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.
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.
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.
Ekirch's theory has had many threads on HN over the years - some of them:
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?
I blame it on alcohol. If I drink Iām always up for a few hours in the middle of the night. And Iām quite sure they were doing a lot of that back in that time.
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.
This again? Itās been pretty thoroughly debunked:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many...
(Courtesy of quietbritishjim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16037465)
It's so weird that all this research and discussion never once mentions daylight length difference between summer and winter in parts of the world far out of the equatorial belt.
The difference is between almost 16h of night time (depending on your definition, of course, since some light will be there even if Sun is not out) in late December and 8h of night time in late June at 45 degrees of latitude.
I wouldn't be surprised if sleeping twice during the night was more frequent during winter time in Europe.
Still, ever since fire was introduced into houses, there was an artificial light source as well.
I've been reading, "The Man on the Donkey" over the last few months or so (so much for the 50 books...). It's a historical novel set in C16 England written in the 1950s. It's an immersive experience using language and descriptions of custom and habit to create a strong sense of the time. Many of the aspects of life mentioned in the article (mattresses of straw, shared beds and rush lights) are there but interestingly, not once have I read a mention of the two sleeps.
The author is a historian but either wasn't aware of the practice or didn't feel it worth including. The richness with which she describes other aspects of C16 life is so great though that I find it hard to believe she would not have known if it were a well understood practice. Perhaps sleep is an example of a custom that it is hard to think about doing differently from the way we do and was just missed. But it seems strange that such a big aspect of life isnāt widely understood by historians.
This article got me thinking, if artificial light forever changed the way people sleep, what other modern changes have also altered life or physical characteristics of people long ago. 200 years ago everyone had perfectly straight teeth, some think heavily blended/processed foods may have lead to under developed jaws and crooked teeth for alot of modern people or possibly high sugar, its not known but something in the modern era changed our teeth structure for the worse.
Ironically I am between my sleeps now. Iāve been casual about life for so long that Iāve fallen into medieval sleeping habits.
I find it frustrating that the explanation of the schedule switches from a 24-hour clock to apparently a 12-hour clock without AM or PM designation
> From as early as 21:00 to 23:00, those fortunate enough to afford them would begin flopping onto mattresses...A couple of hours later, people would begin rousing from this initial slumber. The night-time wakefulness usually lasted from around 11:00 to about 01:00
I regularly sleep in 4 hour blocks, and it's definitely the most productive and energetic ive felt. I encourage anyone who is curious to try it for at least 2 weeks, though i find it doesn't take long to get used to. The challenge is mapping sleeping times around the rest of society.
In my experience the easiest way to transition from sleeping 8 is to wake up early on a weekend day and do a bunch of tiring activity, then take the longest nap possible in the afternoon in a blacked out room. That evening, go to bed as early as you can fall asleep and get up after 4 hours. Then enjoy the watch for a few hours before going back to sleep.
I find i'm also less dependent on alarms sleeping that way.
I find it fascinating how such everyday routines become relatively hard to be reconstructed even after just 300 years. Wondering if will be the same of our times, if things we consider too banal to document will be considered interesting and very strange or even will be lost after a few centuries.
This was practiced in Muslim world as well. We have a mid night prayer called tahajjud.
coincidentally, this was a fairly large plot element in the book i've just finished reading, colson whitehead's "harlem shuffle" (excellent book, recommended). the protagonist switched to a split sleep pattern to get some extra hours during the night to do things his day job didn't give him time for, and which would take away from his family if he did them in the evening.
The most interesting thing about this to me is how it shoes just how little are know and likely will ever know about historical life.
This entire concept was just forgotten for centuries, and even now we can just sort of guess that it happened but are unsure why. How many other parts of daily life were just never written down? All our historical sources are so absurdly biased towards a wealthy few that our conceptions of historical life are inherently flawed.
Surprised the article doesn't mention siesta's or mid-afternoon naps that are common is Spain.
What I find interesting is how there are references to a second sleep in literature, such as Charles Dickens and Don Quixote.
Whether it's cultural or biological remains to be seen, but it definitely seem to be common enough that it didn't merit explaining, except as a casual reference.
Just to add to the chorus of modern reasons this might happen, when I was going through pretty bad spinal disc degeneration, I almost always woke up after somewhere between 3-4 hours of sleep. I just couldn't go any longer until I was in too much pain and needed to move about, ice it, take more meds, whatever I could do. That isn't the case any more because of spinal fusion surgery that wasn't an option in the medieval era. I'm sure pretty bad pain you just kind of tried to ignore but could never really get rid of was a common thing back in the day when corrective surgery didn't exist and reliable pain meds didn't either. Alcohol helps, but also disrupts sleep.
Looks great but if you want to break up your own sleep pattern and do something useful for an hour in the middle of the night (like B.F. Skinner, who wrote for an hour from 2-3) it would be good to have some really low light for it, or a red lamp.
I wonder how things were in the more northern areas, where daylight was almost constant in the summer and barely existing in the winter. People seem to have survived there for long times, and must have adapted to different sleeping patterns.
I had this sleep schedule for a few months in college. It was awesome and horrible.
If I give up computers in the evening and alarm clocks in the morning, this type of sleep cycle actually happens to me quite naturally. I prefer it, actually, just a hard habit to keep in the modern world.
If my cats are any indication of their larger wilder relatives, 1-3am is prime attack time. Might have been beneficial to be on guard during those hours when the felines were larger and more murderous.
I have a modern habit of waking up for no reason at between 03:30-04:30, being unable to get to sleep until around 06:00, and then having to drag my ass out of bed for off-farm remote work no later than 07:45. It sucks. We don't live in the medieval world, and it would be nice if people who have to deal with modern shit would stop fetishizing and trying to convince people to half-implement stuff that worked in the past but can't work now.
edit: Also, I feel like ass ALL THE TIME so the BBC can shove it
Much (muuuch) more on this in Craig Koslofskyās ridiculously interesting āEveningās Empireā:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/evenings-empire/9CB4189...
How we turned night into day. And basically a story how technology really went hand in hand with a social revolution.
I've been doing sleep from 12:30AM-4:30AM and then a second sleep from 7am-10:30am. I work with a team that works in Poland and I am in PST time zone, so I mostly do meetings in that time, and then just do coding after I wake at 10:30. It works fairly well, and am well rested with just 7 hrs of sleep.
I am wondering how they dealt with that pattern during summer when the night is short.
the article mentioned that a contemporary reproduction of the pattern used blinders to cut off the natural light - something I guess most people did not have in the Middle-Ages. It also mentions that they were waking up at dawn (which is early in the summer).
I do 6:30pm to 10pm usually then sleep again from 2 to 6am or so.. the first sleep to recover, the second sleep to relax. waking up time is highly determined by how exhausted I am during the day for the first sleep, and how long it takes me to relax completely for second sleep. been great actually.
The habit of first and second sleep was common in Sweden, too. In our case, historic documents mention that the interim was sometime just after midnight; people socialized for an hour or two in the middle of the night before going back to bed for second sleep.
I don't buy this as some universal phenomenon. Because I have very little control over when I sleep or how long. If my body wanted to sleep in two shifts it sure as hell would. But instead I sleep about 6 or 7 hours in one shift.
I sometimes have 3 - 1 at the normal time, interrupted by needing a pee (Age/male/kidney disease), then a second interrupted by the elder of my two dogs needing a pee and a third short one until work time. Not ideal!
At Dayās Close is a really great book. This article doesnāt do Ekrichās work justice.
I tried "polyphasic sleep" about 10 years ago, and while I was mentally sharp at night (a huge surprise, as I had considered myself a definite morning person before), I also started to gain weight.
I often fall asleep with my clothes on and TV on. Wake up in the middle of the night, take shower, brush my teeth and go to bed again. I feel more rested those nights that this happens.
My friends mother used to be a dentist, she would go to sleep very early. Then wake up in the middle of the night, do som paperwork and go to sleep again. Sounded very intersting.
Ha, I've been doing it all my life. Taking 1-1.5hr nap during lunch time or in the evening. Not every day but often enough.
I'm doing this, but with a small modification: I've added a third sleep between the two sleeps
āI need my sleep. I need about eight hours a day, and about ten at night.ā ā Bill Hicks
Maybe they didn't live that long due to this being a factor of lost REM sleep?
Well, one can always look at other primates sleeping patterns.
Siesta!
Considering this has been in the news for 10 years and pretty much no one does it, not even a weird sub community, we can safely say this is not a legitimate sleeping pattern for humans.
"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 ā 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."
What a wonderful time we live in!