The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)
bbc.comI do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It's 6:50 now and I've done a lot of work! It's nice, quiet, I just really crack on.
I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again. Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do already!
... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon.
I used to be a 'night owl' really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk.
Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!
So your weekday evening social life is non existent?
Not OP, but I'm almost the same.
If you have (young) kids, it's non existent either way.
Now I go to sleep at the same time my kids do, around 9PM. My social life is during noon. My lunch-time is 2.5 hours instead of the usual 40min. During that time I go to the gym, have lunch with my wife, do some shopping, go to the barber,...
I can recommend it. More sunlight, more movement, no evening binging, no hanging in the couch, no useless late-night phone scrolling, no tired mornings, better quality time with the family...
Not OP, but most of the people I know above 30 don't "go out" on weekday evenings nor regular weekends tbh. Even people without kids. Various trips and meets in friends' houses during the day (usually Sunday) is the main form of socializing.
I'm in the "over 30 without kids" category. I used to do the go to bed / wake up early thing. Used to be great for the same reasons OP mentions.
Then I found there actually were things I wanted to do on weekdays. These tend to happen later in the evening, like 8-9 PM. Think taking up some sport / dance / other kind of class. Clubs usually meet in the evenings, too.
In my neck of the woods, people usually start work around 9:30 and get off around 6:30 - 7. You basically need one hour to get around town, so you can't reasonably hold an event earlier than 8 and expect any amount of people to show up.
And that's without mentioning participating in NGOs, collectives, unions, or dare I say activism.
The current system is not built for free time, it is built for work time and if you're lucky you can shove some quality time with your kids between your employer and your sleep but that's optional.
If we didn't work so much, used all the producittvity gains to actually work less as was promised, this wouldn't even be a discussion, but alas.
For the most part, going out just sounds awful. The parking, the people, the price for mediocre drinks. I’m good lol.
But have you really tried any? :)
Because I go out regularly and does not have any problems with parking (uber / public trans. / choosing places with plenty of parking generalny solves this headache) , the people (you know that you can choose who you meet), prices (free meetups rules) and mediocre drinks (not drinking is an option ,but if somehow not, craft beers seems to work)
I think it depends on a variety of factors. The given city, day of the week, popularity of the establishment, etc. Going to a great brewery in Columbus on a Wednesday is a great time. Going out to a super packed bar on a Friday night in Los Angeles is a different experience.
I would imagine everyone who is 35+ with family has no evening social life. Or am I missing something?
Another question, at some point in your life - do you even want an evening social life?
This! It's not even about the family. I think it just gets boring and unnecessarily exhausting after 10+ years so it transforms to trips, mid-day visits at home and various shared hobbies (like you meet with your friends to go bouldering Saturday morning, idk).
i sleep similarly to the OP (2200-0500). i wouldn't say it's non-existent. instead, i'm much more selective over what i do at night.
the calculus now is: "is this thing that ends super late worth being tired as shit the next day? i'm going to wake up at 0500 regardless."
a date night with my wife or close friends that goes deep into the night? sure!
a random night where folks just want to drink? unlikely, unless i _really_ want to hang with those people. (this means i dip early for work events now. this is okay, since most of the people i work with have kids and need to bail earlier to take care of them.)
that said, i "can" be more selective now because i spent many years doing the latter. i know how it goes, and i've drank enough to know that i'm not missing anything.
i used to be a super hardcore night owl (0200-0900). transforming into an early bird was very hard but extremely worth it. between this and giving up caffeine, my productivity shot up through the roof and my mood in the morning is much more stable.
also, waking up early is a great way to make friends with others that wake up early!
Pretty much so. Mind you I did a lot (too much) in my 20's and 30's, both amazingly good, and amazingly bad, which means going out at in my little off-the-city town is boring as hell anyway.
I'm much more excited about able to be able to go fishing at 4am in the summer, NOW we're talking ;-)
I want to implement something like this so badly. It's just impossible when one is in the strict 9-5 meat grinder.
I'm a night owl that crashes around 2 AM, and honestly, I think it's why I can barely function on an average day. I try to make up for lost sleep on the weekends, but it doesn't quite work that way.
Has this evidence been examined sceptically? I've heard this theory a few times, but it always sounds like one person's obsession, and I struggle to credit it.
You are right (and very observant) that this is mostly Ekrich when you dig into it. I didn't realise this until quite recently, and I too had assumed there was a lot more work about this.
But what he's found in literature is pretty consistent, and biphasic sleep was once quite normal in a specific context: the siesta.
It's dying out in continental Europe alas -- a lost cultural touchstone -- and in the contemporary West, a siesta is short (literally a nap). But a traditional Spanish siesta is the best part of a sleep cycle -- a good couple of hours, with an hour's rest spread either side. More than enough that you could have four hours sleep overnight throughout the longer days and not be incompetent the next day.
My sleep is currently polyphasic, which is not a great time. But it has taught me that sleep in the absence of natural light (or the presence of consistent artificial light) does have a habit of going polyphasic.
I woke up at 4:15am after about five hours of sleep. I just cleaned a grill pan. I may go back to sleep again.
Sleep scientists seem pretty sure that polyphasic sleep is bad.
Question for people who sleep like this: do you live with anyone? How do they tolerate it? I can't imagine it's great to wake up to your roommate scraping pans in the kitchen on odd nights.
(Who scrapes? There are better ways.)
I do not. And no, it isn't.
My dad, I think, had occasionally polyphasic sleep, and he often took on-call rota slots as a result. He'd be in the kitchen cleaning, or in his study, but since the house was big, it was rarely a problem. Sometimes he'd be napping in his study, and I know he slept easily on the train to and from work (with an efficiency that meant he woke up a minute before his stop on the way home).
When I was a student I just forced my polyphasic sleep periods into normal sleep as best I could, which typically manifests a bit like delayed sleep phase; by the middle of the week I was two hours behind everyone else, and I actually did worse in the courses that had early Friday lectures. But when you're a student, being awake or asleep at odd hours is normal enough not to be remarked upon.
As a programmer, polyphasic sleep is sometimes unnoticeable to others. These days probably more apparent in git commit logs.
By not scraping pans in the middle of the night.
Bigger, and well built dwellings help, as do earbuds and soft shoes.
I have to tell you, 4am-5am, between sleep phases, is the best time to clean a kitchen. It's vaguely contemplative and when you go into the kitchen later that day it's like the cleaning fairy did it.
I think it's even better to do it right before sleep. Waking up to a clean kitchen which is nice. But obviously, YMMV.
Always interesting to hear other perspectives on simple stuff like this. Personally, I like doing dishes in the morning while the espresso machine heats up. It's a nice rote task my half-asleep brain can come up to speed on, I feel like I've accomplished something right out of the gate, and I didn't need to interrupt the flow of whatever I was enjoying the previous night.
Oh... what I mean is, one of the things that is interesting about the gap between the two sleeps is that your brain is awash with prolactin.
So some tasks you do in that period of time are done with a kind of lower level of objection, easier "starting", and in a contemplative start, and you're not actually tired.
Which is what also gives this "cleaning fairy" sense that nobody in particular did it.
> Question for people who sleep like this: do you live with anyone? How do they tolerate it?
I tried it and it worked, but I have a family and no, it didn't work for them, so I stopped. Couldn't get a schedule right that allowed me to be with the family for normal social interaction times, AND be at work when THEY expected me to be available for the work-team.
So I had to go to a socially acceptable "norm".
One college summer I worked on a highway landscape crew. They put us on a schedule of 6 am to 2:30 pm, which got us out of the hottest part of the day. I would come home, clean up, and nap until dinner, say 5:30, then have a normal evening, turning in at about 10 pm and waking up at 4:30.
It wasn't bad. I did like waking up at 4:30 on the weekend, rolling over, and going back to sleep.
And it feels bad as well. I have polyphasic periods and I'm always relieved when they end. Not sure why I don't feel too good, because I have ways to cope now, but good monophasic sleep makes me wake up rested and without a headache.
I think it feels bad because it inevitably messes up one's digestive clock (which is implicated in robustly configuring the sleep clock) and by implication, particularly with modern food, blood sugar levels.
(I suspect that the long cultural stability of the Spanish long siesta has a lot to do with the cultural stability of mealtimes -- and meal types/sizes -- that developed around it.)
The other day I felt queasy, suddenly, after lunch at a normal time -- so queasy I had to write off the day. I then proceeded to sleep for the best part of 24 hours, because all the phases seemed to merge. A literal 24 hour period, useless. Other people lived normal lives in that period; for me it just vanished.
I think blood sugar had a lot to do with that, as well as the time of year (winter in Britain) and it has definitely unnerved me.
I cope by just accepting it; trying to do things when awake. But there are things you can't really do in the middle of the night if you live in a close, quiet neighbourhood; hoovering, running laundry, shredding documents, even some printers are noisy.
Yes, accepting is big part. I read mostly and recently trying to meditate as well. Doing nothing productive to not signal that we actually should wake up. Especially bad are the nights when sleep comes after more than 2h of wake time.
I'm trying to watch it from blood sugar perspective, I'm pretty good at extending periods between meals due to intermittent fasting, but there may be connections since Im not fasting all the time.
Feeling queasy then sleeping for a day sounds like more like the 24 hour flu than something blood sugar related.
Because it takes time to adapt fully. Your polyphasic periods are more like stopping and restarting a routine that disallow your body from adaptation. Those who adapt fully over the course of a month feel as good as you do during monophasic sleep.
Hardly a singular obsession of one person when we have both Vigil and Matins as standards of the canonical hours for much of the past two thousand years of church records.
The article outlines multiple examples of references to first and second sleep periods in official court documents, and points to sleep studies of farmers in rural areas who still 'almost wake' not long after midnight.
As a pre industrial habit it makes sense - in colder areas fires don't last all night and rising after midnight to stoke fires, check animals, etc. fits right in with rural life.
> Hardly a singular obsession of one person
The parent post means the study of the practice, not the practice itself.
It might make sense -- I think it probably does -- but that doesn't mean that it's not true, when you dig into it, that the major study here is Ekrich and all the articles about it, articles about Ekrich.
Making intuitive sense isn't really enough. It's difficult to study the habits of the long dead, but the parent poster is right to be skeptical of the nature of coverage.
Aside from Ekrich - who can at least point to the extracts he has found in historic archives, there are sleep study results that suggest humans still have remnant night waking behaviour; these fall into the intuitive.
Which leaves what I first raised - a thousand years of documented broken sleep by monks in monestaries getting up to pray late at night and again early in the morning.
Some might write that off as hair shirt behaviour by religuous fanatics intent on punishing themselves, others might take it as evidence that people of those times were living with punctuated sleep cycles and those that went to serve their God took to praying when they woke as a matter of course.
There's also the evidence of sleep in Spain and other warmer climes, with additional sleeping during the hottest parts of the day, staying up later, sleeping less during the night and rising earlier before the sun.
It's Ekrich's hobby horse, many niche areas have few champions, but it's not exactly the case that he is drawing on forged entries with no other examples to be found.
> but it's not exactly the case that he is drawing on forged entries with no other examples to be found.
Did anyone suggest this? I think it is rude to suggest that the comment you are replying to did any such thing.
(I have noted the long Spanish siesta elsewhere)
Not that specifically but that's certainly one whisp of smoke that might be found should:
> (Has this) evidence been examined sceptically?
The implication there is that the "evidence" quoted might not exist, might be a stretch of translation, misreading of spidery handwriting, or spun whole from new cloth to fit a narrative.
No, that's your implication.
I personally read "sceptically" to imply the idea of seeing whether the study falls victim to significance bias -- e.g. once you see it, you see it a lot, but is it an indicator of a widespread habit, or just a not-particularly-unusual one?
Edit: And indeed if you read on a bit about Ekrich, he suffers from sleep disorders for which he takes medication. That's a potential risk factor for significance/confirmation bias here, I'd have thought. But there's no reason to jump to the conclusion that fabrication is being suggested.
That's my partial, not exhaustive, list of the kinds of things that have turned up in past skeptical examinations of researcher claims.
Many times, of course, researchers are supported in their claims by skeptical examination.
It's of interest that you personally chose a limited reading of "skeptical examination", whether that's due to limited experience or an innate tendancy to only imagine the best behaviour in people I wouldn't speculate.
> It's of interest that you personally chose a limited reading of "skeptical examination", whether that's due to limited experience or an innate tendancy to only imagine the best behaviour in people I wouldn't speculate.
OK, now you're being a bit silly.
I assume error over malice. It's not only imagining the best, it's also statistically and ethically a better way.
Especially since there's that one other person -- Piotr Wozniak -- who shares the idea of two sleeps but argues they are completely different to the Ekrich characterisation. Wozniak thinks the second sleep is the mid-day nap. That resonates much more with my needs.
I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like a hand-cranked LED torch. And those people who remain uncontacted have made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.
Anecdotal / from memory, they did a study (at least) once where people didn't have artificial light (not sure if they had candles or nothing at all), and found that people naturally went to sleep when it went dark - not much else to do - but also woke up after a few hours.
But I'm not entirely sure; how much can you do awake if it's dark?
But then, it's rare for it to be truly dark, with moonlight and the like.
I wonder if this changed with the seasons. In the winter, the night is longer than normal sleep amount and might make sense putting extra time in the middle of night. In the summer, the night is shorter and would sleep through.
the data to support this is extensive. ex: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4720388/
>The sleep period consistently occurred during the nighttime period...was not interrupted by extended periods of waking...
It's so interesting to me that fundamental ways of life like this can go nearly undocumented save passing references. We know a lot more about the annals of Greek history, for example, because that's what was written down. Ekirch took years to rediscover all these references to biphasic sleep because it was so fundamentally normal that historic writers never thought to focus on it. Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.
I've been reading the book Debt by David Graeber, and it went a lot of places I didn't expect. I suspect a lot of things we would take interest in are just not written down, or not commonly explored. For example, it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. It was also common for people to give each other gifts, not too large or too small or too equal to form a community.
> it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day.
I am sure there is some regional variability, but at least in these parts you can still see that habit ingrained in those now around 80 years of age or older. But it seems to quickly taper off in anyone younger. By the time you get to my generation it is effectively unheard of.
As an example, think about how some alien visitors might try to piece together how we live day-to-day by watching TV shows and movies and reading whatever books they manage to dig up. The only way they'll even know we have bathrooms and take a crap there is if they find books or other archives detailing toilet diagrams, bathroom design, etc. If they just watch movies and TV, they'll think we somehow never have to expel waste, even though we obviously eat a lot as proven by how much screen time eating gets.
> I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life.
Oh no what will future generations do without doomscrolling.
It would be a loss IMO if future generations never knew that we even engaged in doomscrolling (or to what extent). Of all things you’d want future generations to learn from, maladaptive behavior that’s so widespread as to be hardly noticed in daily life seem high on the list.
Caveat that doomscrolling specifically maybe isn’t a great example given that we are collecting a ton of data about it, we’re mostly just ignoring it.
How well doomscrolling and were it happens is documented in historic documents? Just food for thought...
You might be projecting there.
Oooh, and projecting. Will they even know what they've lost?
(tongue firmly in cheek, I hope you understand)
> our obsessive encyclopedic documentation
...will bitrot away in 50 years.
In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)
The government-run national libraries (think Library of Congress and similar) at least have the mandate for long-term archival.
Bitrot isn't as much a concern any more - we have data formats worked out these days, with well defined specifications and open standards (PDF/A), so basically as long as computers keep operating on the fundamental principle of bits and bytes, our documents will always be able to be read, and for virtually all popular data storage formats there is open source software that can, should the need arise, be run in an emulator.
In fact, future historians should have it easier to understand our times, given that machines can actually sift through data at speed and you don't need humans to tediously take and scan brittle paper, and a lot of data is replicated so often across the planet that even a nuclear war should leave at least one copy alive in contrast to earlier times where wars, fires and natural disasters would routinely wipe out entire nations' memories. (Doesn't stop people from trying though, just look at the book burnings in Ukraine committed by Russia)
The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. The former because a lot of data there (hole punch cards...) literally rotted away, the latter because of decades worth of homegrown architectures, all kinds of DRM, a lack of obligations for publishers to submit DRM-free copies and copies of the server backend code to national libraries, and the current "trend" towards e-stores for games instead of physical media.
> The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming.
It's much worse today, because most of the so-called "archives" are actually stored somewhere "in the cloud", and are one serious economic crisis away from being deleted at the press of a button. (Also an even bigger problem is all the proprietary or unmaintained data formats. We already have issues maintaining this stack of bullshit today, and only a couple decades have passed. Maintaining this for centuries is out of the question.)
You really think this will be an issue? Storage just keeps growing? The entire history of internet will probably be stored in millions of copies on some rice-sized containers somewhere. :D
I agree, it’s kind of mind blowing when simple things like this are discovered—very humbling. (If the research can be trusted ofc.)
> Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.
As people get older polyphasic sleep often becomes their norm, they sleep when they are tired, and are awake when they are not, especially if they no longer have a job. If you have to interact with people (sign for packages for example) it can be a problem, but if you don't it seems about the same as normal sleep to me. Being forced to change sleep schedule constantly does cause health issues, but just doing what your body tells you seems to work out ok in my experience. Taking drugs to force sleep to a schedule seems like a worse option.
One drawback to it is that many sleep trackers don't handle it well. They'll treat a second sleep as a nap for example and then pester you that you're not getting enough sleep. The Galaxy G5 seems to capture all sleeps fairly well (but it loses pairing every few months and has to be reset from scratch), the Oura Ring sometimes catches 2nd or 3rd sleeps as naps and adds them to the total, the Xiaomi Mi7 Band often misses shorter sleeps or lists them as naps without adding them to the total. The Android app "Sleep as Android" is started and stopped manually so if you can remember to do that it works well.
Ever since I learned of sleep cycles, and how to measure my own, I've pretty much governed my life around them.
Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state.
For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes.
This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.
Can you share more about how you got accurate measurements on this?
I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
I did this at community college ~15 years ago. So I'm mostly improvising regarding my cycle being that long. I'd say it's around 60 minutes.
Specifics don't matter after a while because you build new habits and do them without thinking.
But the thing our teacher told us was to stay up until you get more and more tired, until you feel your eyelids wanting to close, but power through it and measure the time between the most tired and the most alert after that.
The trick to going back to sleep is often, after waking too soon, to do something boring. A chore. Try it for 5-15 mins, go back to bed. Repeat if you're not nodding off. The thinking is, you'll prefer sleep to the boring chore.
I've been experimenting a lot with polyphasic sleep over the years. I've done siestas, Everyman routines, Dual Core, Biphasic-X, etc. They're all interesting in their own way but these days I've been getting into the dual core routine which is similar to the post's two sleeps. These routines by the way are documented on https://www.polyphasic.net/polyphasic-sleep-schedules/
I have gastroparesis, which often gives me bloating/pain that lasts a long time, and if I'm too hungry at night, I have to choose between trying to ignore hunger and not sleeping for the next ~3 hours (even a snack or a cup of water makes me bloated). On top of that, I live in a studio with a cat and a morning person. Due to this, sleeping for 8 hours straight uninterrupted is extremely difficult, so I'm very curious about polyphasic sleep.
In your experience, are you able to learn and be productive while adjusting to these sleep cycles? How long does it take you to adjust and feel well rested? Are there any risks to be wary of, and any tips to change my sleep routine effectively?
Yep, it takes around a month though to fully adapt. You are better served asking questions on the Discord, they are more knowledgeable than I: https://discord.gg/polyphasic-sleeping-249219704655183876
When my wife was pregnant with our first kid I did this for a while. She was exhausted and went to bed early and so did I. Bed at 8, up 1-3, bed 3-7.
I got a ton done in those two hours. I remember looking for an e ink display to use with my computer so I could do it by candlelight, to no avail
Wait tell us more about use your computer by candlelight… do you mean like red shift? Most OSes have this built in and there are 3rd party apps that can do candlelight settings
I never found a solution. I ended up using a very red-shifted screen set to a very low light but what I really wanted was e-ink, like a Kindle for instance. The only options I came across were impractically expensive, though. https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-p... for instance, and this was years ago when there were fewer options.
Just noting because I went through the same, but I haven't found I've been able to use any LCD or OLED at very low contrast and brightness without content becoming illegible or uncomfortable without ambient light. However, a relatively smaller CRT maintains a contrast ratio that I don't seem to struggle to look at or decipher in complete darkness.
I've also tried dropping the aspect ratio on my 42" 4k OLED to 4:3 and not scaling the resolution to limit light output, but the pixel density ultimately seems to be a limiter. Since I can work on my smartphone at its lowest output and with redshift, a smaller, higher-dpi display may be key.
I have a 'study' setup using a Boox Mira (portable 13" eink screen) for exactly this kind of use; not polyphasic in my particular case but late evening use. Yes, the screen is expensive, but _totally_ worth it.
Thanks for the tip!
i tried using an e-ink tablet (Boox Note Air) but found it cumbersome compared to my iPad mini on greyscale mode with night shift enabled.
waking up in the middle of the night is extremely normal, even with "perfect" sleep hygiene.
in fact, cbt-i, the therapy I undertook last year and earlier this year, takes advantage of this to help patients mitigate their insomnia.[0]
the treatment protocol requires that you get out of bed and literally go anywhere else when you wake up at night. you can do almost anything you want during that time, even watch TV or play games! (i read hacker news or read "linux kernel development" by robert love; if you're on here, thanks!)
given this, it's not surprising that our ancestors divided their sleep into two halves. our circadian rhythms are naturally programmed to sleep when it's dark and stay awake when it's bright. i could imagine that their circadian rhythms were more "in tune" before electricity.
[0] "insomnia" isn't curable and can happen to everyone! it's more of a state of being than a condition or disease.
I've done this, and it... works, mostly, for me.
The problem is I have a family, and I couldn't make the schedule work out to where I get a good polyphasic sleep cycle in and still be a part of the family with the normal food-oriented together times.
This happens to me naturally in winter. The only problem is trying not to disturb my wife and daughter, so I usually try and resist it.