I’ve been thinking about how different sleep must have been before electricity reshaped our nights. The concept that keeps pulling at me is the idea of a second sleep—people waking naturally in the middle of the night, spending time awake, then returning to sleep. Research on pre-industrial slumber suggests this wasn’t insomnia or a disorder, but a normal rhythm that humans maintained for centuries. Looking at sleep we have lost in the British Isles and the historical evidence around it, I’m realizing that what we call a “good night’s sleep” might actually be the anomaly.
My own sleep patterns feel unnatural when I hold them up against this history. I stay up really late, fighting against darkness in ways that would have been impossible before. I can imagine the rhythm of preindustrial life clearly enough: sun goes down, you sleep, you wake for a stretch in the middle of the night, then you sleep again. But I’m chained to artificial light and obligations that don’t respect those natural pauses. There’s a real friction between Bi-phasic Sleep in History and how modern life actually functions. We’ve optimized ourselves for continuous wakefulness, and our bodies haven’t caught up with that demand.
Modern life has created a fundamental misalignment with our natural rhythms, and I think we’ve stopped noticing it. We’re fighting something basic about how humans are built to rest, and that fight shows up everywhere—in the need to stay productive, in the anxiety around sleep itself. Navigating Sleep Anxiety - Trusting the Body’s Wisdom and understanding Time Poverty are connected threads here; we don’t have permission to just lie in bed, to experience rest that doesn’t serve productivity. The historical evidence around segmented sleep patterns shows we’re trying to force ourselves into a rhythm that’s only a few centuries old, barely a blink in human history. Academic research on pre-industrial sleep patterns confirms what intuition already suggests: we’ve lost something.
If I took this seriously, I’d want to experiment with working less and sleeping more—not optimizing every minute, but being okay with time in bed that doesn’t look productive by modern standards. That would mean resisting the pressure to stay up late, to squeeze more out of the day, to treat sleep as something to minimize rather than trust. I don’t know nearly enough yet about how this worked historically, but the direction feels clear. The experiment wouldn’t be about forcing a segmented sleep schedule, but about giving myself permission to follow what my body actually wants instead of what the clock demands.