Why Waking Up At Night Used To Be Normal

It is three in the morning and you are awake. You did not decide to be. You start doing arithmetic - four hours until the alarm - and by morning you have a word ready for it: you slept badly, and something is wrong with you. But for most of human history, waking in the middle of the night was not a problem. It was the middle of the night. People had a first sleep and a second sleep, and an hour in between that nobody thought needed explaining. This video is about how that hour disappeared and got a diagnosis. A historian who kept finding a phrase in old court records that nobody bothered to define. A laboratory experiment that took away the light and watched the old pattern come back on its own. The gas lamp that turned the night into something you could spend. A factory slogan that gave us the number eight. And an industry that now sells you both the standard and the device that measures how far you fall short of it. CHAPTERS 0:00 - Three in the morning, and you are awake 0:44 - First sleep, second sleep 1:40 - The hour people spent in between 2:43 - Wehr's experiment: the old pattern comes back 4:14 - What artificial light erased 5:35 - Where eight hours actually came from 6:45 - The gap becomes a symptom 7:43 - What gets sold to fix it 8:30 - The wristband that diagnoses you 9:01 - A house full of light WHAT YOU WILL LEARN The historian Roger Ekirch found more than 500 references to "first sleep" and "second sleep" for his book, and has since found more than 2,000 in a dozen languages - in diaries, court records, medical texts, prayer books and plays. The oldest are Roman. Nobody explained the words, because nobody needed to. Between the two sleeps people prayed, talked, mended things, visited neighbours and made love. There was no word like insomnia for that hour. In the early 1990s Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health gave eight healthy men 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness a day for four weeks. By the fourth week they slept in two blocks of three to five hours, with one to two quiet hours awake in between - the same pattern as the old records. During that waking hour prolactin, which normally drops when you wake, stayed high. The men were awake while their bodies were still resting. Gas street lighting came to London in 1807 and to Baltimore ten years later. Evenings got longer, factory hours stayed fixed, and the gap between the two sleeps was squeezed out from both ends. The number eight comes from Robert Owen's 1817 slogan: eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest. It was a demand about working hours, not a measurement of sleep. Estimates of the sleep industry range from about $100 billion a year counted narrowly to more than $600 billion counted broadly. Insomnia accounts for roughly two fifths of it. In 2017 sleep researchers described "orthosomnia": patients who came in for insomnia treatment because a sleep tracker had told them they had it. SOURCES A. Roger Ekirch, "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles", American Historical Review, 2001. A. Roger Ekirch, "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past", 2005. Thomas A. Wehr, "In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic", Journal of Sleep Research, 1992. Robert Owen and the eight-hour slogan, 1817: the demand for eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest. Gas street lighting: London from 1807, Baltimore the first American city from 1817. Sleep industry estimates for 2025: BCC Research, Grand View Research, Emergen Research. Commercial forecasts; the spread between them is large. Kelly Glazer Baron et al., "Orthosomnia: are some patients taking the quantified self too far?", Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2017. #sleep #insomnia #history #biphasicsleep #sleepscience #circadianrhythm #sleepproblems #why #industrialrevolution #videoessay #documentary #palewoodtales