Do you wake up at night & are you fit?
In the Middle Ages, two-phase sleep is said to have been very common.
A sleep researcher investigated whether it is in human nature.
Going to bed at 11 p.m. and getting up at 7 a.m.: This is the sleep pattern of many people.
Most sleep in one go, so don't get up at night.
But that was not always so.
Before industrialization – i.e. before the time of electric light and other technical achievements – so-called biphasic sleep was widespread
.
So people split their sleep in half and sometimes stayed up for hours in the middle of the night.
The American social historian Robert Ekirch came to this conclusion in his publication "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles".
According to Ekirch, before industrialization, most people went to bed around 9 p.m. and woke up a few hours later.
Then followed a longer waking phase, which was used for prayers, conversations, pleasure or even crimes.
This section usually lasted a few hours, as the Stern further quotes Robert Ekirch.
According to Ekirch, the second phase of sleep usually lasted until dawn
.
There were no alarm clocks back then, it was daylight that woke people up.
Ekirch's explanations are based, among other things, on the evaluation of historical records, such as Homer's "Odyssey" or the novel "Don Quijote".
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Two-phase sleep: useful or outdated?
The reasons for waking up at night in earlier times are obvious: fleas and uncomfortable sleeping quarters made it almost impossible to sleep for eight hours, cold or heat could not be counteracted as well as today and sharing the sleeping quarters with many family members also disturbed the night's sleep .
But could it be that two-phase sleeping is in our nature?
In an experiment, the American scientist Thomas A. Wehr examined how the reduction in light affected the sleep of the study participants.
This is particularly interesting given the ability of electric light to extend the day in the modern world.
People no longer wake up and sleep in harmony with nature, i.e. with sunrise and sunset
.
"When normal individuals were switched from a conventional 16-hour light phase to an experimental 10-hour light phase, their sleep episodes lengthened, typically dividing into two symmetrical periods of several hours in duration with a 1-3 hour waking interval in between,” informs Wehr.
Among other things, he attributes this to the altered release of melatonin in the body and concludes from the results of his study: "The results of the experiment show that human sleep (...) can be polyphasic, like the sleep of other animals".
(jg)
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