People used to sleep twice a night on purpose.

Why did people used to sleep twice a night? A first sleep, a waking hour, then a second sleep was once completely normal. For most of human history, the solid eight hour block of sleep you are chasing did not exist. People slept in two shifts, and if you wake in the small hours and cannot drop off again, you may be running much older software than you think. The historian Roger Ekirch found the receipts, hundreds of them, buried in diaries, court records, medical texts and literature. They casually mention a first sleep and a second sleep, as if everyone knew what that meant. People went to bed not long after dark, slept for a few hours, then woke for an hour or so in the middle of the night. And this waking hour was not lying there in a panic. They used it. They prayed, they read, they talked, they tended the fire, they visited neighbours, before falling into their second sleep until dawn. So what killed it? Largely artificial light. As street lighting and then cheap home lighting spread, evenings stretched later, bedtimes shifted, and the whole night compressed into one consolidated block. There is even a clue from the lab: in a study by Thomas Wehr, people kept in long winter like darkness with no artificial light naturally drifted back into two sleeps with a quiet, wakeful window between them. So that 3am wide awake spell might not be insomnia at all. It could be the ghost of an older, perfectly normal way of sleeping. Read the full, fact checked deep dive: https://munchrd.com/why-did-people-sl... Watch the Short:    • People used to sleep twice a night on purp...   CHAPTERS: 0:00 The eight hour myth 0:52 The historical receipts 1:23 First sleep and second sleep 1:55 The wakeful hour between 2:22 How artificial light killed it 2:57 The Wehr darkness study 3:32 What it means for your 3am 3:56 One more thing Ever Wondered? by Munchrd. Genuinely accurate, slightly funny answers to the questions you have quietly wondered your whole life. Every claim is researched and fact checked. Subscribe:    / @munchrd   #Sleep #History #BiphasicSleep