The Fabulous Forager

Are you getting a good, solid eight hours of sleep every night? Sleeping soundly from the time you lay down to the time you get up to go to work? Well, stop doing that: it’s bad for you and unnatural. Yes, you heard me correctly!

There are so many aspects of our daily lives that we take for granted as being normal that have turned out to be totally maladaptive and, in the grand scheme of human history, brand-new: having hierarchy, eating cereal grains, wearing shoes… now it seems we can’t even get sleeping right.

In an article for the New York Times, Jon Mooallem recounts the findings of A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech and author of the book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past:

[F]or many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission. “There was an extraordinary level of activity,” Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Granted, “first sleep” and “second sleep” sounds like something Hobbits would come up with (to me, anyway). But check out this passage from Ekirch’s own New York Times editorial:

This time after the first sleep was praised as uniquely suited for sexual intimacy; rested couples have “more enjoyment” and “do it better,” as one 16th-century French doctor wrote. Often, people might simply have lain in bed ruminating on the meaning of a fresh dream, thereby permitting the conscious mind a window onto the human psyche that remains shuttered for those in the modern day too quick to awake and arise.

But obviously, an improved sex life is not the point, although the chief result of sex benefits from this sleeping schedule too: it would make sense for the mothers to be able to emulate their babies’ sleep schedule to make late-night breastfeeding easier. Mooallem goes on to show that this pattern of sleep—which was the rule as recently as 200 years ago—is what comes most naturally to us:

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, “may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,” Ekirch told me. “It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.”

In fact, many contemporary, nonindustrialized cultures contentedly pass portions of the night in the same state of somnolence, says Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who is one of the first to look at how other societies sleep. Sleep and wakefulness are rarely seen as an either/or, but rather as two ends of a wide spectrum, and people are far more at peace with the fluidity in between. Among the Efe in Zaire, and the !Kung in Botswana, for example, someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot sleep “may begin to hum, or go out and play the thumb piano,” Worthman and a colleague have written. Others might wake up and join in. “Music or even a dance may get going.”

Worthman says, “In our culture, quality sleep is going into a dark room that is totally quiet, lying down, falling asleep, doing that for eight hours, and then getting up again.” She calls it the “lie down and die” model. “But that is not how much of the world has slept in the past or even sleeps today.” In some cultures sleep is more social, with crowds crammed together on little or no bedding, limbs entangled, while a steady traffic comes and goes. And while it all sounds unbearable, Worthman notes that science has never looked empirically at whether our more sophisticated arrangements actually benefit us. For children, learning to sleep amid all that stimulation may actually have developmental advantages.

Still, we can’t afford the same equanimity about not sleeping through the night as the Efe and !Kung; the flipside is that men and women in those cultures are content to pull a cloth over their faces and doze off during the day if necessary. Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day — as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming “Insomnia: A Cultural History,” explains that in the 18th century, “we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time.” Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: “We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away.” She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.

Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal. Perhaps the real problem is that we still haven’t come to terms with the unavoidable imperfection of this state of affairs.

Electric light didn’t obliterate nighttime so much as reinvent it. Our power to toggle between light and dark encouraged us to see night as an empty antithesis to day — an unbroken nothing-time that begins the instant we flip off the switch. And this significantly reshaped and rigidified our expectations of how we ought to be spending it. All of this leaves us — regardless of the circumstances or how poor our sleep hygiene is — insisting that we go out, and stay out, like a light.

The result of this bizarre sleep schedule is that people who are not “so easily tamed by artificial light” end up confusing “this primitive bimodal sleep” with a sleeping disorder, and so drugs such as Lunesta and Ambien are born. According to Wehr’s data, our compressed sleep schedule resembles the pattern people used to take in the summer, when nights were shorter. In fact, during winter, European peasants used to practice a sort of human hibernation. As far as sleep goes, we’re basically going around pretending it’s summer all the time.

So what can we do about this? Unfortunately, if you have an office job and a family, trying to get back on a natural sleep schedule will be even harder than trying to go paleo. As maladaptive as the eight-hour sleep is to our biology, we started on it for a reason: industrial civilization requires it, and by this point, everyone else in our workaholic culture expects it. But if you’re one of those who thought you had a “sleep disorder” because you divided nighttime into two bouts of sleeping, at least you can rest easy knowing that you’re actually the normal one.