyalgia. He also talks about fibromyalgia directly. The man is a genius.
Anne
Thank you for this article. For years our family has consistently commented on how we all have this sleep habit and felt it was in our family genes. Good to know we are not crazy or have a sleep disorder. Now I can get up and do something and not feel guilty, but useful, and not lay there with crazy thoughts in my head!
More good news! Yeh, am in the same club ;)
Yes I can relate Vickie. It seems that our famly also tends to have this sleep pattern going on, at least with the females. I sometimes wonder if it was just the way we were raised and saw how Mom would rise up in the middle of the night to tend to things she had not finished during the day. I find myself doing this often. Society or the “norm,” would have us believe that we are not normal. However when I let go of what is believed to be norm and allow my body to do what it needs I seem to be content and well rested durning the day, even having gotten up for a couple of hours during the night! I guess the lesson is to accept it and listen to your body and all will be well.
I agree with your insight that “when I let go of what is believed to be norm and allow my body to do what it needs I seem to be content and well rested during the day, even having gotten up for a couple of hours during the night! I guess the lesson is to accept it and listen to your body and all will be well.”
During mid-life, I suddenly fell ill with a disorder, one symptom of which is changed sleep patterns. Drs prescribe sleeping medications for those with the disorder, but I eventually thought: why not let my body do what it feels it needs to do? I think I am doing much better following this approach. I am writing this between 1st and 2nd sleeps, which is when I do most of my writing.
(The industry that makes drugs for inducing sleep will probably try to discredit this kind of research.)
I really enjoyed this article. The two sleep pattern got me through my entire scholastic career and I still do it. Over the years I have found that I am more energetic and mentally alert when I sleep like this as opposed to 6-8 hours at a time, which leaves me lethargic.
It’s almost impossible for me to sleep throughout the night without waking up (stupid bladder). It’s good to know that there’s nothing wrong with me.
I use to do this when the kids were little and I’d get up and Sew.
I think I will start doing this again.
gerri
A very interesting and enlightening post!
I always knew about our ancestors going to bed when dark and rising with the light but did not know about the broken sleep pattern. It makes a lot of sense.
For years I made a point to be in bed by nine. I slept until 4am and got up to write. My soul, just fresh and inspired from my nocturnal journey had to share with me her musings. Without realizing it, I wrote book .
Blessings and light, Lucie!
What an interesting article! I am a two sleep sleeper and I have discussed this with some of my girlfriends and thought it was hormonal or had something to do with age. Some friends have this same sleep pattern, some do not. Academically, this worked for me to write papers in the middle of the night when my mind was fresh. Now that is completed, I wake up and search the net for interesting subjects. I don’t take drugs or drink very much and just let my body do what it does and two sleeps is how I work most of the nights. For learning purposes, it’s great. I did not think it was strange, but, my husband does. I can’t wait to share this with him.
I’ve slept like this all my life but still have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. My theory is I wake up after the first five hours of sleep due to a cortisol peak. Cortisol has a half time of an hour and a half which is when the second sleep comes. Still: groggy after that. I think the night peak eats into the cortisol supply needed for waking up.
Just a general question: how would first and second sleep relate to the circadian low in cortisol at two in the morning? Or is that low a product of our modern 8hour chunk sleep? Did people typically get up and eat a little at night?
All these questions. It ís 2 in the morning, I do my best thinking at night.
I recently had a sleep study done and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. I learned that I had the first period of REM sleep that lasted about 2 hours and was restless or awake for an hour and then another period of REM sleep that lasted about 3 hours. This is my typical sleep pattern and although I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, sleeping is the best thing I do. My body is telling me that I should be having 2 sleeps. Very interesting.
Kathy, your comment reminded me of my husband. He also has sleep apnea and the same sleep pattern as you…only some times he takes 3 shorter naps!
Very interesting post indeed!
Without any demands to sleep and wake along with the rest of society, I fall asleep about 2:00 am and sleep for five to six hours. Then my bladder wakes me. After using the loo I want breakfast with a cup of tea. After that I’m ready for my morning “nap” of two to three hours. After that I wake feeling quite refreshed and I’m good to go until 2:00 am again.m
I started having two sleeps when I lived in a cabin with a woodstove for heat and had to get up in the middle of the night to add fuel to the fire. Seems I was living like our ancestors.
That’s actually pretty cool….
I’ve always been one that will sleep straight through 14 hours if left undisturbed, but starting last year my schedule had to change. I had to get up at 7AM to get my sister on the bus, and by the time I readied myself and went outside… I was pretty much awake enough not to go back to sleep for at least a little while. So I would stay awake for a few hours and by the time 9 or 9:30 came along, I would settle down and read a book, and be asleep by 10:30 at the latest, usually waking up again at noon or 1PM. Eventually I started going to bed at like 2AM, only to start the process over again. I really hated it because I had to go to work at 5PM, so I felt like I was missing a lot of my day, but I was very surprised at how well rested I felt. Those few morning hours that I had to myself were the most creative of the day, and I looked forward to them. I found that it was near impossible for me to stay awake from 7AM on, without being insanely tired come 7 or 8 o clock that night…
Sleep really is quite an interesting study.
Hi
I absolutely agree with this practice. Thank you very much for the scientific views because I find it is easier to understand when the explaination is substantiated with sciences. Prophet Muhammad did practice to wake up in the last third of the night (between 2 to 4 am) and he will sleep back until about 6 am. Now, I realize the advantages on this habit. I observe that I feel more calm, positive and cheerful starting my day when I break my sleep into 2 sections.
Hi Lily,
You know, I have often wondered about the night prayers and how to work this in to my life without being totally sleep deprived. I’ve often marveled at how some can do this. As I read this article it struck me that this is how it’s done! Amazing. I’m glad you made the point about Prophet Muhammad, as it confirms my thought process while reading.
Hi,
I was thinking of precisely the same thing and have lately been struggling to make a sleep routine to accommodate night prayers. I suppose, as the article states, it is easier to get into this routine in the winter months, which is why the Companions of the Prophet (PBUH) would rejoice as it gave them more time to sleep alongside prayers at night.
My sleeping patterns as well!
Very frustrating, I am really a “night” person and would rather stay up late and sleep the morning away. Getting myself to sleep all through the night is almost impossible but a constant battle as a work schedule demands I am awake early.
Just a note about stoking fires. We burn wood all winter in a soapstone wood stove. If you stoke it well before bedtime, there will be plenty of embers to start it up again in the morning, even for a long night. Most people don’t want a roasting hot house at night while they’re sleeping anyway.
Way back then I don’t believe the houses had the insulation that our homes do today and they probably did not retain the heat ours do
I often sleep from 10 to 1 then am awake from 1 to 3 then sleep asleep until 10
Well, now I don’t feel so weird…waking at 3 am and lying there trying to go back to sleep, the awake time is stretched out. I will strive to go ahead and get up and read till sleepy again and with the hope of feeling more refreshed upon awakening again.
This never happened when I was younger, just started after we retired and our time is more our own to do as we wish, like two sleep times!
YIPPPPPPPEEEEEEE……..I thought that there was something WRONG with me…..I wake up every night at 1AM……AND I LOVE IT!!!! I read and catch up on my thoughts until 4AM and then go back to sleep…..this has always been my routine……AND I LOVE IT!!!! I am 64 and I am never tired and never nap like so many of my friends at this stage!
I have often thought that MAYBE I should take a sleep aid BUT never did as it is sooooooooooooo wonderful to have A SCHEDULED TIME ALL FOR MYSELF!!!! Thank you for sharing THE OLD WAYS with us!!!
It seems to be forgotten by most, but the break between first and second sleep was used for “Midnight Office” in days of old in Christian cultures.
Oh, yes. And the modern monks still do it. their last office in the evening is usually at 8, about 20 minutes long. Then the retire to their cells, to sleep, read, and then the first office of the day is about a.m. (short) and then the retire again and are up early.
For about 16 years of my younger life, working as a morning radio announcer, I would split my days into two, giving myself the best of both worlds. I woke at 4am, worked until 1pm, ate lunch and slept until 5pm, enjoyed a “second life” in community theater during the evening, and went to bed at midnight to start the whole thing over again. My friends thought I was nuts, but if I hadn’t kept that schedule, I would never have had a social life working the hours I did. I never suffered for it; as a matter of fact, I thrived.
All of us who have nursed a baby know that getting up at night is ‘natural’ and we get used to it and gradually ‘program’ the baby to wake this way and not more often than once, when they are a couple of months old. Once a night gets manageable for nursing mothers, and it is ridiculous to hear so many people still ask young mothers…”Does she sleep through the night yet?” as if this is a ticket into the real world of being human…Thanks for the revealing article!
@Humanwatch1: I would hardly call nursing a baby multiple times a night “relaxing.” This article doesn’t talk about children, or an entire family waking at different times of the night, resulting in the parents get very little sleep.
Even as a small child I never slept 8 hours without waking. Often I got out of bed but everyone else was fast asleep. I am extremely light sensitive as is one of my children. When it’s dark outside i get sleepy and when light comes through the windows I awake. Now when I wake in the middle of the night I turn on the radio and listen to the BBC which puts me back to sleep even when I’m keenly interested in the topic discussed or person interviewed. I don’t worry about the 8hrs of continuous sleep. I’m sure i get enough.
Perhaps this is a logical extension of the monastic practices of medieval times:
” final prayer service, the Matins, took place at 2:00 in the morning.”
– See more at: http://www.thefinertimes.com/Middle-Ages/monks-in-the-middle-ages.html#sthash.gC3xCmLC.dpuf
I’ve spent many, many nights in the hospital due to an acute illness this year and found my sleep schedule matching exactly this. I typically end up going to bed about 10 and waking up around 1:30 or 2:00 thinking my medication was the cause of this. I have used the time to read or think and end up going to sleep around 4:00 or so, waking up at what was before now, “normal” about 5:30 or 6:00. I haven’t been any more or less tired during the day. It started out as annoying, but I’m enjoying the quiet in the evening to write my blog, catch up on emails or just dork around on Facebook. I’m really no inclined to try to reclaim a full 7-8 hours of continuous sleep any longer.
sleep how you like!
I often nap with my cats
and often sleep for 2 or 3 sessions in the night
I am curious if they naturally woke up or if they had some sort of alarm (not sure how they would have that)? This article makes it seem like the two sleeps was intentional, but I am assuming that they just naturally woke up on their own somehow. If it has to do with tending a fire, it would make sense because they would have become cold during the night.
Katie, I’ve read other pieces on the subject and it seems it is a natural rhythm. I suppose if we go back to the cave- and savannah- dwelling days, it makes sense that we should wake, make sure the predators aren’t lurking, nurse the babies and get back to sleep.
This is all very interesting. Here is a thought (I have not read all of the comments above, so it might have already been stated) that older men have to get up to urinate in the middle of the night. Once up, they might take a slug of hard drink or have a smoke.
(Me, I check the late baseball scores) then go back to sleep. If I didn’t have to work in the morning, I might stay up a little longer between sleeps.
I have been this way all my life. Nice to hear it is normal. I go to bed or fall asleep watching TV, wake at 2 or 3, write till 7 and go back to sleep until 10. When on night shift I spend 2-3 hours midday taking care of shopping and mail and then back to bed and then up for work. Two sleeps, always have.
Changes in the way of sleeping … relive the past when we had less power … interesting because now is the time to go to sleep is still time that my grandfather 94 years … wakes but as stated in Article 20:30 hours, often already asleep. Split sleep … I can not even if the 8 hours required … but it would be nice, it would be!
For many years I struggled with my sleep pattern especially during times of stress or working too much. I’d go to bed around 10:00-10:30 feeling very tired and worn out then I’d wake up around 2:30-3:00 and wouldn’t fall asleep again until 4:30-5:00. It seemed the more I tried to force myself to go back to sleep the worse I felt in the morning.
Eventually I gave up fighting it and turned on the my bedside table lamp and picked up a book. After reading for 45 minutes or so I could fall back to sleep with ease. Generally I would wake fairly early still but feeling much more refreshed than most nights. I found I needed to turn a light on a fully wake up in order to fall asleep again, fighting it simply didn’t work.
Once I realized how good I felt in the morning I took to liking this odd habit of mine and fully embraced my special private time in the middle of the night. I enjoy reading but found it hard to concentrate at bed time or early in the morning but reading at 3:00 am was easy. Eventually I started journaling and using this time for personal development: A little reading (Malcom Gladwell, Timothy Ferriss, Seth Godin, Daniel Pink, Peter Diamandis), then a little journaling and reflection on my life, business or habits, a little goal setting or review. I didn’t set a timer for these sessions I just let them run their course and when I got a little drowsy I’d turn off the light and go back to sleep around 4:15-4:30 sometimes even later. Then I’d wake up around 7:00-7:30 feeling completely refreshed. Once I realized the benefits of this pattern I started to look forward to it even to the point of going to bed earlier knowing how productive I’d be in a few hours.
Yes, as you’ve noted in your article, this pattern is predominate in the winter months. Once again I’m looking forward to the increased productivity.
Thank-you for sharing this article with us.
Wade F.
Sorry, I gave you your own link in my previous comment. I had copied the link for my benefit. This is the link for the article I read. It deals with artificial light being one of the culprits.
“Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, makes the case that electric lighting can seriously affect our natural sleep cycles. He explained in the perspective that just like our ears are important for both hearing and balance, our eyes also have two purposes — vision and influence over our circadian clocks, because of our intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells that are sensitive to light.
When our eyes are exposed to artificial light, it stops sleep promoting neurons and activates arousing neurons, leading us to feel less sleepy, he explained.”
Read the entire article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/01/electric-light-sleep-circadian-rhythm-cycle_n_3332920.html
Interesting! I wonder how to combat this artificial light phenomenon. I would be just fine to get two sleeps, but getting up for work and to get a child to school makes it difficult to manage.
I would try to go to bed earlier. I know — I’m a mom of three myself– not always possible but well worth the effort I think.
I read an interesting article earlier this year that for me, explains changes in our sleep patterns over the years. The timing seems right. http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-like-you/
Thanks, at least I am relieved that getting up once and still going to bed is OK. I was under the impression that uninterrupted one time sleep is the ONLY healthy habit!
As long as one of your two sleeps goes for 5 hours, because REM sleep is reached in the 5th hour (REM is very, very important for health).
Actually, REM is the 5th stage of sleep, with nonREM sleep stages 1 – 4 lasting between 5 and 15 minutes each. The first REM sleep stage usually occurs about 60 – 90 minutes after falling asleep. The 5 sleep cycles then repeat.
I love the concept, but in this workaday world we do not have enough free time between dusk and dawn to have this great time span opportunity!!
I have been sleeping like that for the past few years now. I do enjoy waking in the middle of the night and getting online for a couple of hours, then falling back to sleep til morning.
As I’ve aged (now 51), I’ve started waking up not long after going to sleep, usually around midnight. Since I’m wide awake, I go to my office and watch YouTube videos while playing Risk on my computer. I’ve assumed it was unusual. Maybe, instead of fighting it, I should retire earlier and make better use of that quiet time. Thanks for this article!
Great article, Was just thinking of something similar to this sleep style earlier, Lived in Sweden a while, not accustomed to the long winters and I personally developed that 2 stage sleep for a while.. Listened to radio and fueled the wood cook stove. Yes i thought i was weird, so did my wife. could have something to do with that i worked nights and rarely seen light of day. But the reason I am typing this is maybe our ancestors in the way way back past, did it for survival reasons when nocturnal animals were active. No proof, just a thought from me.
Very interesting. When I wake up during the night and feel like doing a bit of pottering or read. I will and not feel I shouldn’t .
This would certainly make life with young children more natural. When we had our first child, we soon learned that his longest sleep of 4-5 hours was between about 8pm to midnight or 1am. Desperately needing sleep ourselves, we learned to go to bed right after he did, get those 4-5 hours of sleep, and then get up to feed him. We didn’t have 2 sleeps, more like 3 or even 4, but it certainly worked better than if we had gone to bed at our usual 10 or 11pm in the evening.
Whenever I’ve gotten up after four or five hours sleep and feel my body is not going back to sleep, I know that this is a creative time for me. A project that I’ve been working on suddenly becomes clear and the writing flows easily. And yes, then I can go back to sleep. All I need do is wear an eye mask. It works for the creative soul.
I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, land of the midnight sun. This would be a great place for someone to study sleep patterns. We have 24 hrs of daylight during the summer, and get down to only 1.5 hours or so daylight in the winter. In the summer, we say, “I’ll sleep next winter.” Very little sleep is had during the summer and everyone is very energized.
During the winter we all sleep a lot more, even to the point of feeling as if we are hibernating.
I’m right here in Fairbanks with you, just for three winters now, and I’ve noticed the same! I’m looking forward to long mornings sleeping in and catching up the deficit from summer.
in the summer, do people feel stressed about missing sleep? you say they are energized, I wonder if they get tired after a a few weeks of less sleep? do they take naps? I have often wondered about these things.
How cool is this? My mother actually told me she used to do this in her home in Pakistan. There was not much electricity then. I thought it was strange, but this explains so much. Thank you.
When reading this, I was reminded that the 13th century Japanese Buddhist teacher Nichiren once wrote that Buddhas attain enlightenment between the hours of the ox (ushi, 2:00AM) and the tiger (tora, 4:00AM).
Perhaps being awake and devoted to meditation or prayer during those hours was common in Asian cultures as well!
Thanks for this fascinating article. Could it be that it makes sense of various Old Testment references ot waking and sleeping such as Psalm 119 v62 “At midnight I rise to give you thanks for your righteous laws.”
I saw this posted on LinkedIn and I’m glad I clicked. Very cool article.
I’m always interested in the science of sleep- including dreams, sleep stages, how to fall asleep quicker, etc. This article definitely taught me something completely new about how our ancestors slept.
Segmenting your sleep is better for your health and well-being. This is the only point in the article that is wrong. Here is the Explanation, taken from:
http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/overviews/segmented-sleep/
“There is evidence that the prolactin hormone surge associated with regular and stable night sleep segmentation can lead to improved sleep architecture, increasing restorative SWS in the first sleep, and increasing REM in the second sleep.
This prolactin surge in the first segment of the night can be regulatory of the entire day’s hormonal secretions! Having a high peak prolactin in the night, and repartitioning SWS (Slow wave sleep) into the first three hours of the night will mean there is less prolactin secreted throughout the day.
Prolactin enhances the secretion of dopamine and hgh, which enhances the delta wave SWS. Prolactin also down-regulates sex hormones, so when the prolactin is high and blocking other hormones there effectively is a sex-hormone rebound when the prolactin secretion stops when you wake. When the prolactin stops and the rebound begins, the hypothalamus secretes gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). The GnRH will signal the pituitary gland to produce and secrete luteinizing hormone (LH) and FSH. LH orders the production of progesterone, DHEA kickstarts the production of testosterone (this is why most men get erections in the morning) and the DHEA combined with the progesterone raises body temperature and keeps the body warm at night.
This is all a very, very healthy process, as ideally testosterone is highest in the morning, and prolactin should not be produced in the day unless under very specific circumstances.
Monophasic sleepers will only produce a very small dose of midnight prolactin, or not get it at all, so the entire day’s hormone regulation becomes very sluggish, or doesn’t work at all! Testosterone does not get secreted until the later hours of the morning… some people will constantly produce small amounts of prolactin throughout both the night and the day to make up for lack of midnight surge which develops prolactin resistance and prolactinema… prolactin interferes with other hormones which results in low testosterone, low estriol, low esterone, and high estradiol which results in fat gain… the dopamine system becomes exhausted and ineffective at producing GnRH resulting in low libido. Many doctors will attribute this to disease caused by general aging, but it could be a result of bad sleeping habits and forced monophasic sleep.
To reiterate, the result of no midnight prolactin surge is constantly secreted prolactin. Estradiol is needed to produce prolactin throughout the day. Estradiol is about 10 times as potent as estrone and about 80 times as potent as estriol in its estrogenic effect, so is there an estrogen-type imbalance and effective estrogen power to effective testosterone power becomes imbalanced. It is most noticeable in women as they age. Not only does high effective estrogen cause fat gain in the belly, and chest areas, but it is also related to many diseases.”
so you are saying in this article that a split sleep pattern is much better than sleeping a straight 8 hours thru? I am 55 and over the past 9 months or so i have gained a lot of weight… I have also been sleeping well with medicines…maybe i will stop taking them. I never thought about my weight gain being associated with sleeping thru the night…ugh
now that just ruined my day. I was very happy finding out that my two sleep night is a throwback. I generally watch PBS. Its good. Now you tell me about belly fat. yikes.
Putting up thick curtains: difficult, or even impossible.
Nonsense – with todays materials there are plenty of options for fully darkening a room in the daytime.
This also may explain the popularity of the idea of 3:00 AM being the “witching hour,” and the time of night when most supernatural things occur. Timing-wise, 3:00 AM is about halfway through the night, one full REM cycle from 11:00 PM. From a scientific point of view, it is probably natural for even one-sleepers to wake up a little during this hour and have incidents of lucid dreaming or night terrors.
In the Native American culture, 3:00 a.m. is “the Women’s Hour.” This is when the women traditionally wake and gather together to work their own special brand of miracles.
I like this ! (Spoken at 4:30 am)
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was required (as a commandment from God) to wake up in the night after sleeping for the Tahajjud (Night Vigil) prayers. It is reported that he would do this several times in the night. Wake up, sleep for a period, and wake up and so forth. The obligation of Tahajjud prayers did not apply to the rest of the Muslims. However, it was a recommended action that became the practice of the most devout Muslims since. The vast majority who follow this practice consider that one is required to sleep then wake up. If one were to divide the night into three parts, the middle is considered better. If the night is divided into two parts, the last part would be better and more virtuous to pray in. Of all the optional prayers, the night vigil is considered the best, since it is a time when one is not occupied with work, family and children may be asleep, and there is much peace and quiet for reflection. It is mentioned that one is most close to God at this time.
Very good explanation. So those who think Tahajjud will break their quiet slumber and affect their health, must know that this will not. As this is a divine commandment, it is very close to human nature. One who sleeps twice I am sure is more calm and patient and close to God than others.
May God give all of us the strength to walk on the right course. (amen)
Peace be upon him. Ameen. May Allah make it easy for us to practise this practise that the Prophet advised us.
I’m more interested in polyphasic sleep……… -_-
No tending of a fire in late spring into summer and early fall, though. During that time, coals would’ve been banked (with ashes), thus enabling a person to easily re-kindle a fire when needed.
Now I feel normal this is how I sleep.. I go to bed at 7pm wake about 1 am, do some study or housework and go back to bed at 3 or 4 am until 7am.
In addition to research into sleep patterns of other cultures, I would like to see the relationship of two-sleeping to mid-afternoon siestas.
This is exactly what I thought of when reading the article. Wonder how it relates to the very warm climates where they take a siesta in the afternoon. Did they also sleep twice at night – so making it 3 sleeps per day?
yes!
I have been a two-sleep sleeper for most of my adult life, regardless of the season. When I mentioned this to doctors, they wanted to send me to sleep disorder specialists. My friends who slept straight through the night expressed grave concern about my sleep habits, and suggested that I might be clinically depressed even though I felt happy and energetic. Finally I decided to ignore all of them and accept that the body knows what it wants. After reading this article, I now believe that I simply sleep like my ancestors, and it’s all right.
Good for you, Liz! Sounds to me like you are the one your Doctors and friends should be taking advice from.
Exactly! Me too! Medical etc people have a lot to answer for in our anxiety about sleeplessness! AT LAST vindication for our “abnormal” and even “bad” sleeping habits!
I’ve been taking melatonin to help me sleep through the night. I’ve found that if I take it 3-4 days in a row I wake up with a headache that stays with me all day and it makes me feel depressed! I think I will quit worrying about waking up in the middle of the night and enjoy the quiet time.
According to medical science, overstimulation (long hours of work) causes nasty side effects like…cancer, auto-immune disease, other chronic illnesses, and most acute illnesses. I have rheumatoid arthritis. It was mainly caused by a job I held for 14 years in my young adult life in which I was under constant mental, emotional and physical pressure to succeed. I was getting about 3 hours of sleep a night. When diagnosed with RA, at age 29, the doctors and I couldn’t get it controlled until I change certain habits. One of the habits I was required to change was sleep. Now that I sleep twice per 24-hour cycle, my rheumatoid symptoms are mostly in remission. I whole-heartedly believe that modern science, anatomy and physiology research, and the author of this article have re-introduced a concept to our advanced thinking that we can use to enhance our physical and emotional health.
I completely agree. I have had lupus for 20 years. My first symptoms included a greatly increased need for sleep. Initially I thought that I was just trying to make up for a sleep deficit incurred during secondary school, when I worked very hard at my studies and rarely slept more than five hours a night. But eventually I realised that something was wrong.
Nowadays I use the two-sleep cycle most of the time. When I DON’T wake up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, I know I’m in for a flare.
I wonder if this also applies to the tropical countries? Those that don’t have four seasons, and experience the same length of day and night throughout the whole year. Would there be any historical records or accounts that discuss this, by any chance?
It is a very interesting concept, and I myself would like to try two-sleeping. I have read that people today never have time to think and reflect among themselves anymore, thus leaving them hopeless, helpless, and sort of feeling like they’re dragging themselves to live their lives. I feel like the meditation time between the two sleeps would give people this time. The concept offers lots of opportunities for further study, and that is really cool. :)
Note that in hotter countries — closer to the equator — the custom of a daytime sleep, or siesta, during the hottest part of the day is still common today.
Anna:
One of society’s current problems is the “push” of so many component parts to gain access to our brains where instinct and desire is stored. Many advertisements are blatant in saying: “When you think of _____, think _______.” You can fill in the blanks, I am sure. Try turning the TV on and go someplace where you cannot see it and pay attention to the sounds. Ask yourself, what is that voice trying to do? Frequently, the answer is that our communications media does not want us to think reflectively on the information they are providing. When was the last time you had the time and inclination to reflectively consider a particular subject–such as whether or not you wanted a pet, is a dog better than a cat? What might happen if I acquired a pet, etc.? Some of the advertisements include ten seconds or so of some voice speaking at a rate exceeding 400 words a minute–as if anyone listening could hear, reflect upon, and make decisions based on that message. Have you ever wondered why our computer types decided that no matter the length of what you wanted for a computer name or the requirements of “regular” English, it all had to be in lower case and not contain any spaces?
Even this response is somewhat fragmented and “hops around”. Do you remember someone telling you of the letter from Thomas Jefferson who started it with the apology “I am sorry I did not have time to write a shorter letter to you.”
I learned at Bowdoin that much time was required to produce an assigned paper–and the bulk of that time was not spent writing, but rather thinking, meditating, talking the ideas I had over with someone, and then producing numerous drafts which FINALLY led to a draft which I was prepared to turn into a
final copy.
My speech professor made sure we all knew that “um”, “ah”, “you know” and its cousin “I’m sure you know” (which, by the way, always raised the concern for the speaker that if he or she is “sure that the listener knows” why are they talking about the current subject?) add nothing to the value of what a person is saying. And, in my “hopping around” in this reply to you, I am reminded how much fun it was to listen to Bob (Elliot) and Ray (Goulding) as the reported on the “Slow Speakers of America Society.” If you can find a copy I am sure you will enjoy it.
The real purpose of “um” and “ah” probably grew out of a four year old child’s desire to say something to his mother as he pulled on her skirt in the grocery store checkout in his desperate need to say what has come to his mind when she turned to him and said “Yes?” “Well?” and after 1.25 seconds turned away to continue the conversation she was having with another adult–or something similar. In this case, the child is trying to say “I have something important to say, I am paying attention, just a moment so I can re-adjust my focus to tell you.” The number of “um’s” or “ah’s” reflect how long the child has been trying to get her attention and tell her something IMPORTANT (TO THE CHILD).
At any rate, I hope you had at least a little chuckle with this and perhaps understand a little better why some people cannot stand a silence for even sixty seconds.
John Carter ’58
John: I find your response almost incomprehensible. You seem to suffer greatly from the symptoms you are writing about. Did you post your first draft this time around?
I wonder that myself. My husband is from the Philippines, and he definitely doesn’t seem inclined to follow this pattern. But I do find myself naturally gravitating towards it. (I’ve lived most of my life in the Northeast.)
Anna, I’ve been practising this sleeping pattern unvoluntarily for some time and must say that I usually get really stressed because I start thinking of things I didn’t have time to do or any other unpleasant stuff :-/ But having read this article, I will take it more easy since now and will enjoy this hour or two when my body doesn’t want to sleep in the middle of night :)
Anna,
I moved from the Pacific Northwest in the U.S., a cool climate area, to the southern U.S. with a much more humid and hot climate for a period of 5 years. During that time in the hotter climate I continued a two-sleep night with much more ease than I had in the colder climate. This was because I could sit up in bed during the early hours and not get cold, so I was perfectly comfortable and could meditate easily.
My two-sleep nights started as I began investigating my spiritual side and started meditating daily. Gradually, I started waking naturally at 3 a.m. each day, meditating for about an hour, and returning to sleep, waking naturally again around 6:00 a.m. I never used an alarm clock, haven’t used one since the early 80’s. When I had to awake to get ready for work at a specific time, I’d just ask my “higher self” to wake me at the appropriate time. It always worked. At first I worried that I would feel tired during the day if I spent an hour or two awake in the night, but that never occurred, I always felt fine throughout the day.
Now I’m back in a colder climate area again and find I can’t sit-up to do a 3 a.m. meditation without being too cold, so I use that time, instead, to stay under the covers and practice Reiki, which relaxes and energizes me at the same time. I usually fall asleep, after an hour or so, while running the Reiki energies and awake in the morning refreshed. Also, for the past 6 or 7 years I get up in the night a couple of times to drink water as I find I sleep better if I’m hydrated.
I doubt this has already been said and I haven’t read the other comments. The character ‘Seth’ from ‘Seth Speaks’ by Jane Roberts advocates two periods of sleep as invigorating to the ‘higher self.’ It is interesting to discover that this was common practice before modern times.
Kraig, that was my first reference to it too. Had medical issues that kept me out of “regular” life and my sleep changed naturally. It resonated when I read it.
+1. I thought exactly the same thing.
I would actually point towards 3 sleeps. The 2 sleeps at night and the mid-day sleep. Siesta in the Spanish Language and Kayluna in the Arabi language commonly known to us as naps. So it isn’t necessarily the darkness that is needed for sleep as cultures of the past and present (adults and children) still take customary naps during the day. It could be those naps that make waking in the night easier as the afternoon naps are usually limited to no more than 2hrs, compensating for those 2hrs in-between the 2 sleeps at night. Now this is theory but I believe that people are sleeping full 8hr stretches because they are overstimulated. 30 minute lunch breaks won’t allow for naps and then in the evening there is TV watching, internet surfing, music listening which leads to a lack of rest through out the day that forces the body to overcompensate when sleep does present itself. Leaving people with high levels of stress and feelings of restlessness.
i quite agree. moreover, here, in the middle east, one naps in the afternoon because of the heat and because one has eaten the heavier of the meals. The dark hours are not regulated at all and each may be as active or introspect as he wishes.
I would like to have tips in general on how to deal with restlessness. I’m always a bit restless even after a busy day at night unless I feel very complete like in a relationship, the late hours before and after midnight I use to philosophize, ponder, “day”dream, to reflect etc. In lack of better, with popular psychology I would say I’m a HSP (highly sensitive person, due to Elaine Aron), and startle easy into both high, energetic and low , calm, reflective states, and easily into various suggestion. So to be ready to sleep I have to steer my emotional state into the right direction first, with something enyoyable for the mind and heart, or something that emphases my mood or where I want to be.. ( at least when I’m alone and haven’t been to busy during daytime). Does anyone else feel like this? This often manifest in restlessness, but it’s a “meditative” and rewarding restlessness that I can enjoy much as the artists and poets enjoy the night time hours, but the restlessness itself can be a bit annoying, getting much worse with modern media attirel. How to deal with premidnight to past midnight restlessness? why do you get restless from a scientific perspective?
With the advent of electricity came the circadian rhythm-shattering illumination levels of lamps and screens. If we wake up now and turn on any of these things, our bodies assume it’s morning and second sleep becomes near impossible.
I have been sleeping very little for several years, as I have lupus and fibromyalgia. In the past few years I have developed a pattern of sleeping for one or two hours at a time, from 10:30 p.m. to 5 a.m. During that period of time I may sleep a little and then be awake from 5 minutes to 90 minutes. However, after 5 a.m. (dark or light) I often can get some deep sleep between 5 a.m. and noon! I meditate, read or write while awake and do not fret about lack of sleep at night because I recognize that getting anxious doesn’t help one sleep!
That is interesting. I have recently been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and already suffer from Ankylosing Spondilitis. I can only seem to sleep properly, i.e. get into a deep sleep, from about 5 am to mid day and for a couple of hours when I come back from work at 5 pm. Obviously not practical for a normal working day, but when I can leave my body to find its natural sleeping pattern I feel much better! I experimented with this when I was first diagnosed with AS about 30 years ago. I was a student and after that worked from home as a translator so was able to. I would sleep for 4 hours in the early hours of the morning, from about 4am – 8 am and again from about 4pm – 8 pm. I would find the sleep was short, deep and restful and I was alert and stress free in the waking hours and able to perform well. If I tried comply with a conventional sleeping method of 8 hours during the night from midnight to 8 am I would only sleep for a bit in the early hours and would feel exhausted the rest of the day, unable to work or socialise.
Those who feel they have their best sleep between 8 a.m. and noon (or so) may well have the circadian rhythm disorder DSPD, Delayed Sleep-Phase Disorder. I felt guilty about my preferred sleep pattern for decades — until I was diagnosed and came to understand that the problem wasn’t (just) my lack of self-discipline!
This is really interesting to me – one thing I think of is my late-in-life realization that I CAN sleep on an airplane (after years of being the ony person awake on long flights) if I travel early in the morning.
That’s why having some lamps with orange or red bulbs is desirable. They have no blue light which is like sunlight. Also, no TV or computer or other devices for the same reason. Too much blue light, it wakes up your brain.
Alas, the computer programmers will not even let me indent the start of this paragraph. BUT, General Electric does have a light they call “Daylight” which replicates the spectrum of the sun quite well. The are very expensive, but they are a great help in your study lamp. The cousin of this light is the florescent tube called a “grow light”.
Good luck,
John Carter ’58
Well that sounds about right for me anyway. Now I understand why I only require about 5 hours of sleep. If I stay up for a little while I do sleep better once I return back to the bed. Weird, but awesome.
I am wondering if there is an established relationship between certain age groups and the “remembering” of two sleep, especially where independent or active mobility is restricted. We have known babies to wake up in the middle of the night (and some cry a lot for attention). And as people get older (and most probably move around less) they also get up in the middle of the night and stay up for some time before slipping back under the covers.
Second, I am also wondering if sleepwalking (which occurs in the middle of the night) somehow has something to do with the two sleep history.
I do this all the time, BUT, I can’t get my second sleep on until the sun comes up. I fall instantly asleep when it does. This is a bit of a problem. I don’t use curtains or create artificial darkness at all in my bedroom. Maybe I’m a vampire.
Richard, I too love to see the sun come up. Then I go right into my ‘second’ sleep until
8:am, when I either am refreshed…or not. At 80 years, I have been a ‘Night Owl’
since I can remember. Then, I was naughty for not going right to sleep. Now, I am
comfortable with the freedom to meditate, read, or just walk in my garden until I am
I am ready to sleep again, at my own choosing.
It makes sense. If you have young children, waking up every 3 to 4 hours would make it easier to take care of their nightime feedings. When my babies first came home, I slept a few hours, stayed up around 1 to 3 hours (depending on how fast I could feed, change and get the baby back to sleep) and then sleep again. If everyone in the house is getting up in the middle of the night, it would take out a lot of the stress of those nighttime feedings and make taking care of the babies a lot easier. You at least don’t have to worry about the baby waking everyone in the house when he cries.
Yes – my thoughts too.. With a toddler n a two month old at home – this solves the problem of engaging often asleep hubbies in baby chores ;)
Just jumping on the bandwagon to agree. I have a 7 month old and this is basically our pattern. We are ECing so he gets up around 11 (just did) for his nighttime potty time and usually stays awake for another hour or so afterwards despite all I try to do to encourage him to get back to sleep. I’m sitting here now waiting for him to decide it’s time for second sleep!
We’ve been running a wood furnace (attached to our oil fired/furnace hot-water heating system), and it means getting up in the middle of the night to put more wood in. We discovered at the beginning of the winter heating season we needed an alarm clock to wake for this, but as the heating season wears on, we wake up automatically… I often have periods where this “two sleeps” is a natural pattern. Once I acknowledged this a natural pattern and stopped interpreting it as a “problem” I began making great “creative” use of the interval as both a time for relaxing, and a time for introspective activities. Now when these episodes arise, they are no longer a “disruption” and sleeping is equally beneficial in either pattern… Allowing nature to strike its own rhythms seems to enhance self-awareness and add to a fundamental peace, balance and mutuality in the Self-to-self relationship of life’s experiences.
I work an early morning job, I get up at 2:50am, to be to my place of employment by 3:45am.
I have found I am more productive at work, and in a much better mood when I take a nap when I come home from work, ranging from 1-4 hours (I get home at 1:20pm) then I am alert and awake until 10pm and usually have no problem sleeping till I get up again at 2:50am.
If I miss the first sleep, I find even if I go to bed at 7pm, I am groggy, more anxious, and even sleepy during the day. I also have trouble falling asleep at the earlier time, even though I may feel tired.
In my mid twenties I set off one winter to do a winter version of Walden Pond. I wanted to live simply in accord with nature, so I talked a friend into letting me use their family resort cabin, quit my job and moved to the far north of Minnesota for a hermit’s life with my dog.
Being winter I realized any full day away, which might become necessary for unforeseen circumstances, would allow all my stores to freeze, so I put in an oil burner as a backup to my wood stove which I used almost exclusively. I was also talked into a phone, which I didn’t use, but had in case of serious emergency like cutting of a finger or breaking a leg.
The cabin had no plumbing, but it did have electricity.
I expected that in natural in rhythm with day and night, I would naturally start going to bed earlier than my late night habits and rising with the sun. It did not happen. After a few weeks, I realized I could easily stay up late reading, writing and listening to music because of the electicity, so I pull the main breaker and decided that evening light would have to be “organic.” I could use candles or oil lamps or even a Coleman lantern that burned with mantles that had to be lit with a match. The light, I realized was sufficient for reading and writing but it had a flicker effect that caused me to call it “organic” unlike the harsh even light from an incandescent bulb. In very short order I began shifting my bedtime earlier and rising closer to dawn. I was particularly struck by the long period of dusk when the light began to slowly dim over a period of hours. I found this extremely soothing and it led naturally to wanting to go to sleep by the time it was dark outside even though I had alternative source of light. I realized that humans have experience that long slow dimming of light at the end of the day for thousands and thousands of years. I imagine our bodies find that process very soothing. It is only the last century that brought electricity which blocked out this awareness so effectively that we didn’t even notice. Perhaps much of the neurosis of modern life is due to disrupted sleep as a result.
I have had periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night all my life and have never considered them a problem, but I notice family members fretting when they are aware of waking in the night. I always counsel to pay attention to the total hours of rest, not the continuous hours in any one stretch. I suspect they are more biologically rested than they think they are, if they could simple stop fretting over the fact that they remember being awake for a period during the night and “trying” to sleep before the need came over them naturally.
I found your response really fascinating! What a brave move as well to ‘subject’ yourself to such a rigorous winter..
Right now so many people are also being affected by planetary shifts in vibration that is stopping them from sleeping and as you say, if they could only accept that this is not a “bad” thing and that sleep should be measured by the total hours of rest we accumulated rather than the LENGTH of time we slept, we would all be far less neurotic. I try not to look at my clock at all to gauge how long I’ve slept but check in more with how I’m feeling..
Thanks for sharing
You are right about the gentler light. It goes perfectly with what I read in “Sleep, Sugar, and Survival” Also, the artificial light tends to be blue like the sunlight. Sends the wrong message to the brain.
nothing can get you more invigorated in your biological clock than hanging around nature. In Sweden, a majority of households own a “summerhome”; which is a reflection of our 100-year exile from our farming countryside past alone among vast woods, a romantic and preferably spartanesque simple cottage in the woods, by a lake or the sea which even in the glossy table magazine’s ideal should be as romantically and purifyingly back-to-nature as possible, preferably with no heating, only cold water from the well and with the drafty materials of a house from 1850. Not to sound puritan, there is still 3g, but it’s amazing how fast you adapt into the appreciation of the romantic 1850s lifestyle with simple conditions; appreciating the dusk and the candlelight, reading in bed, cozying on the porch with a woolen blanket, sitting in the garden watching nature get into the evening with sounds and smells, getting into your soft cotton sheets, read in silence, perhaps getting out in moonlight to get a quick and envigorating night swim, feeling the cold dewy morning hours through the old windows, and wake by the dawn to a vibrant morning. may sound idealistic but is more like reality and just every day easyliving olowing the conditions. having the nature upon you is just more elemental and keep you on parallell track with it. This is as easily twarthed as soon as you get back to town, to your superisolated, dry-aired flat on the third floor, where articifical light and multimedia takes you far away from the organic elements. just saying
lost in translation? :)
Y,
When my children were young, I took them every week-end
to the mountains, beach, or the desert for a camp out. That
is how I survived living in the city with all it’s lights and noise.
At night we could actually SEE all the stars in the sky. My children
learned to name them. Yes, we woke at dawn. One of my
adult daughters told me she had learned more on our camp outs
than in grammar school, and enjoyed it more.
The fretting members of a family are the ones with the sleep problems. You are the one who is doing it correctly and are more rested, clear thinking, and NOT fretting!
I work nights and am a two sleeper. I find it works best for me when I get off work to relax for a bit. when i fall asleep, i sleep for 3 hours. I awake in the afternoon stay up a couple of hours Then I sleep 5 hours and wake up refreshed for work. I have done it for years and works out nicely. On my days off i sleep nights. I go to bed early and wake up early, I find that I am not as rested as I am when I get my two sleeps during the day.
This discussion makes me wonder how many of those leaving comments are familiar with life in Mexico and other points South– When I was in Eagle Pass, Texas for some time, we always broke for “siesta” at noon and took a nap until 1:45 or so, leaving just enough time go get back by 2 p.m. We then worked until 6 p.m., but that never seemed to be a problem.
Hasta luego, estudiante. Juan
I’ve done this for the past couple of years. Not because I wanted to or thought it was a good idea; in fact, I’ve worried about what was wrong with me. I spent the middle of the night/early morning pondering, praying, reading, journaling, etc. I’ve also thought for a long time that our electric light & evening entertainment society may be missing something – that it seems more natural to go to bed when it gets dark & wake up when it gets light, but I wondered if that would be too much sleep in the winter…it’s fascinating to know this wasn’t abnormal at all. :)
I’ve been talking a lot about this lately. I suffer from chronic pain from Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as well as severe adrenal fatigue.
I have never been a good sleep, always wanting to go to bed too early, and then missing the window and staying up far too late to be rested for the next day. In the time since I’ve had to stop working, my between my given symptoms, my sleep schedule could not be more off. As much as I understand sleep, and know that I don’t ever reach stage 3 or 4 sleep when the body restores, I’ve always had this feeling that it’s not me, it’s the modern world.
Sort of organically, I’d find myself sleeping “early” for a few hours, and then waking wide awake, frustrated. I’ve learned that I should just get up and do something non-stimulating, but still productive, during this time. I have the unique situation of not always having to set an alarm clock, so I plan to keep experimenting with this and see what happens.
Of course, getting rid of the electronics go a long, long way, which makes sense given the historic link to electricity.
Thanks for posting.
I had a full month of two sleeps. I went into adrenal fatigue, as a result. Apparently the electrical breaker box in my bedroom caused it. I moved and am sleeping through the night, but not fully recovered yet.
The two sleep is practiced by alot ofmuslims and is usually considered as beneficial. Even our holy book talks about the sight and mind being more keener at the time of awakeness around 2-4am. This time is for a special prayer and then the sunrise prayer. most people then drift back to sleep. I have done this and it is definitely calming and very serene. Alot of out of the box thinking is done during the interval between the sleeps.
A propos of non-Western sleep habits–medieval Japanese literature is full of activity in the middle of the night–usually erotic, with conversation, dalliance, sex (implied)–among the aristocracy. There’s a sense that day and night are sort of blurred and run together, which may have to do with a long-night, low-light, two-sleeps pattern.
very interesting, I often have 2 sleeps with a half hour break between each , i would rather have one sleep, however, i sleep longer with 2.
I have always had the 2-sleep pattern, with what I call “wakey time” consistently between 3:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. During the second sleep, I have noticed that I tend to have a lot of dreams. If my second sleep is interrupted, then I wake up groggy. FWIW. Thanks for the article!
me too Christine. Exactly the times I tend to wake up… but not “every” night. I used to sleep through the night, but last few years I wake up alert and feel like doing something, but tend to stress about getting back to sleep. Recently though I’ve stopped stressing about it and go back to sleep easily. Then this is, like you, the time I have lots of dreams and when my alarm unfortunately goes off. It’s very hard to get up. When I can, I naturally sleep for another 2 hours.
I’ve also noticed at sunset, a huge wave of sleepiness comes over me and all my instincts tell me to go to bed… however, I plow through it because there are things to do. However, if I knew I could do those things “between” sleeps, it would all work out perfectly. I think the idea of following one’s natural rhythms makes a ton of sense..
References to first and second sleeps are indeed very common in old writings, but the significance put on electric lighting in this article seems like an odd bit of silly conjecture. Edison’s electric lighting merely replaced VERY widely used kerosene lighting, which itself merely replaced the use of other oils dating back tens of thousands of years before any known writing of first and second sleeps. Refining kerosene is what made John D. Rockefeller rich, before Edison (Tesla, in reality) stole his thunder (and before Henry Ford returned it 10-fold.)(Gasoline was a dangerously combustible, useless, byproduct when Standard Oil became synonymous with monopoly. ;) )
Have you ever used a kerosene lamp? During a winter storm this year we were out of power for 3 days. I have many lamps that I put away for just such an emergency. With 4 lamps lit in front of me it was still like trying to read at dusk. After an hour of that it is time for bed at 8:00 pm. Just too hard to see, not to mention carrying an oil lamp every where you go in the house. I do see how electric lights would have an effect on sleep patterns. With them we stay up later into the night because we can do all things we would do during the daylight hours with ease.
Industrial revolution would have changed the sleep habits of people. When people started to work in factories work hours were regimented, there was a time to arrive to work and a time to quit and go home.
Interestingly I have this two sleep period pattern, felt weird about it until I read this article.
Absolutely agree with you on this, Diana. The Industrial Revolution, especially how it evolved through the 19th century! And it would have been reinforced by the advent of Progressive social engineering ideas of “8 hours work (employment), 8 hours sleep, 8 hours leisure (play and domestic chores).
“Society the Machine” – and we but the cogs within it!
Exactly what DeAnna said,
One really can’t compare electric lighting, that essentially emulates daylight “indoors AND outdoors” with any oil light source… Electricity has definitely changed sleep patterns not only with available light but electronics, primarily the TV…
I think the 2 sleep pattern could still hold in the summer. Those in hot/arid areas would sleep/rest during the hottest part of the day (usually late afternoon) then get back up to do end of day chores, etc and then go back to sleep.
Not sure why the claim is being made that getting up to tend the fire is necessary. A banked fire will easily last the night. People slept in rooms that were below freezing… Think of all the stories of breaking the ice formed at the top of the water jug!
I agree with Colleen. Everyone had to cover their fire at night – that was the couvre-feu or curfew. Even in the morning not all the wood would have burnt away because of the lack of oxygen and the fire could easily be revived.
And it also occurs to me that a 2-periods sleep would make it much easier to deal with young babies waking and wanting a feed in the middle of the night. I know mine never slept through the night till he was 18 months old. Perhaps the foods we give our children when weaned encourage longer sleeps to aid digestion?
It’s interesting that a couple of people have mentioned that two sleeps would have made it easier to tend to babies for night time feeding. In the 19th century, most babies slept in bed with parents- they didn’t sleep in a crib in a separate room. I co-slept with my babies and never fully woke to feed them, nor did they fully wake and cry to bring me to them. They will root and find you and nurse without much assistance. No one was climbing out of bed to the tune of a baby’s cry, stumbling to the fridge for a prepared bottle and heating it up to settle a hungry babe.
Have you actually lived somewhere where you “banked the fire” and it lasted through the night? Usually the body’s natural defense against freezing (chills and shaking” ) will wake one up after the fire has basically collapsed. I have slept in a tent at 0 degrees, but I was prepared for it and in a down sleeping bag from L. L. Bean.
Try it an tell us how you like it… John ’58
I found this article very interesting! I believe I may be a two-sleeper! I am turning 55 shortly and I have a sleep disorder (at least that’s what I was told) however now I think that may be inaccurate. I developed a pattern of waking when I was married to a violent alcoholic; I would wake up to check on my house, etc. After escaping that situation I found I still could not sleep well and the doctor put me on sleeping meds. I was on those sleeping meds for almost 20 years but have not been using them the past few months due to economic restraints (can’t afford my meds). Interestingly enough, after stopping the sleep meds, I did not notice much change in my sleeping patterns. I tend to sleep for 2-4 hours and then I’m awake. Sometimes I read a book until I can fall asleep again for a couple hours, sometimes I just get up because I have fibro and arthritis and my body just hurts. I am working on getting in that second sleep! I am also menopausal and attributed the disruptive sleep patterns to this, however after reading this article perhaps I will stop thinking of my situation as a “disorder” and more of a natural occurrence!
Ive often reassured clients ( I’m a hypnotherapist) that when they wake up in the middle of the night, instead of making it a problem, with self talk ”I can’t get to sleep and if I don’t I will wake up feeling tired” They hypnotise themselves and create their own negative self fulfilling prophecy.
I advise them to take this time to listen to some of my self help hypnosis recordings which will help you relax and imagine waking up rested knowing even if you don’t drop of to sleep immediately, you are doing something useful as you are listening to suggestions to find solutions to any issues.
I myself wake up about once a month around 4 or 5am, get up make a cup of tea do a bit of gentle work for an hour or so, then go back to bed as I’m ready for it and sleep soundly.
By the way I have a free hypnosis recording from my website if anyone is interested google http://www.debbiewilliams.co.uk
I used to be on a two sleep a day schedule. Though it was a bit different. I called it halfdays. I ended up with 2 jobs at opposite times of the day. So I cut my days in half. I would sleep from 7pm to 11pm, go to work from midnight to 6am. Then come home, sleep another 4 hour stretch from 7am to 11am and then head off to my other job at Noon till 6pm.
It was an experiment to see how well I could handle such a schedule. I was surprised at how quickly and easily I adapted to the “halfday” schedule. I would be wide awake for 8 hours, tire very quickly at the end of that 8 hour “day” and sleep pleasantly for 4 hours only to wake welling well rested. I literally had cut a normal day in half.
I’d like to give this sleep schedule a try come this winter. Most fascinating, yet not all that surprising read. Thank you.
This might explain something I’ve previously wondered about, which is how pioneer couples living in very small cabins — and virtually no privacy — managed to have such large families.
It also helped that they were a lot less repressed sexually as we are. Children grew up knowing that sex was natural, weren’t shamed by their feeling about sex, and sex was just something that people did. Granted, the parents probably weren’t going at it like rabbits at all times of the day and night, but they also didn’t feel the need to hide it as much as we do now.
When my husband and I lived in the country, without electricity, we found this happened all the time. We would routinely wake up after a few hours, and all of us (the dog included) would head out to the outhouse to pee, then tend to the fire, maybe have a cup of tea, read a bit, then back to bed till morning. It felt natural.
I regularly do the 2 shift sleep pattern and find I do some of my best work in the wee small hours of 1-5 am being an artist and not having to be up for a regular 9-5 job. There’s something about the tranquility of working in the night and drifting off to birdsong at dawn. Friends think I’m crazy. At least I don’t get distracted by social media sites that late at night as all my “normal ” , gossipy, non arty friends are sleeping. I think my muses must come from another time zone completely about 5 hours ahead of GMT!
I think that is great! Y0u are not crazy! I think you get your best ideas in the middle of the night, when it is quiet and peaceful. I do my best problem solving in the middle of the night. Have a happy in the middle of the night good time!!
So interesting. It certainly changes the concept of “[Number] sleeps til Christmas”!
I find myself having two sleeps during periods of vacations. It just seems natural to start with a 3 hour nap, get up for a while and piddle around and the go back to sleep until morning.
This could explain why I can never sleep straight through a night.
I had a friend who could lie down and sleep anywhere and be asleep in a minute. He would sleep 30 to 40 minutes and get up work 2 maybe 3 hours. Then another 30 minutes or so sleep. He did this pattern 24 hours a day with never being able to stay awake more than 3 hours at a time. He did this pattern his whole life until one day he didn’t wake up from a 30 minutes sleep
I have very odd sleep patterns (some of which goes with the fibro I had for thirty years before I shook it off in ’04) and was a notorious night-owl for decades. Now something is shifting, and more nights than not I have two sleeps, the first one early by my old standards, but they are still both late by even the loosest of normal standards. It takes a little more doing, but it is possible to have two sleeps when it is not winter, even if a big chunk of your second is in daytime. It helps a lot that we painted the bedroom walls a rather dark green and installed dark green venetian blinds way back when we moved in. Drapes or curtains can help, too. But for the best sleep, it really helps to have an eyeshade mask, and it has to be the kind that is cloth over molded foam. Flat ones (the kind you sometimes see on movie stars in old glamor movies) press on your eyelids, messing up eyelashes and interfering with dream cycles because your eyes can’t move freely inside the mask. With the molded ones, you can actually open your eyes in the dark inside the mask. Much nicer.
One reason darkness (whether from timing or dark paint and blinds and mask) helps sleep is that the body makes melatonin the best in the dark, the darker the better, so doing everything you can to make it dark helps you make your own natural sleep aid. Anyway, if your sleep is split-shifted (how I think of it) and you can’t seem to break the pattern but are not sleeping well enough because of short nights, do what you can to get your room as dark as possible and get a good molded mask and it may well help. The best one I have had so far came from Bed Bath and Beyond, but I’ve seen them offered in various online/mail order stores, too.
I used to live in Central America and nights were much darker there- in the country there is little artificial light. Also it gets dark about 6pm throughout the whole year. I’d go to bed about 8pm every night and be up for a couple hours in the middle of the night, then back to bed. I felt so well rested!
My grandfather and uncles talked about herding wild cattle, singing to them etc. Every night the cattle would lie down, sleep for a few hours then wake up, graze and go back to sleep. In the military when everyone smoked people would wake up for a cigarette and change of duty after 4 hours.
having read the above, I have not seen anyone offer the simple sociological reason namely that people have been educated/trained/conditioned to believe the one single chunk of eight hours because that is is the pattern best suited to produce a compliant population.
There is no such thing as ‘normal’ – the human animal adapts itself to whatever is the least bad means of survival and genetic propagation.
Lets not forget that infants, of which I believe there would have been quite a bundle of in the old days when families all lived under one roof and one big roomed house, usually wake every 4 hours to crave their mother for weaning (or formula perhaps in modern days). When there was very little contraception people were constantly having young (some didn’t live long, but that’s another story), this probably made a 4 hour sleep pattern common.
“to crave their mother for weaning”
don’t you mean nursing? weaning is when you are trying to get a baby/animal to nurse less and less, and eat more solid food.
But otherwise… yes, I agree, babies’ needs would have affected more people/families than today because of the number of children per family and because they didn’t age-segregate themselves as much as people today.
I find the idea of childeren bring a good indicater of this two sleep pattern. I have four kids and they all woke in the middle of the night or bed late early morning. When I followed with them on those nights I can recall beinng more rested the next day.
Is it possible to train your body to ho back to that withoutca reason or purposr to wake up….
“Tending the fire,” eh? I guess that’s what the kids are calling it these days…
Sleep through the night has always been a problem for me since childhood.
I remember during high school, in winter, I would get home at dark (4-4:30 pm) feel very sleepy by 7 pm and either fight off sleep until at least 11 pm to sleep 6-7 hours as otherwise I would only sleep 2-3 hours and be awake for 3-4 hours before I could sleep another hour or so before I had to get up to do chores before breakfast and school. If I went to sleep at 7 pm or so, I would sleep 2-4 hours, be awake 2-3 hours before I could sleep again 3-4 hours before I had to get up. I think I was more rested when I had the 2 sleeps.
Now that I am retired and do not need to adhere to any schedule, I think I will try to do 2 sleeps if I feel sleepy early in the evening. Maybe then night sweats will stop breaking up my sleep every hour or 2 as they currently do!
This is very common, especially in older folk. I don’t know if many of you have noticed your parents or grandparents who stated that they cannot sleep very long at one time. I noticed it in my grandparents, then my in-laws, then my dad. It was frustrating but could not be changed. They seemed to accept it as a change in their life that came with age or the lack of activity from the work that they did when they were younger of had more to worry about. But as this article seems to explain, they were returning to their roots. It certainly explains why they were reverting to the sleep pattern that they did. My mother never developed that sleep pattern, but my dad certainly did. And his break in the night was used to study his Bible. He was a Baptist Minister and he did his most ardent study during that time. Thank you for explaining and I will stop worrying when I revert to this pattern myself.
thanks for this enlightening article! I am older and have found that this is actually my “normal” sleep pattern, I also have older friends who have complained about the same thing happening to them. I think it MUST be the way we are meant to sleep. In my working years, I always had trouble waking up to go to work, until I worked evening shift. THANKS again for taking away my frustration re: this. I always felt guilty going to sleep at 7 pm and waking at 10 or 11, for a couple hours, then back to sleep til maybe 9 am. I’m sharing this so my friends will stop feeling guilty too.
There are Qigong meditation practices that are best performed at certain hours, too – due to human energy cycles. I doubt that any one religious practice has a monopoly on wisdom; more like, observant and intelligent people in all cultures take note of natural cycles and learn to work with them.
It is with a huge sigh of relief that I conclude I am a ‘two-sleeps’ person. I fall asleep fairly early (9-10 pm) and wake up without prompting about 2-3 am. I use this awake time for reading, or perhaps watching tv, or taking a shower. Then about 4-5 am I fall back into a deep sound sleep. I wake up around 7 feeling fully rested a refreshed. My husband thinks this is odd, but it feels right to me.
I used to be a bartender while going to college, and adapted my own sort of , seemingly bizarre to most, sleep patterns. I would wake early and go for a jog before classes, or to the gym. Classes at 8am, until noon or 1 pm. I would then sleep after a small, light lunch and wake after 3-4 hours to make another meal, study and then head for my shift. Getting home between 1-3 am and sleeping again 3-4 hours. It took a very dark room in the afternoon, but It sure seemed like I was able to cram two days into one. My productivity was higher than it is now on a “modern wold” induced cycle. Maybe I should go back to this…now that I am married and we run our own business, we just might be anle to pull it off.
I watched my father fall into this cycle. At 80 he would rise in the middle of the night and go to his reclining chair and watch some TV and after about two hours fall back to sleep. By 90 he was just doing this in the chair and skipping the bed. As I turned 60 I started to get sleepy much earlier in the evening but then waking after about six hours of sleep then after a bit going back to bed again. I have inhered dad’s chair and now rarely have a night when I don’t sleep twice.
Yes when we are at our wood stove heated cabin, when I awake at 2:00 AM, I put a couple more logs in the stove to increase the heat or sometimes just to watch them burn and wait for the wolves to howl.
Nice article. Thanks.
I became aware of Roger Ekirch and his discoveries in the last couple of years. Thanks to this, I now sleep within an 11 hour window. I need to be up at 6:00 am , so I am in bed sleeping by 7:00pm , I usually awaken around midnight and stay up for no more than 2 hours (I set a timer). I spend the time reading, doing math, or playing guitar. Friends think I am missing some kind of night life with my going to bed so early , but I am up everyday at 6:00am and I need no caffeine. Before this I suffered from lack of sleep my whole life, was hopped up on caffeine (3-4 pitchers of coffee a day), was terrible in school, miserable and tired. This way of sleeping has changed my life for the better.
I ususally go with 8-10 Sleeps. Not that I want to, but d*mn, my back hurts.
Try Chiropractic and maybe another mattress.
I was doing this naturally with my young children, as I would lay down when putting the youngest to sleep, and then fall asleep as well, wake up a few hours later and then study/read for a couple hours before returning to bed. Since young children need about 12 hours sleep, this would let me go to bed and rise at the same time as them, with a few quiet hours to myself in the middle of the night.
I try to sleep in one segment, in a very dark room.
In fall/winter, there is only low and orange/yellow lighting in the evening, with sleep centered between dusk (17:00) and dawn (8:00), so maybe 21:00 – 6:00. (9pm-6am, or 9 hours)
Nearer the other solstice, I may go to bed and awaken during twilight, maybe after 21:00 through 5:00, (8 hours) when I awaken naturally.
Obviously, some will not awaken naturally at 5:00, even after becoming accustomed to this schedule.
I have slept twice a night for many years. I assumed it was because the middle section was an ideal time to think, plan and read. It was the only time I had to guarantee peace when the children were young.
Now that the children have left home, I find the evenings boring and am happy to cut the day short and enjoy my wakeful time in the peaceful hours.
Except in the middle of winter, I go to sleep quite naturally as the daylight fades.
My yogateacher has been living like that for years. I also do it occasionally, when it happens spontaneously.
Read Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Then speculate – fire was very important to our species, since we needed it to ‘pre-digest’ our food. And so some of us evolved (generally older people) to be awake in the night to tend the fire and guard the family.
It can’t be proved, but I like the speculation, and Richard W agrees.
http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/
This would not work for me. I need 8 hours straight sleep. I don’t get it because of work schedule. Get 5 to 6 hours sleep. On weekends I will sleep 10 hours each night.
First sleep—get the kids to sleep! Wake up have sex! Second Sleep–relax after having sex. Forget all that other stuff they told you!
Another explanation is liquor. In the olden days people drank a lot more wine and a lot less water than we drink now. Liquor is notorious for putting you to sleep, but you wake up a few hours later.
For almost two decades I have been “suffering” from two-sleep. I thought it was menopausal insomnia. Maybe knowing it is a natural process will allow me to stop fighting it.
I have fought for decades “two sleep”. I’m glad to know that it’s is a natural process and Lori, it could be that Menopause triggered your body to get back to what it knows to do naturally! :)
Seems to me this would be most closed linked to latitude then, right? Equatorial cultures wouldn’t ever have the longer nights, colder winters necessitating fire-tending, but the Europeans would, especially the northern ones, like the English who are quoted here.
The Mexicans had their siestas, and in some European countries it has been very common to have a nap after lunch, during which time businesses close. The closer you get to the more you see what I would interpret as an adaptation.
Since I have gotten older, I have fallen into this 2-sleep cycle. I love it. And I find that I have no problems during the day other than a desire for a nap after lunch. I think our ancestors slept then also. I think I will probably continue this cycle…. :)
I used to do this when I worked third shift. I would wake up early afternoon and run errands or read, do homework when I was attending school. I would then go back to sleep late afternoon and wake up a few hours before work. It was easier to stay away during the night hours.
I’ve done that. Following a hard day of working outdoors, I would fall asleep from exhaustion soon after coming home. After a few hours, nature would call in both needing to use the toilet and to eat. Then, after a while, normal sleepiness would set in and I would get a few more hours of sleep. Since I went to bed much earlier, I would wake well before dawn. So, by the time I had to back to work, I had plenty of time to be fully awaken and have a good full breakfast and feel warmed-up for the day. I can see how this would happen, and work well in an agrarian society.
Yeah I used to do this too. Work outside all day, Come home in the afternoon, cook supper immediately and fall asleep a short while later and then wake up around midnight and muck about on the internet for a couple hours before going back to sleep. I had to sleep after work because I would be completely useless and exhausted, but It’s impossible to sleep until the next morning before work in one stretch, and it’s also hard not to sleep in the twilight hours, but usually you will be up before dawn ready to face the day. Now I work evenings and I am always drowsy at the end of my shift at 11pm, I can’t wait for it to end, so boring.
hi! great article – super interesting! could you perhaps post the links to the books you mentioned in the article itself? it’s getting a bit difficult to find things down here in the comments section. thanks!
I read a very similar article a few weeks ago on the BBC website and I thought at the time that it made total sense, and now reading this article it confirms it, in my opinion. My husband has always been able to sleep and nap whenever he feels the need to. However while working he tried to stick to the average 8 hours straight sleep and then if the opportunity arised he would nap during the afternoons. Since retiring though, he has completely adapted to the ‘two sleeps’ and now finds this normal. He goes to bed around 8:30pm and sleeps till around 2am, gets up and spends two or three hours relaxing by reading or on the computer, then he comes back to bed and sleeps till around 8am. He still likes to take a nap in the afternoons.
Several years ago we vacationed in Greece and found that most of the Greeks we got to know had a sleep in the early afternoons and then again at night after returning home from work. Then they would get up around 8pm and be active till well after midnight, before going back to bed. The streets and cafe’s of Athens (and the smaller towns we visited on the islands) were often quite busy very late at night and that’s when the next day’s newspapers would hit the streets and when the locals would sit and read them before returning home for their next sleep! I remember thinking back then that it seemed a sensible and natural way of sleep patterns.
The book “Our babies, ourselves” explores sleeping patterns in families/babies from other parts of the world in one of its chapters, and it mentions people from a village getting up in the middle of the night to talk by the fire then go back to sleep.
This is very interesting. But I feel there is a lot more psychology at play here. Many modern people lead very “electronic” lives, and the time without those modern conveniences can be very bothersome. And that could lead to more sleep, or earlier sleep. Have you ever experienced a blackout for a day or two with no lights, TV, internet, video games. I bet most of you have gone to bed extremely early during these times because you simply have nothing better to do. I believe this is a natural instinct to speed up time, like hibernation. Ever get so bored on your day off you just sit on the couch and take a long nap, even though you got a full night’s sleep the night before.
During the 1800s everything was done during the daylight hours, and night time was a natural indicator of the not only the end of the day, but the end of activities that most did. Most people also got up and 5am and worked very hard throughout the day, so by the time the sun went down at 8pm in the summer, people were all ready for bed. But it is not plausible to sleep from say 8:30pm to 5:30am everyday. So it would make sense to go to bed early, rest up for a few hours, wake up to have some quality time to yourself, and sleep the rest of the night before the next day’s hard work.
I can relate. I go to work at 10am, and I come home at about 10pm. The responsible thing for me to do is go to bed at about 12-1am so I can get a full night’s sleep for the next work day. But I figure, if I did that, I wouldn’t have any time to myself. By the time I get home at 10pm, go through my mail, shower, eat something, and have a seat at my computer, or pop in a movie it is already 11-11:30pm. So I usually stay up until about 3-3:30am catching up on TV shows, playing guitar, and sleep until about 9:40
Charles, your thinking on this points out how many in this tread seem to assume humans evolved within an agricultural (now industrial) culture, which isn’t the case. I’ve been noticing a lot of comments in this thread talk about how second sleep isn’t “possible” due to the kind of work that they do (from having to tend animals to corporate endeavors), without questioning how we’ve forces ourselves to conform our basic biological needs to the demands of persistent exhaustion and/or the distraction of gadgets!
Totally true. At most, our ancestors have only been part of an agricultural lifestyle for maybe 15,000 years. Not enough time for humans to evolve or adapt much, especially compared to the millions of years we spent as hunter gatherers.
Very interesting idea, something I think I’ll try as the light fades into winter. One insignificant aside… having lived in the bush a number of times, I learnt early on that using the correct wood and method, one can pack a wood-burner to generate heat through the entire night; no need to get up in the middle of night to stoke the fire.
Efficient iron wood-burner stoves/ovens were not common until the 1700’s and even then often only in the kitchen; the average person not sleeping in their kitchen area still would have needed two sleeps to tend the fireplace.
I recently read an article saying that 8 hours may be the wrong amount of sleep for the majority of people anyway. According to the article, it takes approximately 90 minutes to complete a sleep cycle. No matter how you try, it doesn’t add up to 8 hours but 7.5…!
So I wonder where that fits this… hm.
Some people take a half hour to fall asleep, at least I know I take that long just for my heart rate to drop and everything to calm down.
My parents have done this for years but didn’t know it was “normal.” Since retiring and being able to set my own schedule I often wake up between 2-4 am and read til I feel like falling asleep again…or sometimes get up at 5:30-6:00am, and then go back to sleep after breakfast for 2-3 hours. sweet! to be able to sleep when my body is telling me iy wants to. I have also burned firewood for years although never really got into the habit of feeding the fire until after retiring, when I wasn’t under any pressure to maintain a different sleep pattern. Thanks for letting me know about this. fascinating!
My husband has always done this but I always slept 9 hours straight. Until a few years ago. I thought it was probably hormones because this seems to be true of many of my friends over fifty years old. But now I am thinking that a combination of lifestyle changes (ie children gone, returning to work, husband retired, post menopause) facilitated a pattern more natural and suited to my present circumstance. The problem is, the single sleep cycle mantra is so entrenched in my psyche, that I spend the wakeful period stressing out about not being asleep. After reading this, I can now relax, go with the flow, and let it work for me.
Intriguing – but would never work for me with full time work, my horse to tend to and other stuff I need to do. Including travelling time, my work day takes up around 9 hours as it is, once I get home and get my horse done I can only then sit down and eat. I struggle to get 8 hours sleep most nights. As Bodie Parkhurst observed, for most in the modern world it just wouldn’t work well. I guess in the 1800s most women stayed at home and did the necessary stuff during the day, whilst the men went out to work, allowing time in their evenings to retire early and do the 2 sleep sessions before morning.
Could the reason be that cows have to be milked twice a day (?) to prevent mastitis? This I learned from a Wisconsin lady, who had milk cows. I also remember reading something about 2 am feedings in some homesteading or farming magazine.
I think this vision could help make those “college all nighters” much more constructive. We need a rested brain to focus and study, and we need to rest the brain to let what we learn sink in, become memory. When we cram without a rested brain, our short term memory is compromised already, and when we cram without that added “second sleep” we loose the opportunity for our short term memory to effectively share our efforts with our long term memory.
Interesting! I wake up at 3 AM every morning without fail, and can’t get back to sleep. I’ve never found it soothing to do something calming at that hour, maybe because I’m worried about not sleeping. I think I’ll try visiting my neighbors instead. Ha!
For my wry take on insomnia: http://squirrelsinthedoohickey.com/good-night-my-foot/
I wonder if this sleep pattern relates to afternoon siestas? Maybe when sleeping at night, our bodies crave a bit of wakefulness, and when awake during the day, our bodies crave a bit of rest.
This is pretty much the Muslim spiritual practice for the last 1,500 years. Nothing new! The Prophet Muhammad, may upon him be peace, after spending some time with the family would sleep, wake up in the last third of the night for prayer. Then engage in deep spiritual “zhikr” until sunrise. The second sleep would actually take place after midday (roughly after 130PM).
Studies also show the great benefits of the “power nap” or “siesta” during the day.
Not surprising that this and a gajillion other practices of the Prophet that science now confirms to be a benefit to humanity.
I love Islam! <3
What you are saying, Omair, is typical of people with religious beliefs. They hear that their Prophet (leader) did such and such, as you have done, then attribute that to the “Correct way of living, as taught by the Prophet!” WHEN in FACT, it is a simple record, describing the Prophet’s daily routine and sleep patterns. Patterns that the Prophet did NOT create, but that the people of the times he lived in used everywhere.
Just like the article quoted here. Non-muslims followed this sleep pattern, probably world-wide. Christian, hindu, buddhist, whatever. Only lately, we have changed our sleep patterns to adjust to our times, and technology. This is NOT a LAW that has been broken, it is a statement of current social mores. Islam has nothing to do with it.
I sleep at the office during the day.
Fantastic article ! I dozed off and continued reading when I woke up.
I strenuously dispute the idea that two-sleeping in pre-electric Europe or North America was due to a need to ‘tend the fire.’
As two-sleeping has been forgotten so has knowledge of fire-building and maintaining.
Home fires were traditionally ‘banked’ at night — insulated with stones or even ash so that the fire could be easily restarted in the morning. It would have been foolish — and quite wasteful — to keep a fire burning throughout the night, especially when there were blankets and bed partner to keep warm. Like our fussing over electric and gas bills today, people of that place and era wanted to limit the fuel they burned (and the effort expended to buy and/or collect that fuel.)
Banking a fire meant that you didn’t have to ‘tend’ it through the night.
As poet Robert Hayden wrote in “Those Winter Sundays”:
“Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress …”
The best explanation for two-sleeping remains that it was a coping mechanism for people living through long, dark Northern Hemisphere winter nights before the advent of electric heat and light.
Thank you for explaining to people what a ‘Banked’ fire means. I hope it clears up some
misunderstandings. As a young girl we used to visit my Uncle’s ranch and we would sleep
in the bunk house where there was a huge fire place for warmth. After the fire was ‘Banked’
for the night, that meant that nobody had to tend the fire for the rest of the night! We girls had fun before bed roasting marshmallows. Brings back lovely memories….
Very interesting article. I had never thought about this as something natural or normal. I do this! I like to wake up by 4 am, read for 1/2 – 1 hour and go back to bed after this. I find it very relaxing… but I always thought this was my strange little habit.
A commenter brought up a great point about this sleeping pattern being reflected in Islam. The 4th daily prayer, Maghrib, is performed right when the sun sets, and the 5th and final daily prayer, Isha’a, is performed at halfway between sunset and sunrise.
Our household had a wood stove until I was in Junior High School, and I learned to cook on a wood stove. At the end of the day, my mother ‘banked’ the fires in both the kitchen range and the living room ‘pot-bellied’ stove. Banking was a method of ensuring the coals and embers would remain throughout the night and the fire would be ready to re-start in the morning, while keeping the house warm. Unfortunately, I never performed the ‘banking’ myself, so am not sure just how to do it. All I can say is that the house stayed warm and that mom said she did it so the fire would be easy to start and she didn’t have to keep getting up to feed it. Since she was raised with wood burning stoves and ranges and learned how to handle them from her mother, I guess she knew what she was talking about!
I still try to take in 2 sleeps a day to combat boredom. I do it almost every day unless I’m very busy that day.
I would say that “two sleeps” also is common for a lot of moms, even today. It’s pretty typical to get up with an infant for a 1 or 2 a.m. feeding. Even after the kids started sleeping through the night, I still get up at 1 or 2 a.m. pretty frequently to check on them.
I actually frequently went the two sleeps route in college. I’m a night owl by nature, but I had a lot going on during the day. I found it difficult to concentrate on my essays and studying when I got back to my dorm room at 7 or 8 o’clock, so I would set my alarm for about 2 am and hit the sack. When I woke up, I would have a little snack and pop out essays or memorize note cards until I felt too tired, and I would go back to sleep until class time. I do think that I spent a little more time awake than is typical, though. I just did it this way, because those wee hours of the morning have always been the time when I think the best.
I actually read something about that sleep study in college.
It seems to me … “different strokes for different folks”.
In days gone by it probably was more of a “class” issue than a response to a natural body rhythm. The servants waking to stoke the fires for the privileged (and for themselves), the privileged sleeping thru the day and enjoying social events lasting to the wee hours of the morning, while servants (be it the working poor, servitude, or slavery) took care of the physical needs of high society. Sleep for the poorer classes was defined by the requirements of survival to each individuals situation (farmer, hand servant, slave, bricklayer, etc.) This probably would apply to all parts of the world each part having it’s own class system – equality of mankind being a relatively new, albeit spotty and a poorly implemented, concept.
Or, in the present, work schedules as well as “time of life” issues (teens require more sleep during growing years; elderly being awakened by aches and pains; young parents finding “secret” time in the middle of the night; middle aged men better able to enjoy sex after several hours of sleep; and so on).
My grandmother, raising her family on a Midwest share-cropping farm in the early 1900’s, for many years without electric or indoor plumbing, managed to create dozens of the most beautiful, painstakingly intricate quilts. I’m guessing she did much of this work between her 1st and 2nd sleep during long winter months. It’s hard to imagine she would have had the time otherwise. (As an aside: she would visit the ill, affording them her time and bearing a basket which she filled with staples from their meager farm, food -such as eggs, produce and baked bread- that she would otherwise use for trade. I’m guessing this helped her sleep.)
Few of us anywhere is this world, over the years of our lives, over the eons of time, from the rich to the poor, are at liberty to sleep when we must, so we sleep when we can.
When my children were little and I worked on implementing software systems, I would lay down with them at 8:00 pm, get up at 11 or 12, work a few hours then go back to bed for a few more hours. I feel like I had enough energy and quiet time, while spending the best time with my children.
I was recently in rural Romania doing some work and discovered that two sleeps is still relatively common. The main reason being for the stoking of the fires in the winter time.
This is the second article I’ve read about this in about a year. It’s interesting, but what I’ve noted is that the references seem limited to northern European cultures, and their derivatives, and therefore I’m not sure the practice is any better or worse than single, long-duration sleeping. We do know that most people have 2 sleep cycles in the average 7-8 hour night, but other methods of sleep and rest exist, and seem to work well in their own cultures. Greeks (my best example because I am one), have historically been mid-day nappers that stay up a bit later and sleep later in the morning, with the outliers either not napping and doing an earlier sleep/rise at night, or taking shorter nights and longer naps. This seems to work well even today for Greeks, and nearby cultures as it reflects cultural preferences, climate factors, etc. That is the real key, I think. Personal preference, environmental factors, etc., should probably drive long-term sleep habits, and not an arbitrary standardized business day, which is what we use to generally determine our sleep habits now.
I’ve never heard of this before but do it all the time
I would also be interested to see an examination of the impact of industrialisation on this sleep cycle. It surely wouldn’t have been regarded as profitable to allow for people to sleep these cycles.
This was a very interesting read, thank you.
I would also like to bring to your attention the practice of siestas in the Mediterranean area, I’m originally from Syria and I remember many of my uncles coming home for lunch and taking a snooze for a couple of hours before returning to work. This was common practice in Arab countries at least, and I think it was also popular in the Iberian peninsula and lower Italy.
It’s not exactly the same as the two-sleeps at night, but it is sleeping in two chunks never-the-less.
This is how I sleep.
I run a warm line from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.
So call me!
Doug
703-475-7456
Peer Specialist
Replukon Research
Seven Corners, VA 22044-0394
Could it be the so common sleep debt is due to not sleeping in two periods ? If such a two period sleeping pattern is common among people living in harmony with nature one should reconsider sleeping eight hours in one stretch. Many stress related illness’s would simply disappear because of the few hours one wakes between sleeping periods. We should no longer grow anxious just for waking in the middle of the night. As a surplus traffic jams would decrease in gravity for sure because there would be quite a bit of people sticking to eight hours straight.
Human’s also have the ability to sleep in ultra-short periods of fifteen minutes spanned across a whole day without any adverse effects in the short term. Long-distance wind-sailors did and do this almost without exception.
One’s own body has an internal clock, …Todays society of 9-5… has just interfered with ANYONE’S CLOCK. To each their own..LET THERE BE PEACE, Let’s negotiate,debate,TALK to each other. JUST THINK, when your elder sent you off to school, military, into society… 1. RESPECT 2. BE polite 3. LISTEN & LEARN. OUR CHILDREN are not witnessing what they were told to do!!
Winter/summer…
Remember that we are a tropical species. The oldest fossil remains (ca. 200,000 ya) of a Homo sapiens individual were found in Ethiopia. Beyond Africa, we populated the tropics and near-tropics, first, with the settlement of temperate and polar zones being comparatively recent (on the order of 50,000 ya and less).
In the tropics, one has a seasonally invariant 12/12 breakdown with very short ‘dawns’ and ‘dusks.’ With a regular 12 hours or so of darkness, a 4/4/4 division makes a good deal of sense, even allowing for an early afternoon torpor to escape the heat.
I should very much like to see a detailed neuro-genetic picture of bifurcated sleep vs. extended sleep before making any claim, but it could well be that a tendency to interrupted sleep is inherited (rather than culturally transmitted).
Very interesting article. I am more of a night person and a day sleeper. I have no problem falling asleep during the daylight.
My husband on the other hand actually changed careers because of forced two sleep. He was a traffic reporter who went to work at 4 a.m. and then returned home to sleep a few hours and then back to work to report evening rush hour traffic. All in all he did get eight hours sleep per day but because this was a “forced sleep pattern” he always felt sleep deprived. Now he sleeps an average of 7.5 hours a night BUT he still has to nap after work because all those years of feeling sleep deprived took a toll on him.
As for me, although I am an utter night owl, now and again I will fall asleep quite early and wake up somewhere around 1 a.m. Those hours then seem twice as sweet as compared to my usual sleep pattern.
I have experienced the two sleep pattern as the first sleep is the passing out variety. Usually used to happen on the couch. Then I would wake to tend the fire, and in the waking to do that and wash my face and go to bed there is the reading and just slow quiet awakeness and then about 2-3 hours later going back to (the second) sleep until morning.
Well, well. I’m not such a weirdo after all…just old-fashioned in yet another practice. Cool, thanks for this!
It is the cold period at night, almost painful and hard to sleep through even if the day is hot. Those who have slept outside often understand. It is comfortable to sleep until the cold period around 2:30-4:30. When it hits, you wake, and moving about until it warms enough to sleep again is more than common. Not everyone kept or needed fires
very interesting, thank-you!
i’m wondering if my ancestors also did this, african-americans. did slaves have time for 2 sleeps?
When my dad worked on a commercial freight ship he and the crew actually did sleep in four hour shifts before trading places. Because of this habit for many years he could not apparently sleep a full night’s sleep even once he had quit that line of work and was in a normal daytime job.
Several thoughts.
Like many respondents, I’m relieved to discover that I’m not as peculiar as I always assumed I was based on my sleep habits. Mem. to self: more prayer, less CNN, in the middle of the night.
I have always marveled that the monastic Rule of St. Benedict required monks to arise in the middle of the night to pray the first hour of the liturgical day. “What was he thinking?”
It would seem that this monastic hardship wasn’t as hard as we would assume, since men tend to be wakeful at that time, anyway.
Also, I seem to remember from my studies that, during the Industrial Revolution, one of the chief duties of overseers was to ensure that sleep-deprived men did not fall asleep and fall into the machines.
I’ve never had any trouble sleeping, but my grandfather would regularly get up, have some peaches, and get some work done around 2AM–when everyone else was sleeping, and it was finally quiet. I am a “night owl,” so I would often join him. He was extremely disciplined with time–probably a result of growing up on a farm, and being a mess hall sergeant in the army. I am a deep sleeper, however. Six hours is usually optimal, going to bed around midnight. Sleeping longer than 6 hours often made me drowsy. I started taking naps when work and parenthood increased my duties. Now, we live in a “24-hour society.” You can do virtually anything, anytime, and with anyone in the world–with a telephone and Internet access. “Time” is almost irrelevant, but discipline is more key than ever.
I don’t think it was just electric light that changed sleep patterns the onset of the industrial revolution and people started working in factories to set working hours meant that this was no longer possible.
Very interesting, good reading. I have had trouble with this sleeping from 830pm- 3-4 am and not being able to go back to sleep but I have noticed in the north the sun rising is what wakes me up if I was to sleep in a totally dark room Id be able to sleep longer. Its good to know why I cant go back to sleep in the am now, I won’t freak about it anymore. I will be able to relax more possibly go back to sleep easier. Thanks
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but the old Monastic prayer office of Matins was divided into three “Nocturnes,” which were three pieces of a single nighttime/very-early-morning prayer office. The middle one would have been between the two sleeps.
Anyone with kids already has to do this to have any quality time together.
It feels normal to me to go to bed at 9, get up around midnight for an hour or two, then go back to sleep for a few hours. My doctor diagnosed it as a sleep disorder. It is a lot like meditation for me. I find it calming to be up in the peacefulness that it night.
I have been sleeping this way for quite some time. I go to sleep right after work hours (5:00 pm) and “nap” until about 8:00 pm. Then I cook, eat, chores, and hobby until about midnight. Then 2nd sleep from 12 am – 6 am. I LOVE this sleep pattern and I am so much more pleasant in the evening (between 1st and 2nd sleep) because I’m not exhausted and trying to push myself to continue until I just fall out at 10 pm or 11 pm like I used to. I feel so much better!
Mothers naturally sleep this way, especially when their children are infants and need to be fed in the middle of the nite. My kids are grown, but I still take two sleeps. Except, I sleep for several hours at nite, and then several hours during the day. I can’t seem to get through the day without sleeping for a few hours. It sort of breaks up the monotony and boredom I get and makes things seem like “new and exciting” again after having rested for a bit. I think our society might be more productive and have fewer errors if we did do the “siesta” nap time on a regular basis.
There was no mention of the practical necessity in northern climates to rise in the night to add wood to the fireplaces and stoves to keep from freezing.
I think the need for two sleeps is more out of necessity than the romantic views many are expressing. For example, there is the need in the middle of the night to tend the fire, check on the chickens and other farm animals to ensure predators aren’t getting to them, babies need to be changed, older kids need to be taken to the potty to avoid a wet bed in the morning.
Certainly there may have occasionally been some romance, reading (if literate), knitting/sewing or drinking of tea between the two sleeps but I don’t think those were the primary reasons for getting up in the night. I think our ancestors were much busier trying to keep warm, tending to the kids, farming and finding food than we think they were.
I think it’s only in our post-industrial age that we have time for romance, drinking tea and reading.
That was a fascinating read. I never knew that, but it makes total sense. I love learning something new, so thanks! Now I know that if I wake in the night its just something that we all used to do, amazing!
I´ve been having sleep troubles from childhood on, but in my better periods this is exactly the way I am sleeping. But I´m only able to do so, cause I´m working only part-time and I don´t have children that don´t require me being on demand all the time. I guess, for normal full-time working people who are super busy, this style of sleeping is no option, sadly.
Probably an adaptation made by a tropical species moving to northern latitudes… it would be interesting to see if this pattern occurs in equatorial countries. The same adaptation might explain summer siestas.
Exactly!! In the winter, we tend our fire every few hours to make sleep time shortened. But, in summer, it gets too hot in the mid afternoon to really do anything, so this is the best time to sleep and avoid heat stroke or discomfort. So, time for a siesta!!
I don’t find this unusual at all. I’ve been doing this since childhood. To bed approcimately 11 pm, awake from 2 ish to 4:30, sleep until 8:00 or so. I find it very refreshing and get a lot of reading and writing done in the wee hours.
Great article. I enjoyed it very much.
There is a typo in the sentence that begins with “No matter why the change happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished form common knowledge. I believe the word “form” should be “from”.
There is actually a good handful of research that polyphasic sleep is better – that it is more efficient, to be precise. The greater benefits show up after moving from biphasic to tri and more… it is outside the scope of this “two sleep” pattern, but polyphasic sleep has lots of benefits if one’s schedule can accommodate.
I didn’t realize I have been inadvertently doing this for years. I typically like to burn the midnight oil, and sometimes I am so tired, I just pass out, only to wake up a few hours later, finish up my work, then off to my “real” sleep. As a matter of fact, how fitting it was that I found this article last night during my “between sleep” time (thanks to Digg)!
I sleep more like three periods a night. Considering that earlier periods of time not only had no electricity to extend daylight activities, but that prayers were rung by church bells in Catholic communities, people – certainly those in religious communities – were expected to rise in the middle of the night and join their community for prayer. Bells ringing in the middle of the night are likely to wake up everyone, so maybe that has some bearing on the sleep patterns of earlier centuries. Feeding infants has a similar effect on family sleep cycles. Lots of reasons, but it still doesn’t make those early morning hours when you can’t figure out why you’re up less disconcerting.
My body seems to want to follow this pattern now that I make my own schedule. I thought I was weird, but now I see I am just normal!
I sleep like this all the time, as does my Father. I get a good solid 4 hours of sleep, then wake up and read or get a light snack or both. After a while I go back to sleep for about 2 or 3 hours more. I have no problem with this sleep pattern, except other people (husband included) seem to think it’s weird and I should go to a sleep disturbance clinic.
I am a two phase sleeper. except I usually go to sleep between 12:30 and 2:00 and wake up about 5 hours later. I work with computers and my job does not require regular hours. I often work, or read, or do other activities in the waking gap between phases, which for me is the morning (never TV). But about 2 to 3 hours later, I get tired again and fall asleep. I have little problem sleeping in light so it’s never been a problem with me. when my kids were younger, I would wake up and take them to school at 7:30. Now they are older and one works an overnight shift. He gets home at 6:15 and we hang out one or two days a week.
to be sure I like sleeping. For years I seemed to work best on 9 hours of sleep. I have always liked sleeping, and being relaxed and partially awake has helped me think through many solutions to a variety of novel problems in the research I do. And yes I have an alarm clock by my bed… forever blinking 12:00 because I never use it.
What about non-European ancestry? Did they have two sleeps as well?
For as long as I can remember, I have been a biphasic sleeper. No amount of conditioning myself to sleep through the night results in my doing so; if I fall asleep by midnight, I need until 9:30 a.m. to get my full night’s sleep. And, I can’t make myself fall asleep before midnight, so as a result, having any kind of 9-5 job is not possible for me, as it leads very quickly to fatigue, and reduced immune system function, which winds up making me sick pretty regularly. As long as I have 10-12 hours to get my 7.5-9 hours of sleep in, I don’t get sick, experience no fatigue, and am generally without anxiety.
I had no idea this was a common thing in days past until coming across an article about eight years ago. Suddenly, it all made sense and I stopped putting pressure on myself to sleep straight through eight hours. I sleep for 3-4 hours, wake for half an hour to 3 hours, and then get the rest of my sleep. Of course, this has required me restructuring my life, getting myself to a point where I set my own schedule, and am my own boss, which I realize is not a thing most can do, but it has been hugely beneficial to my personal well being and livelihood.
Now that I am retired my sleeping pattern is more like the two sleep a night. I fall asleep around 10:30 – 11pm and wake up around 2 – 3am and then fall back to sleep around 4 or 5am, waking up around 7 or 8am. But some nights I can’t fall back to sleep and then I’m tired all day with only 4 hours of sleep.
I lived in the two-sleep world for a while after a dentist really hurt my teeth. I woke up because of the pain in my mouth and then had trouble getting back to sleep. But the pain wasomly moderate. Therefore, I think that the two-sleep mode was due to the fact that MANY people used to have lots of little aches and pains that disturbed their sleep. Many still do in the less comfortable parts of the world.
It seems in studying “sleep” only European/Western sleep was studied, making the whole study kind of pointless.
I’ve been doing this naturally for years, now I have an explanation as to why it feels so right for me. I often get some of my most productive work in the studio (I’m a painter) between midnight and 5 am.
Great! Since I was a teenage – 50+ years ago, I have gone years at a time with this two sleep pattern. As a teenager my mother forced me to go to bed at 10, I would sleep until 2, get up until 4:30 or 5 then sleep until 7. I have never seemed to need a lot of sleep until lately – 64 -and if I go to bed before midnight, I am very likely to wake up at 2 or 2:30 for a few hours. Sometimes I read, meditate and often get up to work or clean house. This is the first time I have heard of this other than my direct experience.
Thanks, Jo
Well: Most older men (like myself) get more than two sleeps per night, due to BPH. I’d settle for 6 straight hours.
I don’t believe sleep patterns changed because of electric light. I think they changed because of the rise of industrialism. When you’re on factory shifts, or now when you’re on standard company work hours, you fit your sleep to the requirements of work. Schools and school hours followed industrialism as well. Schools are built and run like factories, with a starting whistle and scheduled break times. Nowadays, everyone is on the industrial punch clock and we organize our lives accordingly, including and especially sleep.
Electric light was just a derivation of the rise of industrialism.
“Note too that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness – darkness that is only possible naturally during the winter months. The greater levels of daylight during summer and other seasons would make two sleeping difficult, or even impossible”
Not for Spaniards – a small amount of sleep at night and an afternoon siesta is par for the course. How else would you stay up til 7 am during fiesta or harvest your grapes in the early hours before the temps hit 30 plus degrees in August?
My husband and I have been doing 2 sleeps for many years. Just works for us. Lots of middle of the night conversations, reading, music appreciation and “stuff”. Very relaxing.
If this is true, then we should find that cultures that are non-technical and don’t have access to modern amenities still two-sleep during the winter. This might not be applicable to cultures around the equator but only cultures where the nights get long enough to activate the mechanism. We should see the same two-sleep pattern in Australian aborigines, for example.
Interesting, either way.
Now I don’t feel so odd, as I wake up at 3am, read, meditate, or have a light snack, then back to sleep for 4 hours….am an old soul ;
Personally, I believe or suspect this is simply an extension of the known fact that many young children do not ‘sleep through the night’. Apparently, instead of fighting it, they just didn’t.
In reality, in 2013, I am suspicious that exposure to the illuminated back drops online and also the amount of communication across real time zones causes people to experience real changes in their sleep patterns. Right now, however, it is very confusing, because there are totally unrelated causes of changes in sleep patterns which are only partly understood so …it is a pet-theory, I don’t have good statistical evidence nor scientific proof but do think so.
maybe even further back, we used that time to hunt.
About 1/3 of the world does a siesta in the middle of the day. This makes sense.
Very interesting article!
Just one minor thing I noticed at the end of the HISTORY section:
“No matter why the change happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished form common knowledge.”
Should be “from” common knowledge.
I’m skeptical of this. The tale of segmented sleep was a big deal in 2012 and 2013, but I have read a number of assertions that this is largely a myth or, at best, a misinterpretation of early industrial history and there is no indication of actual precedent or benefit from bifurcated sleep.
Please cite the “assertions that this is largely a myth or, at best, a misinterpretation.” The evidence is overwhelming. See the February 2015 issue of the Oxford journal Past & Present for additional evidence.
I like the idea of reading and writing if awake at 2 am and going back to sleep!
This is because, as is explained in Ayurveda, the 24-hour cycle is divided into six four-hour phases called “doshas”. The three doshas are called Vata, Pitta and Kapha. So it just so happens that from 10pm to 2am is Pitta time, which has the characteristic of fire or heat. The purpose of Ayurveda is to use these natural cycles to your benefit. So, if you fall asleep before the advent of Pitta time, 10pm, then you will essentially get double rest. You’ll typically wake up around 2am feeling well-rested(assuming you’ve caught-up on excess fatigue). So scientists are finally observing what the ancients taught for thousands of years.
Back in the day, I remember being told that one hour sleep before midnight was worth two hours after. Same wisdom, different tradition?
I awake happily in the night about one or three in the morning and open up the computer . I am happily using it without guilt and am often able to express my opinions or thoughts. When tired I return to my bed to have a fitful sleep before morning.
This is very interesting and I am wondering whether this 2 sleeps-behaviour fit well in more rural areas. There was a larger majority of farmers and countryside labors would usually last until very late in the evening and would start very early. Would these people still have a “double sleep” ?
So is that where the idea of naps derived from?
Interesting read.I do prefer sleeping in the winter because it is dark earlier and the sun doesn’t come up as early as the summer.Sometimes I like when I wake in the night and fall back asleep as it can give you fresh dreams :)I’m not sure which would be more refreshing sleep though?One block of 8 hours or two smaller blocks.
I’d be for a two-sleeps night. Of course, back then they had no electric lighting, so to save on oil and lantern wicks and candles, they would head to bed when it got dark. They also didn’t have indoor toilets, usually, so going to the bathroom in the middle of the night was much more of a chore…..or even getting out the old chamber pot meant being more awake than it does for us to stumble into the bathroom with a flashlight or nightlight.
I wonder if it just involved the adults, as adults are more likely to wake in the middle of the night while children sleep more soundly.
Sleep more soundly? You think so? I know of no children to sleep particularly soundly at night (although they are prone to comatose collapse after a lot of activity.) I remember myself as a child, often falling asleep before my parents and waking up in the dead of night, bored as could be. They got me a record player at some point, so I would listen to stories on it for a few hrs, and go back to sleep. Actually similar habits are still with me today. Don’t have kids of my own, but take care of lots of em, and the sound full night of sleep is a rarity for the small ones, and the bigger ones stay up till godawfull hours on thier phone or pc, and can’t get up come morn.
Necessity. It gets cold, so one must wake up and tend the fire. Simple.
I always feel better when I have 2 sleeps, one which in modern times is called a nap, or siesta. I think you can find some cultures still practice this.
Nice…good work
not sure I liked this sentence
“Very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that.”
seems grammatically incorrect and his level of coolness is irrelevant to the story.
Also, It would have been interesting if you had researched the possibility of our great, great, great, greats only following the two-sleep method in the winter when they had the lack of sunlight as well. Is it possible that they vacillated between the two?
Interesting article though – thanks!
I have been experiencing two sleeps for many years. Very interesting to read this history.
Wehr summarized his research in a chapter of a 1996 book, Hypothalamic Integration of Circadian Rhythms. It ends with this, perhaps my favorite bit of formal scientific writing ever:
“In long nights, periods of quiet rest and contemplation often begin after transitions to wakefulness from periods of REM sleep that are particularly intense. It is tempting to speculate that in prehistoric times this arrangement provided a channel of communication between dreams and waking life that has gradually been closed off as humans have compressed and consolidated their sleep. If so, then this alteration might provide a physiological explanation for the observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies.”
Oh honestly! To give an example, he must choose either one gender or the other…if he chooses the female gender, it is not MORE right or LESS right than the male, and if he chooses the male gender for his example, it is NOT a slap in the face to all woman-kind. If you missed the entire article to latch onto something unrelated in his last sentence, you need help. <—Oops! read last sentence for gender pronoun. *rolls eyes*
RE: The Article. Sooo many sleepless nights over the years now make sense. Of course our sense of panic when we wake at 2:30 am usually has to do with what time we have to get up for work the next morning, and our intense desire to return to sleep usually foils our ability to do so. Thank you for posting it.
I love this idea. I might try it myself now it’s getting darker again. Thanks!
(Grammar note: “..shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished form common knowledge.” = from. I’m only pointing it out because lots of my friends are sending people to this article so it might get a wide readership!)
This is interesting, cause I find myself recently taking 2 sleeps :(
I sleep good night’s sleep during the day do not match. If you sleep sleep in the night and day how that happens so relaxing.
Just woke up from from my second sleep, boy does it feel good . Not too mention its summer and I didn’t even try for this still used lights and stuff.
Also I expect that as light was expensive (only the rich could afford candles etc) then once it went dark there was little else to do. Except sleep.
They also needed to replinish firewood I would think. You can’t just sleep 8 hours through without your heat going down, you’d probably wake up from the severe cold.
Interesting article and some good research. Did you come across the concept of polyphasic sleep? Some people have many more than even two sleeps!
That’s pretty cool findings ancestral history, thanks history buff!
In the third-to-last paragraph you imply that even people living in the 18th would find two sleeps per night difficult during the summer months because of the long hours of daylight? Should we infer from your statement that they switched from one sleep to two sleeps per night during different seasons? Or is the phenomenon of long daylight hours unique to modern times?
I find this fascinating! When I was in junior high school, if I had homework, I would set my alarm for the “middle of the night,” do my homework, then go back to sleep. I felt like I was more rested after a few hours and more able to do my homework then.
Ha, ha! I already sleep like this! I am so tired when I get home from work, I pass out! Then I’m up for a few hours talking on the phone with all my friends and family; then I go back to sleep!
That in tween 2 or 3 hours to relax, meditate or prayer is very valuable. We have lost the art of patience, relaxation, being quiet, meditation and quiet prayers, with so muc TV and noise, reading is becoming obsolete. We need to be schooled again to enjoy silence, meditation, relaxation, not to fear night waking bouts, reading and leisurely listening to classical or quiet instrumental music. There is health value in quietness and enjoyment of silent meditation, quietrayers, listening to the body to sleep. The power naps during the day also has value.
I experienced this when I lived “off the grid” for six months!
Louis L’amour references two sleeps as a habit of plainsmen for security/safety. They would drink enough fluids to cause them to wake up in the middle of the night to relieve themselves and take the opportunity to take a look around to make sure no enemy might be creeping up on them in the dark.
it also comes from having to wake in the middle of the night to ‘stoke’ the fire. cave men, all the way up to current day mountain men in alaska, or even cowboys in the cold prairies of the mid-west, have to wake up half way through the night, or several times, to keep the fire burning, to check traps that have been set, so check their perimeter and surroundings for rival tribes, or predators. In the Marines, we were trained to sleep 3 hours at a time, waking up for ‘fire-watch’ for an hour at a time, then sleep 3 hours, then fire-watch again in the morning. you can do this for months on end and still get the REM deep sleep needed in the short hours. What this artical doesn’t cover is, after 2 combat tours in Iraq, working only the night shift, 7 days a week for 7 months each tour… I am unable to sleep at night, as comfortably as I am in the day. and that was 6 years ago. I still sleep better during the day after having a fucked up sleeping schedule, in a high stress environment, where staying awake mean saving lives. that should do a study on that. the ‘night owls’ of our society.
I sleep that way. It took me a long time to realise and accept that this was my sleep pattern. Now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I simply read a book, do laundry, prepare breakfast for later on, and much more. Sometimes, I just stay in bed and enjoy the quiet.
“after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished form common knowledge.”
Form should be from.
Great article. I enjoyed it very much.
I got into the two sleeps habit in college. There was so much to read that I often fell asleep reading. I considered it a bonus when I would awake in the middle of the night refreshed because this allowed me to read more!
Nowadays, I often get sleepy early in the evening. Usually by 3 or 4 AM I will awaken and watch an old movie on TV for an hour or so. Combined with a little snack, I oftentimes will again retreat to my bed for a few more hours of slumber. Other times I just keep on going and get an early, peaceful and quiet start to my day.
My wife and I have always thought my habit of sleeping in two shifts was odd. I’m relieved to know that I may just be old-fashioned!
You said “form common knowledge” instead of “from.” I make this typo all the time!
This was very interesting. Next time I wake like this, I’ll try to remember your article and not freak out. I think that will make it easier to go back to sleep.
I suspect that due to our evolutionary history that having “two sleeps” was a way of ensuring that a small portion of the tribe was awake at any one time during the night – in order to protect against predators. Given that there are night owls and morning larks this would result in some people being awake at all times. I understand that adolescents as a group as more likely to go to sleep late and rise late…
My boyfriend is a photographer who likes to take both sunrise and sunset photos, so he has adopted the two-sleep lifestyle. It works fine for him!
I’ve slept like this for years now. When I first started I would have a hard time going back to sleep worrying about loss of sleep and how it would effect my day at work. Because I was so tense, the relaxation did not happen. Eventually, I quit fighting it and would just get up and do light housework, like folding laundry and then when starting to feel sleepy would start reading a book. After that, it was back to dreamland with no problem! The most common time that I would wake up was between 2;30 & 3:30 AM, falling back asleep between 4:30 & 5:00 AM.
I must say, I am glad to hear that this is not something to be worried about. It is just the way it is! Thanks for the article.
Had to stoke the fire in the middle of the night!
This doesn’t sound all that different to me…many women…post menopausal do just this every night. Many nights, I fall asleep early, like 9, the wake up between 1 and 3, read a little and then fall asleep til morning. Throw in a hot flash or two as well!!
In the last par, you refer to two-sleep patterns not being possible in areas where there are long daylight hours, “…two sleeping needs a lot of darkness – darkness that is only possible naturally during the winter months,” However, what about the mid-afternoon siesta common in Spain, etc? I find this pattern much more natural for myself as a resident of Australia – a part of the world where there are long daylight hours!
“And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.”
Wait — you mean the plot-line for Idiocracy has been going on for 500 years?
I remember James Joyce’s “Araby” where the character of the uncle tells his nephew, “It’s after the people’s first sleep…” Just goes to show how that line does not merely describe sleep as disturbed by the need to urinate, or by hunger pangs; the line gives clue to an entire culture that existed way before us — a culture that slept differently.
We did it to stoke the fire over millennia and it changes with the season and the light of course. We are one with our earth and its rhythm’s. To continue to deny or just plain not recognize this is why we destroy our home. So much of these answers are within other disciplines of research you just need to get out of your Post holes of your Ph.D.’s and visit other holes often.
Sincerely
the Post Hole Digger
I actually do this whenever I can. I am often exhausted after work and take about a three hour nap. I study and read for a while, then go to bed. I always feel the most rested on nights when I can do this.
Many nights I wake up at 3:oo am. I read, listen to soft relaxing music, i.e. Harry Nilsson, or visit my friends on facebook. my best sleep is the second half or (Bi-Modal). Now that I’m retired, this works wonderfully for me…………
Very interesting. I often find myself waking up around 2 or 3 in the morning and simply laying there for an hour or so before falling back asleep for another 3 or 4 hours. Guess it’s not a strange thing.
Polyphasic is the term. It’s not uncommon today. Id implore the writer to leave the big city, and do a modicum of research on the matter. The interest is clear…but your desk top research does not present an accurate picture. Great article..just very light.
I love my life experience so much, that it is hard to let go of my day and go to sleep. The computer, the music, talking, or even TV can keep me hanging in there for one more tidbit of data and the chance for a laugh, or to be moved by a connection.
When I do give it up and lay myself down, I go right to sleep. With no effort, no waiting, and never any sleep aids. Thank God for the innocents in my life today. Peace of mind.
Meditation, do no harm lifestyle, honestly, minding my own business, vegan diet, all wrapped in “I forgive everyone, I forgive myself, I forgive all past experience.” I am free.
I am free. Good night.
So what *did* people do in the summer months? Is there research on that as well? Very interesting article!
Thanks for this article. It reinforces my experience. I came about this pattern naturally, and yes, the period between sleeps IS transcendental. No doubt about it.
“Minimise sleep. SIX hours are sufficient for you. Aspirants can reduce to four gradually. it is not the quantity of sleep but the quality that matters. If you can get DEEP sleep, even TWO hours are quite sufficient to give you a refreshing night’s rest and make you fit for the next day’s work or study. Do japa (=chanting) and meditate at night BEFORE you go to bed; you will be free from dreams and you will have good sleep.” (A speech by Swami Sivanananda at Governments Arts College (in India) to 30,000 on 26th Sept 1950: pg. 157, Sivananda’s Lectures)
Very neat, thank you for writing this!
About the mention of the gender pronoun-I think it is not harmful. There is no generalization or degradation of either gender made by it. You’re allowed to pick a gender pronoun I’d say!
What about Siesta (Spain) and Reposo (Italy)? Do those practices count as two sleep periods? I just visited Southern Italy this summer and was surprised to see the town elders promenading in the piazza well after 10:00 pm. Some of these ladies and gentlemen were in their 80’s and 90’s! My Italian friend told me that is because their biggest meal is at 1:00 pm followed by reposo when many take a long nap. It was also festival weekend, so they were wanting to see as many of the friends and family members who no longer live there but had returned to the town for a visit. This also explains why the shops were open in the morning, closed in the afternoon and opened up again in the evening. Restaurants typically don’t open until 8:00 pm. It is not possible to do much else besides rest in the late afternoons in this town. VERY different way of life than here – and this is in the summer when days are long.
great article. During vacations and long weekends it happens to me too, inexplicably waking up at night. Now I have a little understanding of that. Thanks!
I wonder if they ate food during the brief awake time?
Thanks for making me feel better about my sleep patterns, I am much more productive in those two hours than I am for most of my day…and I tend to be hungry during that ODD 2 hour period too…guess I am NOT such a weirdo afterall
Good read!
Another catch: “the concept of two sleeps had vanished ‘form’ common knowledge.”
cool info thanks!
that’s because electricity and its benefit were not readily known so people were house bound in the dark with nothing to do ,the lack of central heat and air conditioning would eliminate prolonged comfortable sleep ,and the need for evacuation of bladder or bowels . also people didn’t live to be extremely old ,they were very weary ,and required more rest due to common ailments lack of medicine etc .
perhaps it was also time to fill the wood stove!
So what did our ancestors do in places that had seasonally long daylight hours where it might not get dark until 9:30pm (or later in say Scandinavia)? Did they still retire to the house early and have two sleeps or did they shift seasonally to one longer sleep?
Interesting thanks. As an employee I developed chronic narcolepsy and was forced to ‘go on pension’ at 40. I decided to try to live a more natural life by growing my own food, etc., rather than continue with the mind altering drugs prescribed. Nowadays (at 58) I find that a day of real work tends to leave one no choice but to hit the hay at sunset. Then after four or five hours I wake up feeling refreshed and usually think of something (inside) that I’d like to do right away (eg responding to an internet article or comment). Then after an hour or two I find myself back in bed peacefully producing Zs. So I guess it all makes sense to me.
Crazy. Makes total sense to me, though. Let’s start this up again!
I’ve always woken up in the middle of the night for a few hours somewhere around 2-4 am. Nice to know I’m traditional.
I have been doing the same thing for years. I thought I was strange; now it seems that my forefathers (and mothers) did the same. I always attributed it to the fact that I own my own business (for 28 years and counting) and that I still wake up after just a few hours sleep with the answer to questions that escaped me during waking hours. Is the brain refreshed after a few hours sleep and better able to assimilate data? I usually stay awake for about 4 hours, then go back to sleep about 2 hours before it is time to hit it again.
Fernand Braudel also mentions this in his work.
Very fascinating. I would bet that the practice of having one or two hours a night of low-stress down-time might have also helped to prevent cancer as well as numerous other ailments.
I suffer from insomnia quite frequently and when I realized that I didn’t have to fight it, that I could wake up, find something to do for an hour or two then go back to sleep, I haven’t felt sleep deprived. It felt natural, so maybe it’s not outdated. It works for me all year long. I get sleepy earlier in the evening and then I’m up sometime after midnight then back to sleep. And it works so much better than sleeping pills.
Older men and pregnant women return to that eventually
This really makes sense and if I go to bed at what my husband calls a “Reasonable hour” 9:00 to 10:00 , I am awake by 2:30 and can’t get back to sleep until 5 or 5:30. The I sleep until about 8 .
Actually were the hours I kept (not by choice) when my kids were small! They would “tag team” me. One would wake up about 2 back out by 3:20 #2 would wake about 3:40 and stay awake until 4:30. Dandy would get up at 5:00 to go to work and by 6:30 # 3 was awake and raring to play. I was tired all the time. Only one of mine slept thru the night on a regular basis before they were 3. I have one question: Why do the early to bed early to rise people always marry the Night Owls?
I do this a lot. Thought I was just weird. I don’t really understand the part about how it would be nearly impossible to do this in summer months where there is more daylight. There are these things called curtains that keep a room dark.
Good article and interesting .. I often do this very thing myself and enjoy it !
An interesting article.
I’ve done this for as long as I can remember. I work an 8-5 job and usually get home around 5:30, by around 6:30 I’m in bed and will sleep until around 10pm, wake up – do what I need to do for the next day and 3-4 hours later go back to sleep and sleep until morning.
This break in between sleep is amazing for me. I have the peace and quite from the daily drivel, and feel well-rested enough to work on large projects needed for work, clean, relax, etc.
Most people find my sleep schedule pretty bizarre, especially since I have a family – but I cannot fathom sleeping 8 hours straight. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done so.
I believe this two-sleep pattern is still practiced in some parts of the world (Kyrgyzstan, for example).
Great article, thanks. Now I know why I tend to wake up in the middle of the night when I sleep in a bedroom that has shutters to keep the streetlight out. Not that it worried me; I like to spend this time reflecting on projects and things until I fall asleep again.
I have, for as long as I have been aware of this, believed that this is an evolutionary adaptation to the discovery of fire. Fire is very difficult to make using friction tools alone (the most common method until the discovery of flint and steel relatively late in history) and the best and easiest way to keep a fire going is to never let it become extinguished at all. That means waking up in the middle of the night and adding more fuel to the smoldering embers. This was not simply a matter of convenience, but the calories saved by people who tended to wake up in the middle of the night meant that they had more energy to do other things, but if your fire burns out in the middle of the night in a poorly insulated hut in the Little Ice Age and before, you could die. Sleeping all night long could possibly kill you. And when the fire gets put out, if you don’t freeze, you might never get one lit again under bad conditions. So, just as agriculture made humans diurnal since it was essential to plant and protect crops during the day from birds and the like, fire made people sleep in shifts because a camp fire will never burn for 8 hours straight without maintenance.
So what were the pattern(s) of sleep during spring and summer months?
In the last 8 months, I have fallen into this exact pattern because I am not regularly employed. I have found it very difficult to break. Maybe, I shouldn’t try. And, yes, I find the in between sleep times to be very productive.
This article is super interesting, I love nerding out about history stuff… But I think there one key problem here… “We” and “You”… this article seems to be focused on European history, assuming the reader is white/of European heritage. I’m white, so I guess its about my German/Irish/etc. ancestors, which is super interesting, but what if someone who is reading this doesn’t have that background? Awkward and pretty offensive/ethnocentric actually. Keep up the great research, and work on the cultural sensitivity. Thanks!
I have had the two-sleep habit for years. It does not require the long darkness of winter but the darkness of dark curtains. I find that my middle-of-the-night hours are calm, reflective and pleasing, often quietly productive. It is wonderful to have a time of day when the world is relatively quiet, when one can hear more clearly the sound of a night breeze, or rain, or insects or just plain stillness. I feel that those who wake to an alarm, drink coffee or other caffeine and then rush through the day until they collapse into bed at night with just enough time to squeeze out seven or eight hours’ sleep before the alarm goes off again are really missing out on having a better quality life. And it’s free. One just has to make one’s jam-packed, busy life, less jam-packed and less busy. One last note: abandon all caffeine.
Except when you’re a B-chronotype you’re almost never getting any respect for your circadian rhythm from the current establishment and are thus unable to extend that respect in turn to your “standard eight hours of sleep”.
http://www.b-society.org/who-we-are
In this case, the biphasic sleep pattern can be activated occasionally (on isolated days here and there) to give you some relief or realignment. I know – I’ve tried it and it works.
I wonder if this is an artifact of heavier alcohol use historically on a more widespread basis. Alcohol leads to middle insomnia (another name for your “two sleeps”) by putting the person to sleep, but then waking then disturbing their sleep architecture making it hard to get back to sleep (alcohol gets metabolized, body temp goes up, etc.). Without the science of sleep medicine at the time, “normal” may have been defined as what was common, and what we classify now as alcohol abuse may have been quite prevalent at the time.
This would have been tough to do above the Arctic Circle. Both summer and winter would be skewed.
Fascinating! Thanks!
Is this sleep pattern followed by animals too? If this is unique to humans then I would question the theory.
This is fascinating, and my own experience bears this out. I run a writing and design business out of my home. I’m a single mother. In the years before my son started school we routinely did the “two sleeps” per night–I’d put him down, sleep for a bit, then get up and write. When I got tired (usually two or three hours) I’d go back to bed. If I needed it, I’d nap in the afternoon. I did much of my most creative writing in those hours–and in the summer, when I’m not tied to the daytime routine of the world outside my home, I do something similar. I’m more productive, happier, and healthier when I can do that–but it simply doesn’t work well with the modern world.
So true. It doesn’t work well at all, unfortunately.
That explains my sleeping pattern
I like to sleep early, (9pm) get up/wake around 3 am, ponder the sky, walk outside feel the air. Read some, fall back in bed and wake with a dream fresh in my mind. Usually 9 hours.
I had always thought I was not normal in sleeping in two sleeps between which I was wide awake. This spring I learned about polyphasic sleeping and know it is actually normal. I now sleep for four core hours with three 20 minute naps and I am never tired… a constant before when I tried to fit the 8 hour-a-night norm.
What about those whose ancestors lived near the equator where there is not much difference between winter and summer nights? This article seems to be assuming thev”majority culture.”
I’ve been doing this! I’ll sleep about 3 hours, up for 2, then sleep about 3 to 4 hours. I like that time….however, it’s stressful because you have to get up for work the next day and I always worry about being too fatigued.
Thanks! Now I understand my sleep pattern… ;)
This is interesting. But I wouldn’t say this is gone in today’s world. What about hot countries that close at midday for the siesta? I am a teacher. One summer in my early twenties, I had a job as a part time school secretary for the private school I worked for, which was almost completely closed during the summer months. I worked from 8 to 1pm then went home and had a huge lunch, then slept through the heat of the day, usually from 2 to around 6 when I got up for supper. Then I went out with friends until all hours of the morning. I’d go to sleep around 2am, get up at 6 rested and ready to go, and have a leisurely breakfast before going to work. It was lovely and I remember it as one of the nicest schedules of my life.
No one mentioned they might have had to get up and put wood on the fire and make sure the fireplace was secure…just a thought…
Sounds like the effect of artificial light.
I find myself doing the same thing I get up for about 2 hrs maybe 3 stimulate my mind then go back to sleep. But because I have to get up early I don’t feel I get enough sleep.
I wonder why the authors never mentioned a possible reason for the two-sleep pattern (especially in winter). This sleep pattern would be ideal for making certain that the family hearth fire stayed lit. Get up, mend the fire, settle in with a pastime while your room warmed a little, then go back to sleep knowing you wouldn’t have dead coals in the morning.
Fascinating article. Thank you. Two questions: If long hours of darkness are required for two-sleep, doesn’t that mean that our ancestors only practiced two-sleep seasonally, during winter? Second, the examples that you give of past cultural references to two-sleep are from England. Is there any evidence that this practice was more wide-spread, say outside of Europe? Thanks again.
“Giving the same respect to the single, eight-hour sleep should be just as effective.”
I’ll bet you’re a morning person. ;-)
I don’t think it’s a matter of respect. My body naturally follows the two-sleep pattern, except I force myself to skip the first sleep because early evening is not a sleeping time. Then I am wakeful from 11pm-2am and end up sleeping eight hours afterwards (yes, until 10 am, also a societal no-no). I then wake functional, but not necessarily rested. To conventional eyes, I am lazy, but I am wide awake (though not energetic) from 11pm-2am, no matter what I do. From now on, I will be less defensive about it. Of course, if I sleep from 7-11 and then stay up for three hours, my husband (who goes to bed at 11) will probably think I’m trying to avoid him…
I’ve been doing research on what changes with a low oxalate diet for about eight years, and have a yahoogroup with almost 9000 people on it, all exploring if a lower oxalate diet will help their health. One of the things that happens with this diet is that the body will slowly release oxalate that is stored in the body, and this release has a cyclical nature to it. Many find that when this is happening to them, they will awaken at 2:30, almost like an alarm clock went off, but they will be wide awake, and feeling like it is the start of a new day. It is a very common occurrence for those who had oxalate issues.
I got into looking at oxalate as a progression of work that I’ve done for the last 18 years studying autism, and you can read our study on oxalate levels in autism that was published in the European Journal of Paediatric Neurology. At least once every few months we get stories of children with autism waking up in the middle of the night while their parents are asleep and leaving the house and starting to wander. That is how a lot of them end up drowning in swimming pools and such.
My father who had Alzheimers, and some other elderly dementia patients also wander at night. I’ve always wondered if that night wandering is related to some rhythm our bodies have in getting rid of oxalate since we have had so many people making that same observation. I’m sure our project will study this in time if we get some collaborators in sleep medicine and see if during these awakenings there is reduced melatonin produced.
But, the story is that many people who reduce dietary oxalate are delighted that after their body has reduced oxalate for a long enought time that they see a return of longer sleep. I suppose on the historical side that it could be that that there was a change in diet in the winter. Potatoes and sweet potatoes are very high in oxalate and may have been eaten more often in winter, perhaps. Could there have been a shift in diet that also accompanied this shift into two sleeps in the winter? Fascinating!
My 19 yr. old autistic daughter has slept this way all of her life and continues to do so. We installed double-keyed deadbolt locks when she was a toddler for her safety. My body would prefer to sleep this way as well, but modern life does not allow the second sleep I crave. I am often in a deep sleep when the alarm sounds.
Thanks very much Susan,
For your response. You will find a great deal of this info plus many, many ideas by reading ‘Lights Out’ by TS Wiley. You will find that winter also extends darkness (possible sleep time), so extending sleep is relatively easy seven months of the year. However, by far, is her emphasis on the importance of nocturnal hormone production to cleanse and repair the human body.
The book yields vast insights …. a hugely simple way to eliminate ALL cancers, by sleeping in the dark and allowing sufficient time (3.5 hrs) for melatonin to trigger the release of thymosin – the immune system’s major hormone. The involvement of the immune cleansing capabilities are likely confined to thymosin release, but oxalate-flushing may indeed by sleep related.
Wiley’s book does have some gaps though. Many people do not live in temperate (many do)-Arctic zones, and must rely on ‘other’ simple methods. Although she does indicate that this is for temperate zone dwellers 7 months of the year, I personally would have wished more thought was directed to:
a) the body’s cleansing system (the lymph) is this network. It often becomes crystallized (80 yrs) and so filled with waste, it will not respond to endocrine gland releases. In this way, each gland becomes an isolate and each release of hormones (for effects on the whole body) become thwarted. [This is like filling a castle mote with sand.]
The lymph system operates only on the back-flow system and is as efficient as the amount of exercise performed in the time used BEFORE sleep. The up-down motion of rope-skipping, rebounding and a slew of aerobics meets this need.
Hormones are fat-soluble compounds and the use of fat-free is deadly. Many illnesses are linked to a vitamin D3 deficit – like ADHD. Adequacy of bile salts, especially taurocholate (not being breast-fed) may be a factor.
b) in tropical latitudes vibrant colors are most evident. These colors are so evident, they are often overlooked as therapeutic agents. Stanley Burrows has many good insights re. this. There is also the use of UV-light as the most biologically influential of light frequencies. At night UV (reflected from the sun) kills most germs and fungal spores
White light from the sun is a composite of 12 precise frequencies. I believe only certain frequencies will trigger melatonin/thymosin shut down. There ARE night colors (4) besides UV. An invention exploiting this could mitigate all kinds of illnesses; irritability with watching tv or computer screens … and induce a bi-phasal sleep pattern.
To legth didn’t reader?
Your article does not mention who the “your” and “we” etc. refer to. Europeans? Africans? South Americans? Tropical? Like all such studies and articles I’ll simply assume it means western Europeans and later Americans!
How about the really long back ancient times?
Thank you SlumberWise for a bit of new information. I agree, it is surprising that it was so common as to have colloquial vocabulary, and practices associated with it. Especially since we have completely forgotten about this practice, and English speakers no longer use the vocabulary describing it.
This is very interesting and I appreciate receiving. I am 91 years of age now. Spend about 11 hours in bed, bit I wake up every couple of hours and spend an hour or more awake and drop back to sleep, so my sleep pattern is really a little weird. Guess this par for the course for some of us elderly.
I did this in grad school and when ever I am working hard at writing even now. I go to bed at 9 wake at 2AM and go back to sleep after 2 or three hours.
I’ve slept like this my whole life. Now I that I know it’s not abnormal I feel better about it, but still can’t reconcile it with my modern work schedule.
Maybe the reason for two sleeps was that in the middle of the night in the winter SOMEONE had to get up and stoke the fire. HAHA
Excellent reading! Just came back from a cabin in the woods with no electricity and felt a strong desire to sleep twice. :)
You mentioned that 2 sleeps would be difficult in the summer. Did our ancestors only use 2 sleeps during the winter months?
I can understand why they double slept in the winter months just to put another log or two on the fire. Plus staying in bed under their blankets of furs was way warmer than walking around in their uninsulated wood cabins back then. A older couple or a childless couple could easily pull off double sleeping. But parents once your kids are asleep you tippy toe around to make sure they will not wake back up.
Yet they couldn’t quite reach 40 years of age…
that is not accurate.
infant mortality was so high it skews the average. if you made it through childhood, you were likely to live well past 40.
Living past 40 was true for most men but there was a significant loss of women’s lives due to complications of childbirth. This is still true in the few remaining populations who live totally “primitive” lives.
I wake up in the middle of the night. I watch TV. Then I go back to sleep. This doesn’t happen as often but I will probably try reading or studying from now on. My problem tho, is I tend to sleep later when I do. I HAVE to get up early. I am going to see how I can adjust my habits. Very curious find. Thanks.
I find that I also do a two sleep night when I go to bed earlier than normal. I’ll sleep for 4 hours, go read or listen to radio streams on my computer, and go back to bed after an hour, sleeping another 4 hours. I guess I now know why this happens. :-)
Waking in the middle of the night when you sleep outside-not such a bad thing.
As I’ve aged I find I’ve been increasingly each night entering a two sleep mode. I was worried about it somewhat till this article. Apparently, it’s a natural inheritance not an aberration.
Cool article! Really enjoyed reading this!
I find I do this often. The article is encouraging. What I don’t do is eschew electric lights. I also live in Florida, which is enough closer to the equator that longer winter nights are not a fact of life–the days are close to the same length year-round. Perhaps the amount of light is not the only factor.
Fascinating. I frequently wake up in the middle of the night, and get the urge to do some writing before I feel like going back to bed. I always thought it was a sleep disorder, but maybe it’s just my genetic memory kicking in.
Interestingly, my grandmother (who was born in the 1880s) was almost completely blind from glaucoma late in life, which put her in almost complete darkness. She would routinely go to bed around 10pm, wake up at 2am to clean the house and do the cooking, and then go back to bed around 4am to rise around 8am. She didn’t do this when she was full-sighted. Wonder if it has anything to do with the darkness. Very interesting stuff.
Wow! This is really interesting.
I sometimes wake for a couple hours in the middle of the night. Sometimes it’s enjoyable, but other times, I flip out worrying that I won’t be rested if I allow myself to get up for a while… which certainly doesn’t create a restful night.
Next time that happens, I’m just gonna chill out and revel in my primal sleep patterns!
~Tui
Maybe it’s mentioned and I didn’t see it, but how far back in history do we believe this to be a normal procedure?
This explains a lot! I love it! I almost do this now … my second sleep it so sound.
I’ve been working nightshift many years, and began 2 sleeping every day in the last few years. There is some conflict with modern schedules, but learned to adapt and not fight the rythm.
I do this every evening after a day of hard physical labor. I never knew I was totally retro….
Anyone who’s ever slept in a space heated by a wood fire knows why two sleeps are common, especially in winter – you wake because the fire’s gone out, and get up to build it up again.
Was it a goat?
I would think that pre-1800’s after a very physical day of labor, they would have been ready to go to sleep at sunset and then wake up in the middle of the night. This makes sense. No sitting in the evening watching prime time tv, lol.
So, do people have less instances of the winter blues this way? Also, any thoughts about this in relation to siesta culture?
Interesting read, in America today we call this insomnia, Stephen king even wrote a book on the same title, perhaps its something to think about. We stay up too late watching TV, go to work half awake, we drink huge amounts of caffeine laden drinks in an effort to wake up. We take medications or over the counter aides to go to sleep, only to wake up during the night, insomnia or the wobble effect.
Paragraph 11, “form” should be “from”. Fascinating article!
The next to last statement in “The History” ‘form’ or ‘from’
Very interesting, especially since I tossed and turned all night last night and could not sleep until after the alarm went off :(
I sometimes wake up at 2 and read until 4.
I’ve experienced periods of exhaustion most every day since I was 12. It would be interesting to know if I’d be able to function like a “normal” human being if I had two sleeps.
The humble Farmer
785 River Road
St. George, ME 04860
I have done this for years, still do. I take a “nap” for an hour or so and then get up for an hour or so then go to bed for the night.
Perhaps this is why the “nanna nap” seems so appealing. I also find I frequently wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep for a few hours. I’ve always put it down to the fact that during my twenties I worked shift work, and during my thirties worked a daytime job and a night/weekend consultancy during which I had to be alert for long and odd hours.
I love two sleeps. I don’t get to do it often, and I don’t do it intentionally, but when it happens, that middle of the night when I’m up is definitely my most relaxing time of the day. I get up and write or read and there is no one else up to ask me to do things for them. I wish every night I would naturally wake up at 2:30 in the morning.
This was a great and interesting post.
I often sleep four hours and then wake up for several hours going back to bed around 5 am
I often wake up at night for a couple of hours then go back to sleep. I don’t usually get up but either listen to the radio or read. I live in the mid-Atlantic in a big city, if that matters.
Thought – you might consider surveying current or “returned” Peace Corps volunteers who live(d) in areas with no electric light. I lived in a remote rural village in Nepal for two years and noticed people were often up in the dark talking or doing things, then sleeping more. Nepal is at the latitude of Florida so the difference between summer or winter daylight is not so pronounced as at higher latitudes. But there are Peace Corps volunteers at higher latitudes perhaps in areas still without power, such as Mongolia.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia. I had a mud hut and no electric light. The sun set around 7:30 and came up early year round. I would go to bed early, wake up in the middle of the night, do some reading, drawing or guitar playing, then fall back asleep. The period between sleeps was exceptionally relaxing. I haven’t slept like that since.
Back in the 90s I was visiting Las Vegas and the curtains in the hotel room were very thin and lots of bright lights outside, so I had very little sleep which only made my jetlag worse. When I got back home I decided that I would learn to have a night’s sleep in a bright environment. There was a streetlight outside my window, so I left the curtains open. My bedroom was quite bright all night. It took me four weeks to be able to sleep the full night without any problems.
This explains a lot to me about my sleep patterns!
After my husband died, I started waking after three or four hours of sleep. At first I lay there tossing and turning, counting sheep; trying to go back to sleep! Then I decided not to fight it! I wake up, fix some oatmeal or toast, a hot cup of tea and watch insomniac news (sleep is over rated). Or read. This usually puts me right to sleep. Or FB! I tell myself to rest and relax. To enjoy this time. Before long, I am ready to go back to sleep !!! This only works if I get To bed early enough. Sometimes I end up with six hours of sleep. Which I can do for a few days and still function. On those days I may take a nap! Especially on days when I know that I want to go out that night!!! Once in a while I come home from work and fall asleep! Then wake up, for my Mid Sleep and then go back to sleep!!! It all makes sense to me now!!!
Fascinating article.
this explains such a lot.
i reside north of the arctic circle at 70`n we have thus ample opportunity to follow this twotiming scheme, it`s the only way to stay in good health during the dark season. in summer i sleep much less. total 4-5 hours a day. our soscial systems however totaly oppose a healty living. and the daylight savinghour correction is an absurdity of pervert proportions.
I agree…. «Daylight Saving» [sic.] is a huge nuisance and a pile of horsefeathers. The politicians are just too lazy and cowardly to get rid of it!
Move to Arizona!
I had no idea! Thanks for sharing that.
Now I think I’ll go have a nap …
I have had several bouts of unemployment over the last 7 or 8 years. After the first couple of weeks unemployed, I fall into the two sleep system, sleeping four hours, waking for two and then sleeping for another three or four hours. I believe our method of sleeping in one chunk has more to do with Modern Life and the jobs we have, the extra curricular activities and family duties. We can’t afford more sleep than six or seven hours in a chunk. In the article you refer to the “sleep debt”, which is a product of Modern Life. Isn’t this an indicator of not being able to devote more hours to rest?
WOW! I’ve been sleeping this way for years. I thought this was abnormal. I didn’t realize that it was once a common practice. It works well for me.
Thank you; interesting article, food for thought.
I sleep as described in the article…I’m up now in fact before I go back to bed…
What puzzles me about this is how people did anything much in that time before electric lighting – in winter it would be pitch black and cold – hardly inducive to getting up to light candles and read, let alone visit neighbours.
Back then, people were far more used to dark and cold. Houses were heated, but not at all to modern standards.
Growing up, my body always needed lots of sleep. I would sometimes come home from school at 3pm, lay on the bed and wake up the next morning. It happened many times every year, but now that I am forty, it does not happen as much. I still come home from work and sleep for eighteen hours if I have a day off, but it is less often now. I am still tired though. I always wondered if this sleeping I do is genetic, so thank you for the article!
Written at 3 AM after my 1st sleep. This pattern bothered me for a while, but since I am retired and rarely have schedule demands I went with it and now I just rest when I’m tired and wake when I’m rested. Nice to read that this pattern is old and normal, can’t say I’m too surprised :)
When I was a young boy and still in 7th grade I used to get up in the middle of the night and do my homework. I initially did this since I was just too lazy to do the work during the day and playing with friends seemed more important. Nevertheless my grades rose and somehow I had a deeper understanding of what I did. Sadly this only lastet until I was old enough to go on partys and thus destroyed my regular sleep cycle. I even had a talk with our school psychologist about it. She seemed to think that it was incredible and even asked me if I could imagine to advance to 8th grade… but again my friends were more important. I guess sleep nowadays is primarily determined by our social life.
Wow….this has always seemed to be my personal sleep pattern and that is with electric/artificial light…very interesting article! Thanks :)
that’s me every night, go to bed about 8 then up around 3/3.30 go back to bed 6ish till 9 thought something was wrong but reading this article not, thank you for enlightment
Well… clearly the most over-looked item that comes to mind was a REASON to wake ‘mid-sleep’.
Assuming these pre-1880’s living did not have central heat… this would be about the mid range of warmth loss as well… so a valid reasoning would be… it got too damn cold to sleep… you stirred, lit or added more logs, tended the fire.. then once again warm… returned to bed.
This is not merely just assumption… as a family ranch I visit during the winters is located in a very (dark) rural area, and until a few years ago… heated by wood fire at night. So… this double sleeping is well known to me… but the presumptions of the writer seems to be more about literary attention than factual practicality.
-Big.
Nice essay. Is it possible that history has recorded a common sleep disorder? For instance, sleep maintenance insomnia is very common. It has been less than a decade since science concretely elucidated the circadian nature of human sleep in exquisite detail from the “genes” to the cellular chemistry. Systematic, well-controlled studies of sleep in ten’s of thousands of people indicate that the “natural” pattern consists of 4-5 sleep cycles over 7-8 hours. Science has also reported significant deviation from the “biological” pattern increases the risk of disease and mortality. The risk might be comparable to what happens if your car engine is slightly out of tune. The engine keeps running … just not quite as well as it could. That engine is less efficient. That engine will fail before an engine that is well-tuned. Modern medicine interprets the inability to stay asleep frequently for a month or longer as “insomnia”.
Historical personalities did not have the benefit of knowing that what they were describing was a sleep problem that contributed to the slow erosion of their health ? Perhaps the interpretation of history (e.g. two sleeps are ‘normal’) should be tempered by the contemporary insight that history appears to be describing a very common and potentially treatable medical condition?
A very interesting fact. How did you learn about it? I would love to see more of the references.
Interesting topic. I have come across this concept of two sleeps about a year or so a go and found it interesting then. If I wasn’t such a workaholic, I would certainly partake in two sleeps, especially if I knew I would be resting for 12 hours! :). Thanks again.
I am sure that the exhausted miner…farm labourer…mill workers would have loved the leisure to get up in the middle of the night to visit the neighbours… But like the workers in the relatively humane working conditions of the railway works at Swindon.Wiltshire ..UK they started work at 6 a.m. and left work at 6 p.m.They found time to build a church in their spare time…look after their families. Work in their gardens…I wonder if someone ever told them that they could spend a coupe of hours in the night writing or chatting……..Whole article is pretentious piffle.
Jose, I appreciate the sentiment and I bridle at middle-class bias where appropriate but I don’t think this article is guilty of that. A scan through the literature of the time proves it isn’t pretentious piffle, as the article points out. Factory workers did their job, went to church possibly, went to the pub probably, but I strongly doubt they built churches in their spare time (I suppose that was a facetious example, but the point holds). Stonemasons built the churches, women certainly looked after the children exclusively, looked after the home, and grew the vegetables. As the article states, this predates the Industrial Revolution, which probably had a lot to do with changing to one sleep (along with evening time safe leisure thanks to street lighting in cities). In fact, I suspect that modern working hours (by which I mean post-Industrial Revolution) had a lot to do with the change to one sleep, probably more than street lighting, which of course was very restricted, even in 1900s UK (certainly confined to major cities). It’s also true that the early sleep was the deeply restorative one, so quite possible that six hours sufficed for the first sleep. It’s noted in literature that for some people the first sleep was enough. Almost all factory workers in UK were illiterate before the 1870 Education Act but they may well have chatted/had sex etc. Given that they lived only minutes from the workplace, since they had to walk there pre invention of the bicycle, sleeping 8-2 then 3-5.00 or thereabouts would have been perfectly feasible.
You’re fussy; you need a nap.
Heel interessant!
Physicians a few centuries ago said the time between the two sleeps was best for sex and most likely to lead to conception. It was also given over to visiting friends, to snacking, smoking and prayer. The optional Muslim Tajjud prayer is said to be the most full of merit. It makes a lot of sense if you’ve already slept a few hours and are in a calm, meditative frame of mind.
You said that these 2 sleep cycles need LONG periods of darkness to work. Not true for ME, at least!
Before I had ever even heard of this type of sleep pattern, I had been living it.
I would fall asleep relatively early (like “normal” people do) and then wake up anytime between 1:00 AM and 3:30 AM. I would go downstairs to our office, play a little on the computer or do crafts, household chores, etc, then go back to bed.
I actually find this pattern of benefit to me, as I have arthritis all through my rib cage, and lying down too long causes bad pain and stiffness.
I have been sleeping like this( bi-modal ) for about 6 to 8 months now and I feel much better . It sure beats the insomnia I was experiencing before ! Perhaps my great great great great great grandparents knew a lot more than I thought .
And *I always was told that waking at 2am was a symptom of Major Depression. Now I know better!
Fascinating! Thank you!
The 2 sleep pattern is very familiar to me and it’s nice to know our ancestors did the same! It has never bothered me being awake during the night, I just read or spend time on the computer. (I never switch off my computer at night so that it is available for use should I wake.) Sleeping after the sun rises is no problem either when I’m tired enough.
I’d have to disagree with your conclusion. Length of daylight and the way it cycles throughout the year seems to correspond with seasonal differences in the way our hormones work. Primates have not hibernated since way back in the evolutionary tree, but some of the underlying hormonal/neurotransmitter mechanisms are still there, and some researchers believe that a major cause of modern chronic disease is us living year-round as if it is late summer. What does a hibernating animal do in late summer? Get fat and sometimes diabetic. (The high blood sugar lowers your freezing point.)
Just thought I’d throw that out there. It kind of amazes me that the same people who are all scientific and stuff will embrace evolution but reject the idea that the human animal does certain things for sound biological reasons and that maybe being technologically advanced and logical aren’t good enough reasons to throw those old habits away.
Hmm. Maybe I was onto something in high school. I used to do “two sleeps” and get up at around 2 am, have a quick wake up shower, do my geometry homework, and go back to bed until 6:30. It was the only way that I could do that homework and comprehend it.
Well this explains my Nap time that I must have to be productive. If I got my 2 sleeps at night, Maybe I would not need that 1:30 nap in the afternoon. I must have a couch in all of my offices where ever I have worked through out my working years. I produce Special Events world wide and People thought it was for meetings and as laid back way of doing things here in the south. They never saw the special pillow and “Blankey” in the Credenza !
Thank You for shining some light on our Bodies Clock History.
Makes a lot of sense, I feel more inclined to want to go to sleep at 8 pm any season though. But if it happens and I do fall asleep and sleep good for a few hours, I wake up not being able to fall back to sleep most nights. I would then wake for a few hours and go back to sleep. But not all the time feeling refreshed after doing so but think more refreshed then I would had I slept 6-9 hrs. I totally get this, but its a shame that with our busy lifestyles it is not used as much any more do to the time everything needs to be done in the morning, I think this is why we stress so much about sleep.
I read that Einstein slept like this. Now given the choice of work hours, I am also adopting this
style naturally. It seems to make more sense that the body and brain might want to pace itself for
conservations sake.
Interesting. This is something new for me.
I have been sleeping this way all my life. About 11 hours in bed, four hours of sleep at first, then two hours awake, an hour or so sleeping, up for an hour to help get my kids off to school, then and a half hours asleep. I general get up feeling rested. If I can’t get the final sleep, I feel lousy. I assumed this was just my own circadian anomaly, but apparently not.
What’s even more funny (and still an existing aspect for much of southern Europe) is that the “two sleep” cycle is technically part of a natural *three*-sleep cycle — one that includes a mid-day nap of 1-2 hours, which also serves to “re-set” the body-clock and keep things in proper rhythm. We all should be sleeping in very different ways/patterns than we do; ideally, we should be getting 8-10 hours of sleep/rest each day, broken up into approximately two 3-5 hour parts, with a 1-2 hour nap-sleep as needed… ;)
I agree.
That was interesting, i think we should go back to that , We spend way to much time up running about, It may even give us better quality sleep ( rest) so we can function better.
I have done this since i was a very very little girl. I still do. Oh how the dr’s said i should sleep all night. Oh how my parents tried!! I studied best inbetween sleeps. It is nice to finally know that this IS NORMAL!! Thanks i wil never stress about it again and enjoy my quiet time when the rest of the world is asleep and i’m studying.
A major oversight that modern work schedules are not mentioned.
The comment that two sleeps requires darkness makes no sense. I like many people sleep with the lights on.
most children are raised that way, afternoon nap. I think it even happens in school. so if we expect our children to sleep in full light we as adults should too.
I also don’t have any trouble sleeping with the lights on, though I like to have light in the room when I wake up, which is why I don’t like thick curtains. My mother, in the contrary is not able to sleep well if it’s not almost totally dark.
I am also thinking that they needed to keep the fires going, I am saying this because several years back I decided to use only wood heat through a winter and I had to get up four hours into the night and keep the fire going. I am thinking that since this was there only source of light and heat that it was common to keep the home fires burning by adding wood between the first and second sleep.
“this was there only source” Please learn the difference between there and their!! Children read these postings too and we are all teachers.
Not enough pictures, article too long without visual support.
TLdr
Me need pictures. Me no like read only words.
“very cool person j.d moyer”
hahahhaha.
This means that the ancients had much more time to prayer or commune with God or angels. The calmness allowed dreams in which visions from God could be received. Thus ancients may have had a natural connection with God that we do no.
No matter why the change happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished form common knowledge.
Should be from not form.
Good article and very interesting but just wanted to point out a typo.
fROm was only one of several «tyops» but more disconcerting for me was the chronic omission of the possessive apostrophe.
While «speek ‘mericun-boi» SpelChek may approve this sloppiness, correct English has not yet formally jettisoned this important diacritical.
I’m a bit baffled by your criticism, MAD. Perhaps corrections have already been made by means of work-arounds since your comment, but I can find only a few possessives in the article at all, let alone those that could have been missing an apostrophe when you wrote this. I have found ‘your’, ‘their’, ‘his’, ‘our’, and the possessive ‘its’, none of which require an apostrophe (e.g., “…its effect on…”, in the 2nd paragraph under ‘The Science’, is correct).
Aha! At the end of ‘The Science’, I found “our ancestors sleep patterns”, which should have an apostrophe (ancestors’). One instance does not qualify as chronic, so please tell me what you are seeing. What am I missing?
Gives new meaning to the phrase, ‘long winter’s nap’.
Well, finally at last. Someone is describing the way I have always slept. Good to hear I might be normal.
Would this mean that people slept less in the summer? Was the two-sleeps a winter thing? I remember reading a traditional Jewish tale that King David would awaken in the night to read/study his Torah scrolls. This might explain why. Interesting.
Gordon,
Another passage in the Talmud discusses that the best time to mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem is at night, just after midnight. This prayer time is one of the first Rabbinical commandments listed in the Shulchan Aruch – Orach Chaim, the universally accepted code of Jewish Law. Jews also traditionally wake at night during the days leading up the the Jewish New Year to say prayers of repentance. This 2 sleep pattern is clearly seen in Jewish Law as ideal.
King David himself implied as much in the 119th Psalm: “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I wait for Your words. My eyes anticipate the night watches, That I may meditate on Your word.” (Psalm 119:147-148 NASB)
The Rabbis did not assume that King David woke up without help. They said that his harp hung over his bed, and a midnight breeze caused the strings to vibrate loudly enough to wake him. See http://etzion.org.il/vbm/english/archive/taggada/09taggada.htm and https://www.templeinstitute.org/kinnor_david.htm
Ever heard of siesta? A huge part of the world’s population does 2 sleeps a day.
Now that I am alone and retired this two-sleep method has come naturally. I worrried about it for a while and figured I really couldn’t do anything about it as the wake time felt so natural. I just get busy doing projects until I’m tired again. Seems like I’m just reliving my great-grandparents night-time habits. Thank you for the enlightenment.
Why would daylight make bimodal sleeping “difficult, or even impossible”? Plenty of people sleep during the day. Third shift workers do it as a normal pattern. Many people nap during the day. I once lived above the arctic circle, where there was 24-hour day during the summer.
Also – many people with normal day/night cycles do not really sleep in the dark. I am amazed at how many people use a night light, or leave the hall or bathroom light on. Conversely, if you want dark during the day, it’s easy enough to draw blinds, or even just pull the bedcovers up.
This is both very interesting and very reassuring. My natural sleep inclination is bed between 800pm and about 700ish am — the waking time is variable by weather and time of year as both affect the amount of sunlight reaching my room.
I naturally sleep in two blocks as described here with generally at least an hour of waking time during which I may work (I’m a science fiction author), play games on the computer, and/or eat. I’ve noticed I cannot fall back asleep until I’ve eaten or drunk something (usually a glass of milk); I’m actually more hungry during the night time fast than I am at dinner time.
For a long time I’ve thought there was something really bizarre about this; people look at me funny when I say I am in bed before 9pm. Thank you for showing me just how normal this pattern can be.
And oh yes, I often get my best ideas and do my best problem solving during first sleep! It’s amazing how helpful this pattern is for solving writer’s block!
Good Grief!
Is there any evidence for this in other cultures around the world?
Nice article – I suggest you all to pleaee go and ask any of your Muslim Friend about “Tahajud Prayers” or “Qayam Al Layl” you’d be surprise to know the answer :-)
This is very interesting. And helpful! I often wake up around 2 or 2:30 and fret. Now I am going to get up!
Should we revive two sleeps that consume a large portion of a 24 hour cycle- are you kidding?
Corporate America would not allow that. They would prefer we sleep 4 hours per 24 hour cycle and work 20. We are robots living in the Matrix.
YOU ARE SO RIGHT!!
Then leave it and do your own thing! You don’t have to suckle from the corporate teat. Just expect a lot more personal stress & stares from your neighbours as they won’t understand.
It’s not just corporate America, it’s the schools too. They start too early and load kids up with homework. My kids don’t get enough sleep and it’s unhealthy.
Then try homeschooling, or other alternative to traditional school.
So perhaps they only had two sleeps during the longer winter nights and one sleep in the summer? And if greater sexual activity is attributed to “two sleeps”, do birth dates reflect a higher % of conceptions in the winter time?
I lived in the South of Brazil for a few years and although it had some bitterly cold nights, the winter wasn’t long enough to justify heating systems in the houses. So, during those bitter nights when outside was 30 degrees and under the covers maybe 50’s, we would wake up because of the coldness and it would just naturally lead up to sex.
The highest birthrates are between late October and early December. This would coincide with equally lengthy winter nights in February through April. Also- no one mentioned that two sleeps may have been a coping mechanism as a result of babies and tending to them through the night. Certainly this was a time when more children were born as there was no really effective form of birth control. And infant mortality rates were very high- which resulted in more babies being conceived- to carry on the family name and tend to the farm/home. Being awoken just a few hours into the night is most definitely common practice with babies- as is the hope of obtaining more sleep after.
There are many studies that say a majority of couples prefer to have sex upon first waking. This seems like a direct correlation to the 2 sleep pattern of the past. Like the articles states, a person is often in a peaceful meditative like mentality. This is a nice way to be to have sex.
Perhaps couples who have sex in the middle of the night are simply living out their natural instinct to have 2 sleeps? Could be an interesting follow-up article!
also makes it easier to have sex when you have young children in the house.
Interesting. I want to try it now!
(Also, second to last paragraph under History says FORM instead of FROM.)
A lot of Muslims still wake up at night to pray. They never stopped doing it.
It is actually part of prophetic tradition in Islam to get two sleeps by either taking a short afternoon nap, or waking up in the last third of the night to perform prayers and then going back to bed. Both were practiced by Prophet Muhammed are recommended acts for Muslims.
Same is true of Christian contemplative orders in the Catholic church, which sleep only a few hours at a stretch at night, and get up for prayer services, which has been going on for centuries. Maybe this was instituted back when it was normal for people to get up for a few hours in the middle of every night. It makes perfect sense in a world where night would last for 12 hours, or more in the winter(especially in Europe which way up in the northern hemisphere, and there was no electric light.
Sleep deprivation is key to brainwashing and mind control. It was common practice to indoctrinate new recruits into the military and to break down prisoner’s resistance. Just sayin’
Very interesting article. This assumes that all our ancestors were European or had European sleep habits.
Just recently I moved from Michigan to Arizona. However for about 2 weeks before I left It seemed I would always wake about 3-4:30 wide awake,But when 9:00 a clock rolled around I struggled to stay awake. After a 2-3 hour nap (as I called it) I was more than fine for the rest of the day. Until I read this article I thought it was really abnormal.
Some of us are capable of sleeping in the day. Not as restful if that’s all you get, though.
I have been a two-sleeper most of my life – even during the warmer months when there is more light. In my 20s, I discovered that two-sleeping was what my body naturally wanted to do. I always thought the habit was weird, but now it’s nice to know that it’s merely “old-school”!
The other benefit to a two-sleep pattern is warmth. In those dark winter nights, the fire will usually burn itself down or even out over 8 hours and your home would become very cold. Those who heat with wood stoves or fireplaces exclusively must either suffer cold mornings or someone has to get up in the middle of the night and stoke the fire. While you’re awake, why not put a pot of water on the stove so that you have hot water in the morning? This is a good time for a pipe, a snack, a drink and, since the internet is down, a book. Yes, electric light changes the sleep needs of society but so does the modernization of home heating systems.
My grandfather was pretty good, but he was not great-great-great-great.
Fascinating! If you want a further edit, just before The Science “vanished FORM …” clearly s
hould be from.
BUT if you haven’t got light for the early evening why are you allowed light in the middle of the night? Plus reading by candle light in bed is a great way to strain your eyes and a fire hazard.
And what do studies of people living nomad hunter/gather life say? And those living in Asia who did not historically go to midnight mass?
Eight consecutive hours could be fatal for an H/G band (sans fencing or other attributes of a village). Tending the fire, then, would be a matter of keeping nocturnal carnivores at bay.
As to the light of burning candles or fires, they tend to the red end of the spectrum, and light in that spectrum prompts the conversion of serotonin into melatonin. (Blue light, like that of a tv or monitor or incandescent bulb produces that opposite effect). The loss of light would, then, signal not just the end of the day’s work, but would induce sleep, especially if it closely followed a meal. (Tryptophan > hydroxytryptophan > serotonin > melatonin).
Sounds very scientific, except: that mechanism doesn’t seem to explain sleep patterns in most other species. Horses & other herbivores seem to sleep in short episodes for 15 min or so recurrently throughout the 24 hr day. Carnivores sleep most of the day and are only awake for a few hrs per day. Sleep should be considered the normal, baseline state of the brain (energy efficiency) and wakefulness the exceptional state (need for protection & food procurement, etc). Survival requires the optimum balance between the two states. We should not be asking “what induces sleep?” but rather, “What induces wakefulness?”
So this explains why I sleep from 10PM-2AM, then don’t get back to sleep until around 6AM (which unfortunately shortly coincides when I’m expected to get up and face the modern world at 7AM.) I’m a throwback. Thanks for the explanation (and the good excuse.) Seriously, it had worried me but now it’s a little easier to accept.
I did this all through college and when I was single (not a mom). I actually planned for it because the hours between 2am and 5:30am were my most productive. I used this time for study.
I have very similar sleeping habits Toni. Your comments are exactly what I was thinking as I was reading this article.
I have done 2 sleeps for many years … all it requires is either a sleep mask or a nice dark room.
I did this for many years when nursing my babies. Now I do it again, on a slightly different schedule, for work. I find it generally works quite well for me… but then again, I don’t have to be up at 8am for work.
I have been doing this for so many years now (waking to my own personal bio-rhythm) that the idea of being woken by an alarm clock is appalling.
When driving cross country (living in the West and in College in the East) I found it difficult and dangerous to drive near sunset or sunrise, and so deliberately set a pattern of driving for 8 hours and then sleeping four. Full time employment makes such an arrangement impossible, but when working for myself at home I frequently fall back into that pattern.
In parts of Latin America the tradition of Siesta is 90 degrees to that with the sleeping times just after noon and midnight and goes back for quite a ways.
Take a look at the frame story of the 1001 Nights. Shaharazad has arranged with her sister to wait until they wake up in the night, then ask for a story–and the king who has just married her and was planning to have her executed the next day is also wakeful, so gives permission for the story, which ends with him wanting to hear more the next night, so he doesn’t execute her. Repeat for a thousand nights.
This way of sleeping would be ideal for couples. Men are often more ready for sex in the morning and many women are more romantic in the evening. Might save marriages.
Or you could stay married and sleep with other people.
That seems more a marriage ender, not saver.
One can stay married and sleep with other people…..as long as they just sleep!
This is fascinating. Thank you.
If you are looking at cultures outside of Europe…take a look at the Yanomamo…I remember reading a book by an anthropologist that described precisely this sleeping pattern. “Sleep” would last roughly 12 hours with a 2-3 hour break in the middle of the night where a Shaman might give a sermon to everyone in the tribe.
Great article that explains my sleep patterns as I get older. When backpacking in the wilderness, I’m in the tent by 8:30, wake at 3:00, read, think clearly, or watch the stars and sleep at 4:30 till the sun warms the tent. This seems more natural than our single sleep period which is convenient to an industrial society, all day work schedule. Also getting up in the middle of the night to tend the fire, pee, and ward off pedators was probably necessary to our ancestors. Don’t listen to those who insist you’ll die young unless you sleep 8 hours at a shot!!
Thank you! My daughter posted this on my FB page. I have always had a problem with my sleep patterns. I will get up at night for a few hours do housework or reading then go back to bed. Sometimes when I was working, I would stay up too long and it was time to get ready to leave for work! Yes, very exalting! At times, I would need medication to help me sleep and rest. My adult children have problems with their sleep patterns but none as bad as I did. Now, I am retired and have no problems. I make my own schedule! It’s good to know that my sleep pattern came from my ancestors and this was a normal way of life back in the day.
so I’m normal !!! I can stop stressing my two sleep pattern
I find that as I grow older (I am now 76) the two sleep pattern is a great way to stay up with the world. I still work and find that when I get home around 5~6pm and take a nap for an hour or two then I get up, eat, watch TV or what ever is the activity which is going on in my house. Around 10~11pm I return to bed and read for a little while 30~45 min, I fall asleep until 6~7am in the morning. Then it is off to work and a full day of keeping up with the youngsters in my shop. Everyone says “how do you do it, a man of your age”. I twice sleep and keep an active schedule and enjoy my life.
I am 72 years of age and if I go to bed about 10 p.m. I wake up around 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. I read and also make plans, write my concerns and then I pray. I usually go back to bed about 5:30 and then I sleep another hour and 1/2–and I feel fine. Good to hear I am not the only one.