Will Medieval Sleeping Habits End Your Insomnia?

In premodern Europe, and perhaps centuries earlier, people routinely went to sleep around nightfall and woke up around midnight—only to go back to sleep a few hours later, until morning. Then modernity came along and ruined everything by pressuring everybody to sleep in one big chunk.

Eideard

By Derek Thompson

I was researching my nocturnal issues when I discovered a cottage industry of writers and sleep hackers who claim that sleep is a nightmare because of the industrial revolution, of all things. Essays in The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine recommended an old fix for restlessness called “segmented sleep.” In premodern Europe, and perhaps centuries earlier, people routinely went to sleep around nightfall and woke up around midnight—only to go back to sleep a few hours later, until morning. They slept sort of like I do, but they were Zen about it. Then, the hackers claim, modernity came along and ruined everything by pressuring everybody to sleep in one big chunk.

The romanticization of preindustrial sleep fascinated me…I reached out to Roger Ekirch, the historian whose work broke open the field of segmented sleep more than 20 years…

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