![]() Two years after that, a study found that the indigenous residents of Tanna, in the South Pacific, largely had one uninterrupted sleep.Įven within preindustrial Europe, sleep contained multitudes. ![]() Two years later, another study found that a rural society in Madagascar practiced segmented sleep. A 2015 study of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia found that most foragers enjoyed one long sleep. This makes it sound like segmented sleep is humanity’s natural habit, and that the industrial revolution and modern capitalism despoiled our perfect rest.īut humans have never had a universal method of slumber. ![]() When a 1990s study at the National Institute of Mental Health deprived a cohort of male subjects of light at night, their sleep became segmented after a few weeks. “Every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep,” Charles Czeisler, a Harvard sleep scientist, has said. The lit world altered our internal clocks too. New artificial lights delayed bedtimes, while new factory schedules required early waking. By the mid-1800s, “Early Rising” movements had taken off in England and America. A surging economy made a virtue of productivity and instilled “an increasing sense of time consciousness” in the West, Ekirch told me. And ancient soporifics-such as poisonous leaves and various opiate concoctions-were roughly as likely to kill you as they were to induce REM.īeginning in the 1700s, the industrial revolution-its light, its caffeine, its clocks, and above all, its work schedules-took Europe’s biphasic sleep in its hairy arms and mushed the two phases together. Late-night crime was rampant, and the home itself was a death trap, as slapdash construction left houses vulnerable to fire, leaking roofs, terrible heat or cold, and what Ekirch calls “the trifecta of early modern entomology: fleas, lice, and bedbugs.” As for that romantic French dorveille, it was functionally a second workday for many women, who rose at midnight to finish domestic chores. P reindustrial sleep was nothing to romanticize. But that’s not the full story, he told me. Today’s sleep writers often wield Ekirch’s research to suggest that segmented sleep (or, as Ekirch calls it, biphasic-two-phase-sleep) is old, and one-sleep is new, and therefore today’s sleepers are doing it wrong. In the 1540s, Martin Luther wrote of his strategies to ward off the devil: “Almost every night when I wake up … I instantly chase him away with a fart.” They reflected on their dreams and commingled with the spiritual realm, both the divine and the diabolical. During this dorveille, or “wake-sleep,” people got up to pee, hung out by the fire, had sex, or prayed. They didn’t have anxious conversations with imaginary doctors they actually did something. When sleep was divided into a two-act play, people were creative with how they spent the intermission. When he broadened his search, he found mentions of first sleep in Italian ( primo sonno), French ( premier sommeil), and even Latin ( primo somno) he found documentation in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America. One day in London, wading through public records, he stumbled on references to “first sleep” and “second sleep” in a crime report from the 1600s. In the 1980s, Ekirch was researching a book about nighttime before the industrial revolution. So I reached out to Roger Ekirch, the historian whose work broke open the field of segmented sleep more than 20 years ago. It also snapped into a popular template of contemporary internet analysis: If you experience a moment’s unpleasantness, first blame modern capitalism. The romanticization of preindustrial sleep fascinated me. Read: The lie we tell ourselves about going to sleep early Then, the hackers claim, modernity came along and ruined everything by pressuring everybody to sleep in one big chunk. They slept sort of like I do, but they were Zen about it. Essays in The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine recommended an old fix for restlessness called “segmented sleep.” In premodern Europe, and perhaps centuries earlier, people routinely went to sleep around nightfall and woke up around midnight-only to go back to sleep a few hours later, until morning. ![]() ![]() One day, I was researching my nocturnal issues when I discovered a cottage industry of writers and sleep hackers who claim that sleep is a nightmare because of the industrial revolution, of all things. Like millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people around the world, I suffer from so-called mid-sleep awakenings that can keep me up for hours. A faceless physician whispers in my mind: To overcome middle-of-the-night insomnia, experts say you ought to get out of bed … I get out of bed. I grab my phone and scan sports scores and Twitter. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. ![]()
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