According to this influential article by the historian A. Roger Ekirch,
Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.
This is called segmented sleep. Supposedly this is “natural”:
In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.
And if you don’t like sleeping this way you are ignorant:
The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep leads many to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance i nsomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.
An amusing therapeutic approach. Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patterns”.
I found that if I ate more animal fat I slept better. It is entirely possible that if all those Western Europeans walking up in the middle of the night had eaten more animal fat — as their ancestors may have several hundred thousand years ago before big fat-laden game animals were hunted to extinction — they would have slept through the night.
I found several ways to improve my sleep. After my sleep got a lot better — in particular, I stopped waking up in the middle of the night — I stopped getting colds, surely because my immune system was working better. The connection between sleep and immune function is obvious. Given a choice between (a) my immune system had returned to ancient levels of efficacy or (b) my immune system was working better than ever before in the history of the species, I’d bet on (a). Those Western Europeans with segmented sleep were in poor health, I’m sure. Perhaps their sleep was one sign of this.
When people went to bed at sundown and got up at sunrise, a winter’s night was awfully long time to spend asleep the whole way through. Summer’s, not so much.
Makes me think of how many “normal” states are taken as the measured average of the U.S. population, for example. If the population is messed up in the same way, the “normal” may be a long way from the optimal.
I’m willing to believe that segmented sleep with a period of quiet wakefulness is beneficial. Meditation (which could be described as quite wakefulness) has many documented benefits, so meditation could just be adding back in the period of quiet wakefulness we used to get and have evolved to take advantage of.
Btw., Seth, I’ve never been persuaded that your metric of length and depth of sleep is the perfect measure for sleep quality, but then I’ve never had a problem with waking up too early
The crazy experiment I’ve been doing for the last year is sleeping on the floor. This has helped my lower back (I started doing it because of some lower back pain) and when it’s time to get up, there’s less temptation to keep hitting the snooze button for a few more minutes.
I’d want to be pretty sure of myself before I go and take such a dismissive attitude to another perspective.
“An amusing therapeutic approach. Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patterns.””
That seems unjustified.
There are Mediterraneans who take a siesta every day. There’s no reason to think this practice doesn’t go way back into distant ancestry. Why can’t there be more than one ‘right’ way? Maybe the truth about sleep incorporates both your own findings and these other possibilities. Contradiction at first sight doesn’t oblige you to disagree.
Given the variation in diets all over the world, it seems wrong to counter Ekirch’s essay with the solution ‘eat more animal fat’ – seems like pushing a favoured idea too far. Is the body so specialised and fragile that everything goes to hell unless we eat like Eskimos?
I would like to say at this point that I have no foreknowledge of nor bias in favour of Ekirch, nor do I have strong views on sleep.
I would only like to reassert ‘epistemic humility’ where I perceive an academic being attacked unfairly just for having a view that does not at first sight fit with your paradigm.
G, Ekrich didn’t say segmented sleep was natural, at least in what I read; others did that, using his work as part of their argument. My point isn’t that people should eat more animal fat; it’s that taking what people did 500 years ago to support conclusions about what is “natural” is unwise. Perhaps malnourishment explains their behavior. I think this is a more productive line of thought than telling someone your problem isn’t really a problem. Which goes nowhere.
Seth,
I often wake up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom, and lie in a sort of stupor for a while before falling asleep again. This has been normal for me for pretty much my whole life. Are you saying I have a problem? If I were to mention this to my doctor — I never have, because I’ve never considered it to be a problem — are you saying that he should tell me that there is a problem with my sleeping pattern and that I should try to correct it?
Phil
Phil, to answer your questions, no I am not saying either of those things (you have a problem, your doctor should tell you you have a problem). I suspect you don’t “lie in a stupor” for 2 hours before you fall back asleep. And I suspect that people who do complain to their doctor about waking up in the middle of the night lie awake for a few hours before being able to fall back asleep. That’s why they complain.
I am not saying either of those things but I am saying something related. The more useful question is not whether you have “a problem” but whether your sleep could be better — “better” in the sense of doing a better job of helping your immune system fight off infection. I don’t know the answer but I think that considering that possibility is more likely to be helpful than not considering it.
I haven’t read anything about this other than the three quotes that you selected so I really can’t judge this issue on its merits at all. But based on what I know (which might be a lot less than you know) I don’t think it is ridiculous to suggest that “segmented sleep” could be just fine. I’m not talking about situations in which I wake up and can’t get back to sleep — I don’t like that — but about what has always been normal for me, which is sleeping for several hours, then waking for perhaps half an hour or an hour, then sleeping for several more hours. You’re sarcastic of the idea that that is OK, and you seem sure that my immune system is suffering for it. Like I said, you probably know a lot more about this stuff than I do, so it’s obvious to you that “segmented sleep” is bad, but it’s not obvious to me.
Phil, thanks for the clarification. I agree, segmented sleep may be just fine. That’s why I said “perhaps” in “perhaps” the segmented sleep of those Western Europeans was a sign of poor health. Maybe I should have emphasized my uncertainty more.
Likewise, I’m not “sure that [your] immune system is suffering for it.” I just thought/think it’s worth considering. Nor was I sarcastic anywhere, as far as I can tell. I don’t know what led you to say that. When I said a therapy that consists of saying “it’s ok” is “amusing” I meant just that — I find it amusing. Sarcasm would be to say that such therapy was brilliant and insightful.
Ah Seth, I see what you mean now about the trouble being more with the way Ekrich’s ideas were appropriated by others – I missed that first time around… because I was badly underslept, ha ha ha…
Brent made some recommendations here that I plan to follow as an experiment:
https://epistemocrat.blogspot.com/2010/07/circadian-rhythms-m1n1-thinkering.html
I have also been trying the ‘morning faces’ thing; can’t say yet whether I’ve had results yet but truthfully I’ve not been all that consistent.
“Sarcasm” means a sharp comment designed to indicate disdain or disagreement. I suppose you could say that your comment (“Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patternsâ€), though disdainful, is not especially “sharp” and is there for not literally sarcastic. Fine, OK.
As is often the case with your blog entries, I agree with some of your point but not all of it. In this case, I agree with your point that just because something is or was common, and some people call it ‘natural’, does not mean that it’s good. After all, malaria is “natural” but we don’t go around recommending it.
The linguist Dan Everett lived with a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Amazon basin called the Piraha, and describes them as sleeping very interminttently throughout the night, waking and socializing for long periods, and then sleeping regularly through the day as well. Perhaps this is something closer to what our paleolithic ancestors would have experienced. The Piraha’s sleep patterns are dictated by the dangers in the jungle, and their heightened vulnerability at night, and when asleep. This is so central to their lives that their version of “goodnight” translates as “Don’t sleep, there are snakes” — also the title of the book, which tells many fascinating stories of their culture. Visiting psychologists speculated the Piraha may be the happiest culture they had ever seen based on the amount of time they spent smiling and laughing — characteristics not shared by other Amazonian tribes or Western civilisation.
Remember that without electric light, the night is loooong in europe in the winter. Tired after a day of physical labor, the house dark, one goes to sleep. You don’t have to get up and work again until its light again, too much time to sleep all the way through. Most people aren’t sleeping in private bedrooms, so the break in the night is a social time.
I like this theory of interrupted sleep, and see in it the prototype of performance arts, bars, night clubs, concerts, theatre, poetry; that is, the arts and amusements that are associated with the night and come from a shared dreamlike state.
I’d echo what Nathan said about long winter nights being a bit too long to sleep entirely through — especially considering that you might have relatively activity during the day. Also, I’ve always interpreted Psalms that talk about “meditating on God in the watches of the night” to refer to awakening during the night. If so, “segmented sleep” may also have been common in the Middle East.
are people generally sleepier on rainy days?
because i bet that neolithic humans slept a lot more when it rained.
[…] Seth Roberts wrote up some fascinating stuff about historical sleep patterns — apparently some people were trying to persuade us all that it is natural to sleep in two batches with a period of quiet wakefulness in the middle, based on historical information about Western European humans. Seth reckons this is more to do with the poor diets of people in the last few hundred years than a sign of our true ancestral heritage (eg. looking back to our Paleolithic ancestors) since he’s found that he sleeps better than ever since he increased his animal fat intake. My take-home point? If you’re sleeping poorly, in addition to the usual “get some non-screen relaxation in before bedtime and get rid of the lights and noises in your sleeping room” also try eating more fatty meats. Sometimes it can be difficult to get comfortable of course […]