Is it normal to wake up in the middle of the night?

Day 47 / 365

While I was in college there used to be week or sometimes month-long periods when I would wake up around 3 AM, usually from an intense dream and go back to sleep less than an hour later. I attributed it to my bad sleeping habits. As it turns out, this is a quite common condition diagnosed as “Middle-of-the-night insomnia” and some people even take medication to treat it.

There is some evidence, however, suggesting that such a 2 phased sleep cycle might actually be the natural one for us, and the more common continuous 8-hour routine is something we have only recently developed.

Evidence of Biphasic Sleep

Historian A. Roger Ekirch published a paper in 2001, after 16 years of research, given a wealth of evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct 4 hour long chunks, with about an hour of wakefulness in between. He looked at numerous historical diaries, court records, medical books, and literature and found over 500 references to a first sleep followed by a second sleep.

What did people do in the middle of the two Sleeps?

People were quite active during this 1–2 hour period of wakefulness in the middle of the night. They would even get up, pray, write or go out and talk to their neighbors.

Ekrich found prayer manuals from the 15th century that offered specials prayers for the time between the two sleeps.

The references to such a biphasic sleep pattern started to disappear near the end of the 17th century. This was due to the popularity of artificial lightning that allowed people to stay up and work for longer hours. By the start of the 20th century, this idea was completely wiped out of our social consciousness.

Is the biphasic sleep pattern better for us?

Waking up in the middle of the night might just be due to the leftovers of the bi-modal sleep patterns in our brain. But because the popular belief is that we must have an unbroken 8-hour sleep, such episodes of midnight awakening cause panic amongst people. And this anxiety might further damage whatever little sleep they have left.

On the contrary, the waking period between the two sleeps might have played an important role in our relaxation. There are records showing that people used that time to meditate on the dreams that they have had. The only dreams we remember having today are morning dreams, and we generally don’t have time to think about it as we get up and get started with our day.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The 80/20 Rule for productivity