11/26/2025
You wake up at 3 AM and can't fall back asleep. Your ancestors would have gotten out of bed and lived their lives. This wasn't insomnia. It was normal.
For thousands of years, humans didn't sleep the way we do now.
The idea of "eight hours straight" would have seemed strange—almost unnatural—to people living before electric lights transformed the night.
They slept differently. In two distinct phases, separated by an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.
It was called biphasic sleep. First sleep. Second sleep.
And the space between? That was when life happened in ways we've completely forgotten.
Imagine this:
The sun sets. Darkness falls early—no streetlights, no glowing screens, just the velvet black of night settling over everything.
Families retire soon after sunset. Not because they're exhausted, but because night was for resting. Candles were expensive. Firewood needed to last. Darkness demanded surrender.
They would sleep for four or five hours. Deep, restorative sleep.
Then, somewhere around midnight or 1 AM, their eyes would open.
Not from stress. Not from anxiety. Not from the neighbor's dog barking or a notification pinging.
Just... naturally. As if their bodies had an internal clock that said, "It's time to wake for a while."
And what did they do in these quiet hours between sleeps?
They lived.
Some would rise from bed, light a candle, and pray. The stillness of night made the divine feel closer somehow.
Others would read by flickering candlelight—religious texts, poetry, whatever worn books they owned. The quiet hours were perfect for contemplation, for thoughts that daylight's distractions wouldn't allow.
Couples would talk. Really talk. Not exhausted exchanges before collapsing into bed, but intimate conversations in the darkness. They would make love. Reflect on dreams that were still vivid in their minds.
Some would walk to a neighbor's house and visit. Yes, visit—at 2 AM. Because everyone was awake. It wasn't strange. It was normal.
Parents would sit with children, telling stories, sharing warmth in the kitchen, hands wrapped around cups of spiced wine or warm ale.
Others would do light chores—tend to a fire, check on livestock, do small tasks that the next day wouldn't allow time for.
And then, when that invisible internal clock said it was time, they would return to bed.
The second sleep. Carrying them from the deep night through to dawn, when the rooster's crow would announce the day.
This wasn't a quirk. This wasn't unusual.
This was how humans slept for millennia.
Historian Roger Ekirch spent years researching pre-industrial sleep patterns and uncovered something astonishing: over 2,000 references to "first sleep" and "second sleep" in historical documents.
Diaries. Medical texts. Court depositions. Literature from ancient Greece. Medieval prayer books. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Everywhere he looked, there it was—evidence of a sleep pattern the modern world had completely forgotten.
In a 1697 legal document, a nine-year-old girl casually mentioned that her mother woke "after her first sleep" to go out. The phrase was used as if everyone knew exactly what it meant.
Because they did.
A 16th-century French physician wrote that manual laborers were more fertile because they had s*x "after the first sleep" when they were more rested and had "more enjoyment."
References appeared in texts from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Australia, Latin America. This wasn't just a European thing. It was human.
But then something happened.
The 19th century arrived with gas lamps, then electric lights. Factories demanded workers show up at specific times. Cities never went dark. The night lost its power to enforce rest.
Slowly, people began sleeping "all in one go."
By the early 20th century, eight consecutive hours became the ideal. The standard. The expectation.
And biphasic sleep? It was forgotten.
Completely erased from collective memory.
Until Roger Ekirch found it again, hidden in centuries of documents that nobody had thought to connect.
Here's what's fascinating:
In the 1990s, sleep scientist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment. He put participants in rooms with only 10 hours of light per day—simulating pre-industrial conditions, long winter nights without electricity.
Within weeks, their sleep patterns changed.
They began sleeping in two phases again. Waking naturally in the middle of the night. Not anxious. Not troubled. Just... awake.
As if their bodies remembered something civilization had trained them to forget.
Today, when we wake at 3 AM and can't fall back asleep, we panic.
We call it insomnia. A disorder. A problem to solve with pills or meditation apps or sleep hygiene rules.
We lie there, frustrated, checking the clock, calculating how many hours we have left, stressing about being tired tomorrow.
But what if we're not broken?
What if our bodies are trying to do exactly what they're designed to do—wake in the middle of the night for a little while, then return to sleep?
What if the "problem" isn't waking up, but our expectation that we shouldn't?
Sleep scientists now say that for some people, waking at night isn't a disorder. It's a biological rhythm that never completely disappeared, even after a century of electric lights and alarm clocks.
The issue isn't the waking. It's the anxiety about the waking.
Our ancestors didn't lie there panicking. They got up. They prayed, read, talked, reflected. They used that time.
Then they went back to sleep when their bodies told them it was time.
No stress. No sleep apps. No problem.
We've lost something in our relentless quest for "eight hours straight."
We've lost the quiet middle of the night—that secret space where thoughts settle, dreams linger, and the world feels softer.
We've lost the idea that rest doesn't have to be unconscious oblivion. That wakefulness in the night can be peaceful, productive, even sacred.
We've lost the rhythm that carried our species through thousands of years.
And in exchange, we got insomnia.
Or what we call insomnia, anyway.
Maybe next time you wake at 3 AM, instead of reaching for your phone or lying there in frustration, you could try something different.
Light a candle. Make tea. Sit in the quiet. Write. Read. Think.
Give yourself permission to be awake for a little while.
Then, when your body says it's ready, go back to sleep.
You're not doing it wrong.
You're doing it the way humans did it for thousands of years—before we forgot how to live in harmony with the night.
First sleep. Second sleep.
The rhythm we lost.
But maybe, just maybe, it's time to remember.
