Category: STORIES

The history of “first sleep” and “second sleep” holds surprising lessons about preindustrial life, 21st-century anxiety, and the problem with digging for utopia in the past.
By Derek Thompson

About the author: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the

Work in Progress newsletter.

He is also the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Plain English.

AT 3 A.M. I’M JOLTED awake. The room is dark and still. I grab my phone and scan sports scores and Twitter. Still awake. 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 pour a glass of water and drink it. I go back to bed. Still awake. Perhaps you know the feeling. 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.

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. 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. They slept sort of like I do, but they were Zen about it. Then, the hackers claim, modernity came along and ruined everything by pressuring everybody to sleep in one big chunk.

The romanticization of preindustrial sleep fascinated me. It also snapped into a popular template of contemporary internet analysis: If you experience a moment’s unpleasantness, first blame modern capitalism. So I reached out to Roger Ekirch, the historian whose work broke open the field of segmented sleep more than 20 years ago.

In the 1980s, Ekirch was researching a book about nighttime before the industrial revolution. 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. He had never seen the phrases before. 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.

When sleep was divided into a two-act play, people were creative with how they spent the intermission. They didn’t have anxious conversations with imaginary doctors; they actually did something. During this dorveille, or “wake-sleep,” people got up to pee, hung out by the fire, had sex, or prayed. They reflected on their dreams and commingled with the spiritual realm, both the divine and the diabolical. 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.”

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. But that’s not the full story, he told me.

PREINDUSTRIAL SLEEP WAS nothing to romanticize. Death stalked our slumber for centuries. 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. And ancient soporifics—such as poisonous leaves and various opiate concoctions—were roughly as likely to kill.

Beginning 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. A surging economy made a virtue of productivity and instilled “an increasing sense of time consciousness” in the West, Ekirch told me. By the mid-1800s, “Early Rising” movements had taken off in England and America. New artificial lights delayed bedtimes, while new factory schedules required early waking. The lit world altered our internal clocks too. “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. 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.

This makes it sound like segmented sleep is humanity’s natural habit, and that the industrial revolution and modern capitalism despoiled our perfect rest.

But humans have never had a universal method of slumber. A 2015 study of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia found that most foragers enjoyed one long sleep. Two years later, another study found that a rural society in Madagascar practiced segmented sleep. Two years after that, a study found that the indigenous residents of Tanna, in the South Pacific, largely had one uninterrupted sleep.

by T. Blen Parker

Meteorologists make their repeated vociferous predictions,
Sounding the impending doom.
A storm approaches! Be prepared! Don’t get caught!
Residents scribble market lists of storm-survival items.
Lines at supermarket doors grow longer as
Customers scramble to clear necessities from shelves,
Forming a shopping cart race, a cacophonous event.
Cars line up at traffic lights, horns honking, anxiously
Attempting to hurry home before the storm “hits” their town.

Local chatter commences, just before intense cold brings on
Eerie quietude when the first flakes begin to accumulate.
Songbirds silently peck seeds below the birdfeeders,
Frantically gorging themselves to last for days.
Only the river ice groans and snaps, echoing
Throughout the forest where the creatures
Step lightly to find a warm burrow. The wind picks up, gusting
Over 50 MPH creating snowy tornadoes around houses,
Garages, barns, or in the middle of empty snow-covered fields.

Windows rattle, storm doors bang open,
Frigid flakes blow sideways, tap, tap, tapping on windowpanes.
Wooden beams snap and crack suddenly and loudly
Creaking under below zero temperatures.
Heating, clinking silver spoon to stir,
I clutch with both hands a mug of steaming hot chocolate.
Intermittently turning crisp pages until writing calls me
To scratch ideas out with a fountain pen on paper.
The world drops away as I slip on a knitted
Wool beanie cap, settling into warm thoughts, sitting in
My favorite chair against a heated rice bag.
Ahhhhh, the sounds of satisfaction,
Or have I woken to the sounds of my own snoring?

“To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else.”