First sleep and second sleep

One of my goals this year is to improve my sleeping quality as a way of reducing stress and shedding some fat. This article popped up in Feedly–it’s a good reminder of an issue I read about from Mark Sisson a couple of years ago, what he called biphasic sleep. I have had this experience of waking up around midnight, especially when I’ve been giving myself more time to be in bed. When it happens, I will listen to a podcast in the dark for an hour. I have no reason to worry about it or label insomnia.

delanceyplace.com 12/18/12 – we used to sleep twice each night

For most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected “two sleep” phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:

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