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For most of your life, waking up in the middle of the night has probably felt like a problem. You lie there staring at the ceiling, anxious about the hours of lost sleep ticking away before your alarm goes off. You label yourself an insomniac. You reach for supplements, apps, sleep trackers, and eventually maybe even medication. You have been told, reliably and repeatedly, that eight consecutive hours of sleep is the biological gold standard for human health.
But what if that standard is not ancient wisdom at all? What if it is a historically recent invention, shaped more by the rhythms of industry than by the rhythms of the human body?
The Historian Who Changed Everything We Thought About Sleep
In 2001, Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekirch published a landmark paper that would quietly upend centuries of received wisdom about how humans are supposed to sleep. After 16 years of research into pre-industrial life across Europe, Ekirch had combed through thousands of historical documents, diaries, court records, medical texts, and literature, and what he found was striking.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people did not sleep in one long, unbroken block. They slept in two distinct phases, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness in the middle of the night. Ekirch documented over 500 historical references to this pattern, describing what people in the medieval and early modern periods called their “first sleep” and “second sleep.”
This was not insomnia. This was simply how humans slept.
What People Did With the In-Between Hours
The period between the two sleep phases was not treated as a nuisance. According to historical accounts, people used this quiet middle-of-the-night window for prayer, reflection, lovemaking, visiting neighbours, and creative work. It was a liminal space, neither fully day nor fully night, and many people regarded it as unusually fertile ground for thought and imagination.
Medical texts from the 16th century actually recommended this waking period as the ideal time for conception, for study, and for processing the events of the previous day. The waking mind in those early morning hours, slightly loosened from the vigilance of daylight consciousness, appears to have been understood intuitively as something worth protecting.
Whether or not specific historical figures consciously structured their creative output around this window, the pattern itself is well-established. The creative and spiritual value that many cultures assigned to this liminal night period reflects something real about how the human mind functions when it surfaces briefly from deep sleep.
How Industrialisation Standardised the Eight-Hour Block
The shift toward consolidated, single-phase sleep tracks almost precisely with the Industrial Revolution. Factories required workers to arrive at fixed times and maintain consistent schedules across shifts. The organic, flexible rhythms of agricultural and pre-industrial life, where people could structure their days around their bodies, gave way to the mechanical clock.
Artificial lighting, first gas lamps and then electric light, pushed bedtimes later and compressed the night. The social architecture of industrial life simply had no room for a segmented sleep schedule. Workers needed to be functional on a fixed timetable, and the idea of sleeping in two phases, with a waking gap in between, became increasingly impractical and then culturally invisible.
By the 20th century, the two-sleep model had been almost entirely forgotten in Western societies. The eight-hour block was not so much proven to be superior as it was assumed to be normal, because it was the only pattern that fit the demands of modern economic life.
What Sleep Science Actually Says About Biphasic Sleep
Contemporary sleep research has added significant weight to Ekirch’s historical findings. Studies conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health found that when humans were removed from artificial light and modern scheduling pressures, they naturally reverted to a biphasic sleep pattern, sleeping in two distinct phases with a quiet waking period in between.
Dr. Matthew Walker, neuroscientist and author of Why We Sleep, notes that many cultures outside the Western industrialised world have maintained biphasic or polyphasic sleep patterns, including afternoon siestas combined with shorter night sleep, without the sleep disorders and chronic fatigue that plague modern populations.
Research into circadian rhythms suggests that the human body has a natural dip in alertness in the early afternoon and again in the early morning hours, patterns that align suspiciously well with a two-sleep model. The assumption that these dips represent malfunction may have been premature.
The Pathologising of a Natural Pattern
Here is where the story takes a troubling turn. As the eight-hour consolidated sleep norm became entrenched in medical thinking, the natural tendency of some people to wake in the early morning hours became classified as a disorder. Middle-of-the-night waking was labeled insomnia. It was studied, treated, and medicated.
Millions of people who were simply expressing a pattern that their ancestors had lived by for thousands of years were told they were broken. The anxiety generated by lying awake at 2AM worrying about lost sleep arguably causes more harm than the waking itself. Sleep researchers now recognise this as “sleep state misperception” combined with performance anxiety, a feedback loop created partly by the expectation of consolidated sleep rather than by any underlying dysfunction.
If you are someone who regularly wakes in the early hours of the morning and finds yourself alert and mentally clear, it is worth considering that you may not be malfunctioning. You may simply be expressing an older, deeper biological rhythm that modern life has trained you to suppress and fear.
Reclaiming the God Hours
There is something worth sitting with here, particularly for those of us drawn to questions of consciousness, creativity, and inner life. The hours between roughly 1AM and 3AM, that quiet gap between first and second sleep, occupy a genuinely unusual neurological space. The brain is not in the same state as during the day. The internal noise is lower. The analytical mind is slightly softer around the edges.
Many spiritual traditions across cultures have long recognised the pre-dawn hours as sacred time. Brahma muhurta in the yogic tradition, Tahajjud in Islamic practice, Vigils in Christian monasticism – these are not coincidences. They reflect accumulated human wisdom about a window of consciousness that is qualitatively different from daylight awareness.
If you wake at 2AM and your mind is alive, you have a choice. You can spend an hour fighting your body, catastrophising about your sleep score, and eventually forcing yourself back under. Or you can get up, make tea, write the thing, pray, meditate, or simply sit in the dark with your own thoughts.
The second option might be closer to what your body was designed for than you have ever been told.
What This Means for How You Think About Your Sleep
None of this is an argument for sleep deprivation. Total sleep duration matters enormously for cognitive function, immune health, emotional regulation, and longevity. The point is not that you need less sleep. The point is that the packaging matters less than we assumed.
If you are getting six to seven hours across two phases, with a natural waking gap in between, you may be far healthier than the eight-hour orthodoxy would have you believe. Conversely, if you are lying awake for an hour in a state of mounting anxiety about your inability to sleep, the anxiety itself is doing more damage than the wakefulness.
Understanding the historical reality of biphasic sleep does not solve everything. But it can dissolve a layer of shame and fear around a pattern that is, at its root, deeply human.
The middle of the night has always belonged to something. Give yourself permission to find out what it belongs to in you.
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