"Despite near-constant headlines about the prevalence of sleep problems, Ekirch has previously argued that, in some ways, the 21st Century is a golden age for sleep – a time when most of us no longer have to worry about being murdered in our beds, freezing to death, or flicking off lice, when we can slumber without pain, the threat of fire, or having strangers snuggled up next to us."
Not sure if your comment was partially made as a joke or not but I can certainly attest that having to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning because of lice is not ideal.
My parents live in the (Eastern-European) countryside and because of the environment (basically all sorts of animals living around the house) they started having lice since 2-3 years, I think. You eventually get used to them, one of the keys is to tuck (I think that's the word) your sleeping pants well into your socks, so that the damn beasts won't make their way up on your skin from bellow. Sleeping with the bedside lamp turned on seems to also have helped, but not sure if that was my placebo or not.
Conditions may apply. If you're homeless or living in a country with ongoing war, disease or hunger the likelihood that you have to worry about any of these things goes up dramatically.
Indeed, but being homeless(*) or living in a country with ongoing war, disease or hunger is much less likely today than at any point in history. Not only that, but if you were to be suffering those circumstances, is there any period in the past in which you would be better off than you would be today?
(*) for a modern understanding as to what constitutes homelessness
Yeah but one could argue that it's a time of more headaches because we have it so well that we have plenty of time to think about our lives. While people of old were busy working and were more exhausted than we are today.
Of course this is the very definition of a 1st world problem but I think it holds some water in modern western society.
I tried this for a few weeks in college and it was a pretty neat experience. I slept first from 9-12 and then 3-7/8. Those three hours between 12 and 3 ended up being super productive - I was very energized and had creative ideas about whatever I was doing. I had to stop because going to bed at 9 in college was like kissing your social life goodbye, but even these days if I naturally wake up in the middle of the night the hours that follow end up being amazing for my productivity. I think I'll try it out again.
Were you able to fall back asleep at 3? Some of my most productive hours are later at night, but then even when I'm tired and decide to go to bed, my mind keeps running.
I sometimes do sleep from 20h-23h, but I always have problems going back to sleep at 3. Lying awake until 6am really isn't helpful if you want to have productive days as well as productive nights.
Same. Taking naps anywhere from 19:00-20:30 all the way to 22:30-00:30 has been amazingly healing experience both for my body and mind but there's no way in hell I fall asleep at 3:00. I feel at my peak then. When I take these naps I can't fall asleep earlier than 7:30-8:00...
The article does not mention it, but mothers with small children have to nurse babies every couple of hours, even at night. So given that in middle ages, families had "copious numbers of children" (quote from the article), it is for sure that mothers would need to get up to feed a baby. And then possibly the whole family would woke up too. And if multiple generations were living in the same house, then even more probably there were babies too. I can imagine such a basic need being the root of the habit.
As a parent of an 8 month old baby who wakes up literally every hour - what is that solid line from 10pm till 6am at around 10 weeks :P Feels like fantasy
Hah as a husband and father whose wife coslept and exclusively breastfed for the first year, this has little merit. My wife one day commented on how it was great how our 6 month old daughter slept through the night and didn’t complain or ask for food. My wife quite literally breast fed in her sleep.
Waking up to feed the baby is a very WEIRD way of looking at the world.
I'm not sure how typical your experience is. My daughter needed to be fed every few hours for the first 11 months. Both my wife and I were freaking zombies. It was rough on us. My wife would basically get a couple of hours every time the baby went down, but no long and peaceful sleep.
In talking with friends, it would seem like our experience was extra crappy and yours is uncharacteristically mild. So the reality may be that many have to wake up at least once in the night to feed, so 2nd sleep kinda makes sense to me here. Not that I'm saying it's where the phrase comes from.
Given that, power point of this thread, people pretty much went to bed at sunset, at European latitude that would mean a long night much of the year with kids wanting food and adults being sufficiently rested late at night. Once satiated amid a quiet daze of food/sex/meditation, they’d likely doze back off until daybreak. Two sleeps seems quite sensible without electricity’s prolonged days.
It’s funny that you mention that. When I was reading the article, it occurred to me how biphasic (or multiphasic) sleep resembles the schedule of a newborn’s parents. To me the lack of artificial lighting is a more compelling explanation, but who knows there could be many factors that contributed to the habit.
The parent not caring for the baby learns to sleep through. My wife and I swap roles when we wean babies, we need just a couple nights to get used to the changed role.
Sleep through baby crying? I found my own babies cries to be a complete NMI.
When we had infants I'd go back to sleep pretty well instantly (co-sleeping, with baby on a side-cot at bed level; baby breastfed, not by me) but in general one would wake to the little snuffles that precede the crying (I guess that helps to calm them before they get in a tizzy [in a state, brought on by their own actions, crying in this case]).
I sleep through thunderstorms without stirring.
I'm a few years out from dealing with crying babies and still if there's crying in the background, that sounds like one of my kids, I'll pop-up like a meerkat. The sound even gets though (non noise-cancelling) headphones when I'm gaming, though I won't know what I've heard until I take them off.
It helps if the father is a night owl who works from home. Back when we had a baby (20 now) I preemptively bottle fed her at 2 am. She didn't wake up other than sucking from the bottle. Neither did her mother who was sleeping next to her.
Multiple generations also slept on the same bed, I'm surprised the theory is two sleeps and not multiple sleeps. Not that humans haven't habituated to group sleeps in tight quarters, but one bed feels qualitatively different than a bunch of tired submariners cramped in individual bunks or some similar arrangement.
Babies, on average, only need multiple feedings a night through the first few months. Even if there was a new baby for one mother every year, that would be multiple feedings only for 3 months out of every 12 months.
Just like parents today, people would power through that, and not make that a habitual sleeping pattern.
I am not saying this makes the hypothesis of the origin being in parenthood true, just that it does not make it false either :)
The mother would either sleep with the baby or have it easily retrievable without significantly stirring. Dozing while nursing would provide some compromise between rest for her and the household, and enjoying/enduring some thinking time.
I believe this theory is largely thought false nowadays, or phrased too strongly at least.
I myself have weird sleep cycles. I prefer to stay up into the night and wake up around 12:00, but I vary my sleeping hours by up to 4 hours or so. I go to sleep when I feel like it, and don't feel much discomfort by falling asleep at different times. It leads to weird situations - especially in winter - where I might not see the sun more than a couple hours in 3 days despite being up and around a lot. I don't experience a lot of 'two sleeps', but they do occasionally happen.
Hehe, yes. Since the literature is split I can offer my anecdata from living in low light conditions (in the mountains of Eastern Europe with no electricity):
It happens rarely. But enough times that one might notice it. If you experiment with lucid dreaming, you realize that the time you usually wake up is in between your REM cycles at the 4 hour mark. If you take a 15 minute break from sleep in your bed at this time, then fall asleep while trying to keep your mind awake (by, say, counting backwards, or just "willing it"), you can fall directly into a lucid dream. If you try this at the beginning of your sleep, you just fall into a long sleep paralysis and hypnagogia session. Your next REM cycle is too far away.
So, yes, it's real. But I think it's more likely that it was experienced much like nowadays, as a rare occurrence rather than a standard.
An interesting data point: even today, the Liturgy of the Hours, which is the regiment of prayer for Christian monks and nuns, contains prayers for the middle of the night.
>this theory is largely thought false nowadays, or phrased too strongly at least.
What theory? The article doesn't really claim that this kind of sleep is better or more natural, just that it was incredibly common. Is the idea that it was common now thought to be false?
I don't know about commonly thought to be false because I'm not sure it's commonly thought about at all, but it's a theory with considerable weaknesses
Ekirch hypothesis: Early humans had two distinct phases of sleep with an important gap between. Lack of in-depth discussion or even a name for that gap in any language is actually evidence of it being so common it wasn't worth commenting on. It disappeared - again without comment - because of widely available artificial light, although it actually makes less sense to dedicate midnight hours to stuff like household chores and reading in the middle of the night without easy light sources, especially in northern European summer when it's about the only time there isn't daylight.
Null hypothesis: early humans slept much like today's humans, sometimes waking or being woken in the night, occasionally even intentionally but generally not making a big deal of it and trying to sleep through. People sometimes described periods of broken sleep as "first sleep", "second sleep" and even "third sleep" but commentary on the practise of biphasic sleep and importance of midnight waking is harder to find because most people didn't do it that way. A lot of references to "first sleep" can be found if you search digitized records with that string and its foreign language equivalents, but so can references to obviously non-systematic things like "first injury" or "first marriage". You can't generalise human behaviour in the absence of electricity from one tribe that does have a midnight break when numerous others studied don't.
> The article doesn't really claim that this kind of sleep is better or more natural
It does:
"the benefits of dividing up sleep"
"single periods of slumber might not be 'natural'."
THIS article soft-peddles such claims biphasic sleep is better and more natural ONLY because those theories have been largely discredited since it was first put forward. Try an older article:
"Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep"
"a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural"
> The article doesn't really claim that this kind of sleep is better or more natural, just that it was incredibly common. (Emphasis mine.)
For a start, the article suggests that it wasn't just common but actually the dominant pattern of sleep, but the evidence seems a bit thin on that. Moreover, it says that "Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been ... an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors". But I seem to remember an anthropologist on a TV programme (many years ago so I forget which one sadly) saying this isn't obvserved in isolated tribal cultures today, so we can reasonable expect that our pre-agriculture anscestors wouldn't have slept this way.
Edit: A reply to a sibling comment found a good citation: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many... Interestingly, like the BBC article it mentions Ekirch as the proponent of the two sleeps theory. So I wonder if the whole idea is the pet theory of this one person.
The "it was incredibly common" part is the theory. I don't know if anyone else besides Roger Ekirch supports it, which doesn't mean it's false of course. Our ignorance of things past is gigantic and not helped by the fact that history (and stories) tend to be constantly rewritten.
I used to sleep like this too, for around 15 years (20-35yo). Then I began to experience many-day insomnias, or inability to wake up until my body feels like it. Troubles with digestion, immune system, motivation and mental state in general (all interlinked). Checking my hormone levels was like rolling dice every time. My endocrinologist, gastroenterologist, neurologist, psychotherapist all told me that if I don't correct my sleep cycles and get married, I'll suffer even more. I did the former half a year ago and feel much better.
It doesn't have to be connected, maybe my health would deteriorate independently of sleep or alone factors, but doctors say that it puts you into the risk group at the very least. I'd say be careful, but 5-10 years ago I'd also waved it away as irrelevant :)
This would almost work for me, except one of the “when I feel like sleeping” times aligns with the peak of workday, and “when I fell perfectly awake and refreshed” is too late.
It was like that for me too when I worked 9-5 (or more like 6). Now I work "biphasal" days so to speak, from 12:00-16:00 and sometime later in the evening for a couple hours. I find that splitting it up helps me be more productive, I have more of my "software development energy" to spend. I'm lucky that my work offers very flexible hours since we hire around the globe and nobody in my team minds that I review their MRs in the middle of the night.
I usually use the day hours as "open office time" for support requests and meetings, and the later time as "proper work time". This helps me avoid context switches.
Too late for whom? Apparently, not for you. With WFH, taking a nice little siesta isn't impossible (and anecdotally sounds like its more common than some would like to admit). Of course, forced to work in an office makes it harder, and probably surrounded by bosses much less sympathetic to the concept.
> I prefer to stay up into the night and wake up around 12:00, but I vary my sleeping hours by up to 4 hours or so. I go to sleep when I feel like it, and don't feel much discomfort by falling asleep at different times.
Yep. Exactly the same here. I tend to wake up 7-9 hours after I go to sleep (usually between 00-04:00) no matter when that happens. With very rare occurences of two part sleep. No side effects by 45, but I do exercise.
Come to think of it, I may get two part sleep more often than I think, because I do wake up during the sleep period. But most of the time I ignore it and fall asleep again in a couple minutes.
It may be thought of false, but historic documents from many European countries mention and detail it as the common habit. There is no theory or claim about its benefits, just that it was habitual.
It’s a good article, especially in the second half where the two theories are synthesized into a narrow, compatible summary, but the clickbait title isn’t compelling and I don’t think really describes the content.
I blame it on alcohol. If I drink I’m always up for a few hours in the middle of the night. And I’m quite sure they were doing a lot of that back in that time.
Ah yes. Having an evening drink, falling asleep at like 9PM, and then waking up wide awake at midnight to dick around for a few hours until finally falling back asleep at like 3 AM. It still happens to me from time to time.
Oh, so it's not just me. I've always interpreted it as the first sleep (hah) being my body being busy trying to sober up and the second sleep being the actual normal sleep now that the body can focus on something other than getting rid of all that poison.
Of course actual blood alcohol takes longer to go down than that but no matter how much I had, I'd invariably feel significantly more sober after the initial sleep than if I just stayed awake and stopped drinking.
Given that alcoholic drinks (especially various concoctions we'd hardly recognize as "beer" today) were fairly widespread especially when pure water was not always potable, I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't at least factor in for some of the reports. Then again this doesn't explain the observation of polyphasic sleep developing under experimental conditions.
> And I’m quite sure they were doing a lot of that back in that time.
Technically, they were all drinking alcohol because water was unsafe. However, beer at least had half the alcohol content that it has today and the wine was strongly watered. For women and children they even added water to the beer.
Googled it once. The information should still be available.
I've heard this theory before but the argument for universalness of this in all the previous ones were less than convincing because they only used European sources, This is the first article that looks at material from non-Western cultures and therefore makes a stronger argument that this may be a natural phenomenon rather than a cultural one.
I don't see how that "debunks" the fact that people had the habit of waking up in the middle of the night during the middle ages, which is the main point of this article. In fact, it even says
> Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one.
Readit News
What a wonderful time we live in!
My parents live in the (Eastern-European) countryside and because of the environment (basically all sorts of animals living around the house) they started having lice since 2-3 years, I think. You eventually get used to them, one of the keys is to tuck (I think that's the word) your sleeping pants well into your socks, so that the damn beasts won't make their way up on your skin from bellow. Sleeping with the bedside lamp turned on seems to also have helped, but not sure if that was my placebo or not.
If you mean lice, do you mean head lice, body lice, or pubic lice?
This seems to just be an attempt to keep critics at bay.
Of course this is the very definition of a 1st world problem but I think it holds some water in modern western society.
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...
Deleted Comment
https://nocturnepodcast.org/quiet-transmission/
https://nocturnepodcast.org/the-nocturnist/
http://www.eiman.tv/misc/somnrytm.jpg
Since the text is in Swedish, here's roughly what it says: Every row is a day, black is sleep, white is awake.
I've heard of sleep patterns like that but always thought it's just marketing.
Waking up to feed the baby is a very WEIRD way of looking at the world.
In talking with friends, it would seem like our experience was extra crappy and yours is uncharacteristically mild. So the reality may be that many have to wake up at least once in the night to feed, so 2nd sleep kinda makes sense to me here. Not that I'm saying it's where the phrase comes from.
Daughter slept they the night from day one.
Son was up hungry every night at 2am.
Given that, power point of this thread, people pretty much went to bed at sunset, at European latitude that would mean a long night much of the year with kids wanting food and adults being sufficiently rested late at night. Once satiated amid a quiet daze of food/sex/meditation, they’d likely doze back off until daybreak. Two sleeps seems quite sensible without electricity’s prolonged days.
When we had infants I'd go back to sleep pretty well instantly (co-sleeping, with baby on a side-cot at bed level; baby breastfed, not by me) but in general one would wake to the little snuffles that precede the crying (I guess that helps to calm them before they get in a tizzy [in a state, brought on by their own actions, crying in this case]).
I sleep through thunderstorms without stirring.
I'm a few years out from dealing with crying babies and still if there's crying in the background, that sounds like one of my kids, I'll pop-up like a meerkat. The sound even gets though (non noise-cancelling) headphones when I'm gaming, though I won't know what I've heard until I take them off.
Just like parents today, people would power through that, and not make that a habitual sleeping pattern.
I am not saying this makes the hypothesis of the origin being in parenthood true, just that it does not make it false either :)
> Dozing while nursing .... and enjoying/enduring some thinking time.
Nah, it is just brain fog from slee deprivation. It is not free thinking time, it is "Jeeez I want to sleep" time.
I myself have weird sleep cycles. I prefer to stay up into the night and wake up around 12:00, but I vary my sleeping hours by up to 4 hours or so. I go to sleep when I feel like it, and don't feel much discomfort by falling asleep at different times. It leads to weird situations - especially in winter - where I might not see the sun more than a couple hours in 3 days despite being up and around a lot. I don't experience a lot of 'two sleeps', but they do occasionally happen.
It happens rarely. But enough times that one might notice it. If you experiment with lucid dreaming, you realize that the time you usually wake up is in between your REM cycles at the 4 hour mark. If you take a 15 minute break from sleep in your bed at this time, then fall asleep while trying to keep your mind awake (by, say, counting backwards, or just "willing it"), you can fall directly into a lucid dream. If you try this at the beginning of your sleep, you just fall into a long sleep paralysis and hypnagogia session. Your next REM cycle is too far away.
So, yes, it's real. But I think it's more likely that it was experienced much like nowadays, as a rare occurrence rather than a standard.
What theory? The article doesn't really claim that this kind of sleep is better or more natural, just that it was incredibly common. Is the idea that it was common now thought to be false?
Ekirch hypothesis: Early humans had two distinct phases of sleep with an important gap between. Lack of in-depth discussion or even a name for that gap in any language is actually evidence of it being so common it wasn't worth commenting on. It disappeared - again without comment - because of widely available artificial light, although it actually makes less sense to dedicate midnight hours to stuff like household chores and reading in the middle of the night without easy light sources, especially in northern European summer when it's about the only time there isn't daylight.
Null hypothesis: early humans slept much like today's humans, sometimes waking or being woken in the night, occasionally even intentionally but generally not making a big deal of it and trying to sleep through. People sometimes described periods of broken sleep as "first sleep", "second sleep" and even "third sleep" but commentary on the practise of biphasic sleep and importance of midnight waking is harder to find because most people didn't do it that way. A lot of references to "first sleep" can be found if you search digitized records with that string and its foreign language equivalents, but so can references to obviously non-systematic things like "first injury" or "first marriage". You can't generalise human behaviour in the absence of electricity from one tribe that does have a midnight break when numerous others studied don't.
It does:
"the benefits of dividing up sleep"
"single periods of slumber might not be 'natural'."
THIS article soft-peddles such claims biphasic sleep is better and more natural ONLY because those theories have been largely discredited since it was first put forward. Try an older article:
"Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep"
"a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural"
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
> Is the idea that it was common now thought to be false?
Yes, that part is likely false, too:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many...
For a start, the article suggests that it wasn't just common but actually the dominant pattern of sleep, but the evidence seems a bit thin on that. Moreover, it says that "Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been ... an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors". But I seem to remember an anthropologist on a TV programme (many years ago so I forget which one sadly) saying this isn't obvserved in isolated tribal cultures today, so we can reasonable expect that our pre-agriculture anscestors wouldn't have slept this way.
Edit: A reply to a sibling comment found a good citation: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many... Interestingly, like the BBC article it mentions Ekirch as the proponent of the two sleeps theory. So I wonder if the whole idea is the pet theory of this one person.
It doesn't have to be connected, maybe my health would deteriorate independently of sleep or alone factors, but doctors say that it puts you into the risk group at the very least. I'd say be careful, but 5-10 years ago I'd also waved it away as irrelevant :)
I usually use the day hours as "open office time" for support requests and meetings, and the later time as "proper work time". This helps me avoid context switches.
Yep. Exactly the same here. I tend to wake up 7-9 hours after I go to sleep (usually between 00-04:00) no matter when that happens. With very rare occurences of two part sleep. No side effects by 45, but I do exercise.
Come to think of it, I may get two part sleep more often than I think, because I do wake up during the sleep period. But most of the time I ignore it and fall asleep again in a couple minutes.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
"two sleeps" was pure fact for a very long time.
Humans used to sleep in two shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334769 - May 2021 (60 comments)
The History of Sleep - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501610 - May 2015 (11 comments)
We used to sleep twice each night - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542453 - April 2013 (107 comments)
Rethinking Sleep - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558569 - Sept 2012 (60 comments)
The myth of the eight-hour sleep - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620742 - Feb 2012 (161 comments)
Can anybody find others?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=polyphasic
“When Bandogs Howle and Spirits Walk” in Smithsonian Magazine - from January 2001!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-bandogs-h...
Of course actual blood alcohol takes longer to go down than that but no matter how much I had, I'd invariably feel significantly more sober after the initial sleep than if I just stayed awake and stopped drinking.
Given that alcoholic drinks (especially various concoctions we'd hardly recognize as "beer" today) were fairly widespread especially when pure water was not always potable, I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't at least factor in for some of the reports. Then again this doesn't explain the observation of polyphasic sleep developing under experimental conditions.
Technically, they were all drinking alcohol because water was unsafe. However, beer at least had half the alcohol content that it has today and the wine was strongly watered. For women and children they even added water to the beer.
Googled it once. The information should still be available.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many...
(Courtesy of quietbritishjim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16037465)
> Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one.