For your entire life, I’m sure, doctors and parents and everybody else who has an opinion has shoved the whole “get 8 hours” of sleep idea down your throat. Well, it turns out that eight hours of solid sleep is not actually optimal, and historically, not even normal. For a while now a small minority has voiced the idea that civilizations for thousands of years would sleep for four hours, wake up for an hour or two, then sleep for another four. During the break in between people would often chat with neighbors, read, write, pray, have sex, smoke tobacco, and just reflect. The evidence of this is almost irrefutable and makes me want to try it out. I think I might.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren’t entirely solitary – people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses – which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.
In his new book, Evening’s Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened.
“Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good,” he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute – criminals, prostitutes and drunks.
“Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night.”
That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.
This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.
In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
London didn’t join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe’s major towns and cities were lit at night.
Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.
“If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.
“And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit.”
Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body’s natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.
This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.
The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.
“For most of evolution we slept a certain way,” says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. “Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.”
every 4 hours sleep for 30 minutes, this is the best way to get your needed sleep if it can fit in your schedule. After a while you body gets used to sleeping in these short bursts making every second count rather than those *light sleep* parts every bit of your sleep is used you’ll sleep 3 hours a day in total and feel more rested than you could ever imagine. And you can do tasks in those 3 1/2 hour spurts of being awake more efficiently as well. First month sucks, rest of your life is awesome.
-Slept this way for years and it truly is the best you’ll ever feel.
30 minutes is not enough time to pass through each sleep cycle so this would not work for most people. Some people are capable of sleeping for minimal hours while still being able to function, but most need to pass through each step.
What Erick is referring to is something called polyphasic sleep. Sleeping in this way causes the phases of sleep to be compressed and most of the 30 minutes to be dedicated to deep and rem sleep. This allows for the body to achieve the same amount of REM sleep in those 3.5 hours as it does in a longer period.
This state is very hard to achieve and many people fail at it. However, other succeed and are claim to find it a superior pattern of sleep. I have not tried it myself, but I have done extensive research. The inflexibility of having to sleep every 4 hours doesn’t work with my current work situation.
REM sleep is not the point of sleeping. The deep delta wave sleep is really what your body craves as it’s the kind of sleep that body uses to heal it’s self. Delta wave sleep takes a while to reach and can be easily disrupted.
lol wrrrrooonnggg
People in the past didn’t need as much sleep because They Were Rested and not ass-tired as most people today
you can survive without stage 2,3,4 sleep but not without REM sleep Karni et al, 1994 found severe affects on memory when REM sleep was deprived,
I’m going to try this! I’ll tell you how it works, I have sleeping problems so this could end up helping, then again it may worsen things.
@sethnix you don’t understand how it works. You deprive yourself of REM sleep initially so that when you DO finally lay down to sleep it automatically kicks you right into REM sleep so you don’t have to wait to reach it with a normal sleep cycle.
Could it be that we slept that way because of lack of efficient lighting and the need to wake up very early in an agricultural society. This seems like a chicken or egg discussion
I need 11 hours of sleep to feel fully rested.
[...] average persons 8 hour sleeping pattern is wrong and that cultures have been sleeping in two 4 hour sessions for [...]
I don’t buy it. How does this fit with an agrarian or rural lifestyle?
Also, you say that the evidence is irrefutable. But there isn’t any evidence at all to suggest that this is a “better” sleeping style, but rather that is a different sleeping style that appears to have been informed by technological advances at the time.
Show me 500 references to segmented sleeping and I’ll show you 500000 references to single-chunk sleeping.
Tallest Nat,
I do this and have for a few years now. It’s probably not for everyone but I love it. It works for me and I feel great. Give it a shot!
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A likely reason for naturally waking in the middle of the night was the olden-times’ need to restock the fire. If you didn’t wake, the fire would go out and/or you and the entire family/clan would get cold.
Seriously? Who can work 4 hours and sleep 30 minutes, work 4 hours and sleep 30 minutes, work 4 hours and sleep 30 minutes in today’s lifestyle? If you want to get fired, or get written warnings, by all means, go for it, but it simply doesn’t fit in, what, say, 95% of the working class’ lifestyles?
I’ll stick with my 6 to 8 hours, thank you
I never understood how Muslims can pray every 5 hours. It led me to the conclusion that the entire Arab world was sleep deprived. But this explains where that came from. Pray, sleep, pray, sleep, pray. Still a bit crazy, but less so than waking up in the middle of the night for no reason.
Sleep cycles are 1.5 hours. I believe it is best to sleep in an amount which is a multiple of 1.5. 7.5 hours can be better than 8. but 9 hours straight is optimal.
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