I do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It's 6:50 now and I've done a lot of work! It's nice, quiet, I just really crack on.
I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again.
Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do already!
... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon.
I used to be a 'night owl' really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk.
I want to implement something like this so badly. It's just impossible when one is in the strict 9-5 meat grinder.
I'm a night owl that crashes around 2 AM, and honestly, I think it's why I can barely function on an average day. I try to make up for lost sleep on the weekends, but it doesn't quite work that way.
Has this evidence been examined sceptically? I've heard this theory a few times, but it always sounds like one person's obsession, and I struggle to credit it.
You are right (and very observant) that this is mostly Ekrich when you dig into it. I didn't realise this until quite recently, and I too had assumed there was a lot more work about this.
But what he's found in literature is pretty consistent, and biphasic sleep was once quite normal in a specific context: the siesta.
It's dying out in continental Europe alas -- a lost cultural touchstone -- and in the contemporary West, a siesta is short (literally a nap). But a traditional Spanish siesta is the best part of a sleep cycle -- a good couple of hours, with an hour's rest spread either side. More than enough that you could have four hours sleep overnight throughout the longer days and not be incompetent the next day.
My sleep is currently polyphasic, which is not a great time. But it has taught me that sleep in the absence of natural light (or the presence of consistent artificial light) does have a habit of going polyphasic.
I woke up at 4:15am after about five hours of sleep. I just cleaned a grill pan. I may go back to sleep again.
Sleep scientists seem pretty sure that polyphasic sleep is bad.
Hardly a singular obsession of one person when we have both Vigil and Matins as standards of the canonical hours for much of the past two thousand years of church records.
The article outlines multiple examples of references to first and second sleep periods in official court documents, and points to sleep studies of farmers in rural areas who still 'almost wake' not long after midnight.
As a pre industrial habit it makes sense - in colder areas fires don't last all night and rising after midnight to stoke fires, check animals, etc. fits right in with rural life.
Especially since there's that one other person -- Piotr Wozniak -- who shares the idea of two sleeps but argues they are completely different to the Ekrich characterisation. Wozniak thinks the second sleep is the mid-day nap. That resonates much more with my needs.
I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like a hand-cranked LED torch. And those people who remain uncontacted have made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.
Anecdotal / from memory, they did a study (at least) once where people didn't have artificial light (not sure if they had candles or nothing at all), and found that people naturally went to sleep when it went dark - not much else to do - but also woke up after a few hours.
But I'm not entirely sure; how much can you do awake if it's dark?
But then, it's rare for it to be truly dark, with moonlight and the like.
It's so interesting to me that fundamental ways of life like this can go nearly undocumented save passing references. We know a lot more about the annals of Greek history, for example, because that's what was written down. Ekirch took years to rediscover all these references to biphasic sleep because it was so fundamentally normal that historic writers never thought to focus on it. Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.
I agree, it’s kind of mind blowing when simple things like this are discovered—very humbling. (If the research can be trusted ofc.)
> Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.
As people get older polyphasic sleep often becomes their norm, they sleep when they are tired, and are awake when they are not, especially if they no longer have a job. If you have to interact with people (sign for packages for example) it can be a problem, but if you don't it seems about the same as normal sleep to me. Being forced to change sleep schedule constantly does cause health issues, but just doing what your body tells you seems to work out ok in my experience. Taking drugs to force sleep to a schedule seems like a worse option.
One drawback to it is that many sleep trackers don't handle it well. They'll treat a second sleep as a nap for example and then pester you that you're not getting enough sleep. The Galaxy G5 seems to capture all sleeps fairly well (but it loses pairing every few months and has to be reset from scratch), the Oura Ring sometimes catches 2nd or 3rd sleeps as naps and adds them to the total, the Xiaomi Mi7 Band often misses shorter sleeps or lists them as naps without adding them to the total. The Android app "Sleep as Android" is started and stopped manually so if you can remember to do that it works well.
Ever since I learned of sleep cycles, and how to measure my own, I've pretty much governed my life around them.
Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state.
For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes.
This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.
Can you share more about how you got accurate measurements on this?
I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
The trick to going back to sleep is often, after waking too soon, to do something boring. A chore. Try it for 5-15 mins, go back to bed. Repeat if you're not nodding off. The thinking is, you'll prefer sleep to the boring chore.
I've been experimenting a lot with polyphasic sleep over the years. I've done siestas, Everyman routines, Dual Core, Biphasic-X, etc. They're all interesting in their own way but these days I've been getting into the dual core routine which is similar to the post's two sleeps. These routines by the way are documented on https://www.polyphasic.net/polyphasic-sleep-schedules/
I have gastroparesis, which often gives me bloating/pain that lasts a long time, and if I'm too hungry at night, I have to choose between trying to ignore hunger and not sleeping for the next ~3 hours (even a snack or a cup of water makes me bloated). On top of that, I live in a studio with a cat and a morning person. Due to this, sleeping for 8 hours straight uninterrupted is extremely difficult, so I'm very curious about polyphasic sleep.
In your experience, are you able to learn and be productive while adjusting to these sleep cycles? How long does it take you to adjust and feel well rested? Are there any risks to be wary of, and any tips to change my sleep routine effectively?
Wait tell us more about use your computer by candlelight… do you mean like red shift? Most OSes have this built in and there are 3rd party apps that can do candlelight settings
waking up in the middle of the night is extremely normal, even with "perfect" sleep hygiene.
in fact, cbt-i, the therapy I undertook last year and earlier this year, takes advantage of this to help patients mitigate their insomnia.[0]
the treatment protocol requires that you get out of bed and literally go anywhere else when you wake up at night. you can do almost anything you want during that time, even watch TV or play games! (i read hacker news or read "linux kernel development" by robert love; if you're on here, thanks!)
given this, it's not surprising that our ancestors divided their sleep into two halves. our circadian rhythms are naturally programmed to sleep when it's dark and stay awake when it's bright. i could imagine that their circadian rhythms were more "in tune" before electricity.
[0] "insomnia" isn't curable and can happen to everyone! it's more of a state of being than a condition or disease.
The problem is I have a family, and I couldn't make the schedule work out to where I get a good polyphasic sleep cycle in and still be a part of the family with the normal food-oriented together times.
[+] [-] buserror|2 years ago|reply
I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again. Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do already!
... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon.
I used to be a 'night owl' really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk.
Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!
[+] [-] nly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirvi74|2 years ago|reply
I'm a night owl that crashes around 2 AM, and honestly, I think it's why I can barely function on an average day. I try to make up for lost sleep on the weekends, but it doesn't quite work that way.
[+] [-] lmm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemusedthrow75|2 years ago|reply
But what he's found in literature is pretty consistent, and biphasic sleep was once quite normal in a specific context: the siesta.
It's dying out in continental Europe alas -- a lost cultural touchstone -- and in the contemporary West, a siesta is short (literally a nap). But a traditional Spanish siesta is the best part of a sleep cycle -- a good couple of hours, with an hour's rest spread either side. More than enough that you could have four hours sleep overnight throughout the longer days and not be incompetent the next day.
My sleep is currently polyphasic, which is not a great time. But it has taught me that sleep in the absence of natural light (or the presence of consistent artificial light) does have a habit of going polyphasic.
I woke up at 4:15am after about five hours of sleep. I just cleaned a grill pan. I may go back to sleep again.
Sleep scientists seem pretty sure that polyphasic sleep is bad.
[+] [-] defrost|2 years ago|reply
The article outlines multiple examples of references to first and second sleep periods in official court documents, and points to sleep studies of farmers in rural areas who still 'almost wake' not long after midnight.
As a pre industrial habit it makes sense - in colder areas fires don't last all night and rising after midnight to stoke fires, check animals, etc. fits right in with rural life.
[+] [-] kqr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmopp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
But I'm not entirely sure; how much can you do awake if it's dark?
But then, it's rare for it to be truly dark, with moonlight and the like.
[+] [-] nunez|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rappatic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschulz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otabdeveloper4|2 years ago|reply
...will bitrot away in 50 years.
In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|2 years ago|reply
> Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.
[+] [-] rapjr9|2 years ago|reply
One drawback to it is that many sleep trackers don't handle it well. They'll treat a second sleep as a nap for example and then pester you that you're not getting enough sleep. The Galaxy G5 seems to capture all sleeps fairly well (but it loses pairing every few months and has to be reset from scratch), the Oura Ring sometimes catches 2nd or 3rd sleeps as naps and adds them to the total, the Xiaomi Mi7 Band often misses shorter sleeps or lists them as naps without adding them to the total. The Android app "Sleep as Android" is started and stopped manually so if you can remember to do that it works well.
[+] [-] INTPenis|2 years ago|reply
Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state.
For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes.
This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.
[+] [-] q7xvh97o2pDhNrh|2 years ago|reply
I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
[+] [-] IndySun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satvikpendem|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnk47|2 years ago|reply
In your experience, are you able to learn and be productive while adjusting to these sleep cycles? How long does it take you to adjust and feel well rested? Are there any risks to be wary of, and any tips to change my sleep routine effectively?
[+] [-] CalRobert|2 years ago|reply
I got a ton done in those two hours. I remember looking for an e ink display to use with my computer so I could do it by candlelight, to no avail
[+] [-] elliotec|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nunez|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nunez|2 years ago|reply
in fact, cbt-i, the therapy I undertook last year and earlier this year, takes advantage of this to help patients mitigate their insomnia.[0]
the treatment protocol requires that you get out of bed and literally go anywhere else when you wake up at night. you can do almost anything you want during that time, even watch TV or play games! (i read hacker news or read "linux kernel development" by robert love; if you're on here, thanks!)
given this, it's not surprising that our ancestors divided their sleep into two halves. our circadian rhythms are naturally programmed to sleep when it's dark and stay awake when it's bright. i could imagine that their circadian rhythms were more "in tune" before electricity.
[0] "insomnia" isn't curable and can happen to everyone! it's more of a state of being than a condition or disease.
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|2 years ago|reply
The problem is I have a family, and I couldn't make the schedule work out to where I get a good polyphasic sleep cycle in and still be a part of the family with the normal food-oriented together times.
[+] [-] JR1427|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
Some more discussion then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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