Sleeping in two phases may be the natural way, says Andrew Smart

Waking up in the middle of the night might be a vestige from pre-industrial times, but perhaps we should embrace ancient sleeping habits from before artificial light?

My sons are four and six years old. At bedtime I read them a story and then lie down in their bedroom on a sofa and wait for them to fall asleep. However, on most nights I fall asleep too, at around 9pm. Then I wake up perhaps at 2 or 3am and try to fall back asleep, but don’t usually succeed until 4 or 5am. If we didn’t to be up absurdly early for school and work I would sleep until nine.

In modern society this kind of sleeping pattern is a problem – and I am often fatigued. However, it turns out that evolutionarily and historically this bi-phasic type of sleeping might actually have been the norm. It is modern life that is abnormal: with its rigid early schedules and timetables. Why on earth does school have to start at 8.30am? In fact much new research indicates that children perform vastly better on tests if the school start time moves to 9.30am.

Before clocks and electric light were commonplace, people went to bed shortly after sunset for what was called “first sleep”, and then awoke around 3am for a few hours, futzed about or did chores (or had sex), and then went back to bed until 9 or 10am for what was called “second sleep”. Much like Hobbits who had “second breakfast”, people who lived in Hobbit-like villages in the Middle Ages had second sleep.

Today, sleeping pills are a ten billion dollar a year industry. But our perpetual sleep deprivation does not actually have a pharmacological basis, it is simply caused by a lot of wrong-headed ideas about sleep: 1) that we have to wake up early and 2) we need to sleep eight hours straight through the night. Both of those ideas are just wrong. So rather than stuff our faces with sleeping pills at night, and gallons of caffeine in the morning, we should alter our work and waking schedules to our bodies natural rhythms. Some people are really early birds, and others are night owls and it turns out your sleeping cycle is highly genetic. But no matter what, it appears that humans, like most animals in fact, would prefer to sleep in two phases during the night.