For as long as I can remember, I’ve rarely slept through the night in one uninterrupted long period of happy snoozing. I’ve always awakened at least once, sometimes twice or more, often for an hour or more.
When you have a regular job that requires you to report to work at a fixed time every morning, this can lead to issues between you and your snooze button. I used to solve this by having three alarm clocks. One by the bed, one on the dresser, and another one in the living room. Eventually I’d have to actually get out of bed to stop the noise. Most of the time, this strategy worked.
Historian A. Roger Ekirch published a paper in 2001 after doing 16 years of research on human sleep. He discovered a large amount of evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. He draws from diaries, court records, medical books and from literature ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to accounts of tribes in Nigeria to make these claims.
Apparently, until the industrial age brought artificial light and screwed us up, we humans used to go to sleep a few hours after dusk and sleep for about 4 hours, and then wake for a period of one or even two hours. During this wakeful period, Mr. Ekirch says the evidence shows that some people would visit their neighbors, or eat a meal, although most stayed in bed and read or wrote or attended to prayers. There are even 15th Century prayer manuals with special prayers for this time between sleeps.
During the 17th Century, these references to a first and second sleep began to disappear, and by the 1920’s, had disappeared.
Ekirch attributes this decline to the advent of public street lighting and the development of better artificial lights that made it possible for humans to extend their day both indoors and outdoors artificially.
There was also, in portions of Europe, a surge in the popularity of all-night coffeehouses, and as people became accustomed to night-time activity, sleep habits became uprooted.
His research, and my own personal experience is that the human body naturally prefers a segmented sleep pattern. Since this is difficult to maintain, and still meet the daily obligations of modern life, such as a job and activities with family that often eat up early evening hours, some of us become agitated or suffer from some form of insomnia that we blame on some aspect of our daily lives instead of a likely cause of us resisting our natural urges for a segmented sleep.
Part of the issue might be that since we now think we are supposed to sleep in one uninterrupted block of sleep, if we wake in the middle of the night, we convince ourselves that something is wrong and we become anxious, which compounds the problem.
In order for us to revert to this type of natural sleep pattern, we would need to be able to devote 10 or more hours each night to our bedchambers. Into bed shortly after dusk, sleep for a few hours, awaken and enjoy a couple of hours of conversation or reading or having a light meal, and then off fora few more hours of sleep, arising naturally around dawn.
I can see American households all over the land erupting into battle when teens are told they needed to be in bed by two hours after dark.
And just try to get one out of bed at dawn. Although if you have convinced one to get to bed early and succumb to a more natural sleep pattern, perhaps mornings wouldn’t be so chaotic in households with teens.
What brings all this up, is that I was working a normal 8am-5pm job, and struggling with waking at the stroke of 4am every morning. Normal bedtime was between 9 and 10pm, and I just wasn’t a happy camper. Come the weekend, and without fail I’ll spend a good chunk of it catching up on lost sleep.
Since my duties don’t require that I work a “normal” shift, I was able to move my workday to a 5am – 2pm shift. This requires that I go to bed by about 7:30 each evening, which has not been a problem. The nightly glass of wine with dinner helps a lot if I’m not already drowsy, but as my housemate can testify, when I do go to bed, I’m often sound asleep within 2 minutes or less.
I still wake up in the night, but now it’s usually somewhere between midnight and 1AM. I sometimes lay there for an hour, doing nothing in particular, but eventually doze off again, and more often than not, awaken again just a few minutes before my alarm is set to go off at 4am. I feel much more rested, and enjoy the fact that with my hours, traffic to and from work is never a problem, and I get home early enough that I can take on some chores that I’d otherwise be disinclined to do.
I feel better rested, and only infrequently nap during the day since changing my sleep habits. And, after reading the research of Mr. Ekirch, I no longer worry about waking in the middle of the night. Perhaps I’ll start keeping my Kindle with the nightlight near the bedside.