Pandemic brings segmented sleep into the routine of some people

The pandemic was turning one year old when Marcela Rafea started waking up at 3 am, every morning, with her head boiling.

She would get out of bed quietly and walk into the living room, where she would meditate, try some yoga positions, and open the window to hear the rustle of leaves, the noise of cars, and the barking of dogs.

Then at 6am, she would go back to bed and sleep until 7am, when her youngest daughter would wake her up to start her day.

“I needed those waking hours to make up for the lack of time for myself,” said Rafea, 50, who is a photographer with three children and lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

She wasn’t aware of it, but she had reverted to a sleep cycle that was supposedly a pattern in multiple cultures from the late Middle Ages to the early 19th century.

During the period, many people went to sleep at the time of sunset and woke up three or four hours later. Then, for an hour or two, people would talk, read books, eat light meals, and try to conceive children, before going back to bed for a second round of three or four hours of sleep.

It wasn’t until artificial light was introduced that people started forcing themselves to sleep continuously through the night, said A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at the Virginia University of Technology and author of “The Great Sleep Transformation.” of sleep, in free translation).

Now that many people decide their hours on their own because they work from home and are more concerned about their well-being, some of them have returned to the idea of ​​a segmented sleep cycle — whether voluntarily or not, given their stress levels. last years.

So, are we returning to a natural sleep cycle that has long been forgotten? And could this be the cure for people suffering from so-called middle-of-the-night insomnia?

Ekirch, who has studied segmented sleep for 35 years, said there are more than 2,000 references to it in literary sources — everything from letters and diaries to newspapers, plays, novels and poems, from Homer and Chaucer to Dickens.

“The phenomenon was known by different names in different places; first and second sleep, early nap and deep sleep, night sleep and morning sleep,” said Benjamin Reiss, professor of English at Emory University and author of “Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World”.

He added that far from being a choice at the time, it was something that people simply did, as it fell within the standards of agricultural and artisanal work.

There are also negative reasons for segmented sleep.

“The surfaces people slept on — in the past, often a bag stuffed with grass or, if you were lucky, wool or horse hair — made it harder than it is now to sleep without interruption,” Reiss said.

And there were, of course, health issues. For example, “without the resources of modern dentistry, a toothache could start to bother you in the middle of the night.”

Everything changed with the Industrial Revolution, which began to emphasize profit and productivity. The belief was that people who confined their sleep to a continuous period gained an advantage. The increasing prevalence of artificial lights allowed people to go to bed later, which led to sleep compression.

After a few hundred years, we got used to compressed sleep. Well, at least some of us.

Thirty percent of people report waking up in the middle of the night at least three times a week, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, and each year 25% of adults report experiencing insomnia, according to a study. recent study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

For some people, the pandemic has resulted in more flexible hours, which has led to experiments with the way of sleeping that was prevalent in the past.

That’s the case for Mark Hadley, 52, a finance manager in North Bend, Oregon. Over the past 20 years, Hadley says he can’t remember a time when he slept through the night without a break.

“I would always wake up in the middle of the night and lie there,” he said. “Physically, I wanted to get up. But I needed more sleep.”

Hadley had no choice. He’d heard of segmented sleep before, but didn’t have time to experiment with the idea — until he switched to working mostly from home during the pandemic.

So in August 2021, Hadley started practicing segmented sleep, going to bed at 10pm and waking up naturally at 2am. He stays up for 90 minutes or two hours to read and pray. Then he goes back to bed at 3:30 or 4:00 and goes back to sleep until his wife calls him at 6:30 or 7:00.

“That’s what my body was trying to do, when I hadn’t even heard of this practice,” Hadley said. “But now I’ve finally reached a point where I have a healthy sleep pattern.”

However, doctors are conflicted as to whether segmented sleep should be considered healthy.

“We don’t actually know the long-term impacts of segmented sleep because we don’t have that much data on it,” said Matthew Ebben, a professor of psychology in clinical neurology at the Well Cornell School of Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

The practice can make people feel more fatigued and numb during the day, said Nicole Avena, a health psychologist and assistant professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Avena also said that segmented sleep requires individuals to go to bed earlier, which may not fit many people’s schedules.

For Danielle Hughes, 33, segmented sleep was a remedy for her insomnia. Hughes, who lives in Dublin, Ireland, spent an entire year turning to doctors for a solution to his habit of waking up in the middle of the night. Eventually, she Googled the issue and happened upon a reference to segmented sleep.

“It was a moment that cleared things up for me,” Hughes said. “All the anxiety I had about not being able to sleep started to ease and I felt that whatever sleep I got at night was good because it allowed me to use the time I spent awake more productively.”

Since she found out about segmented sleep, Hughes has been opening up to the concept, and has gone to sleep from 2am to 6am and later from 2pm to 6pm.

In cases of insomnia anxiety like Hughes’s, segmented sleep is often an ideal solution, said Alex Savy, a sleep science coach and founder of SleepOcean, a product review site in Toronto.

“When they practice segmented sleep, insomniacs don’t have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night, because that’s how segmented sleep is supposed to work,” Savy said. “So they can match their schedules to their insomnia and reduce the stress associated with it.”

But going back to the sleep patterns of the Middle Ages isn’t for everyone, Avena said, suggesting that segmented sleep should only be attempted by those people who are already experiencing sleep problems.

“I think that while the method may promote better sleep for these people, it will likely have more consequences than benefits for those who don’t have sleep difficulties.”

Translation by Paulo Migliacci