10 thoughts on “Two Sleeps”

  1. “Unfortunately, it’s not practical for people who work modern industrial jobs.”

    That’s actually not strictly true, especially if you have a 9-to-5. You can go to bed earlier to leave room for being awake in the middle of the night. If you like to watch tv or something, you can even timeshift your shows with a DVR. Obviously reading doesn’t need this helping hand.

  2. Rand, thank you very much for this article, it’s very important to me.

    The reason it’s so important to me is I was unaware of the natural tendency, yet I’ve been doing it for years.

    I’m self-employed in a field that requires a lot of work, but work that can largely be done anytime. I do however often have to meet with clients, though that’s almost always in the afternoon or early evening. I live alone, so that, along with my employment circumstances, gives me enormous flexibility regarding when and how to sleep.

    Long story short, I soon discovered that I was more comfortable going to bed around eight in the evening, sleeping until around one AM, then going back to sleep around six AM until around ten AM. That gives me about five hours “between sleeps” in the early AM, which is when I do a great deal of my correspondence and paperwork. I do find it easier to focus in that period.

    The reason I loved this article so much is I’d long chalked this odd sleep cycle of mine up to just me being weird. Now, I see that there’s a basis for it.

    Thanks.

  3. When I worked rotating shifts, I found it easier to stay awake during a mid shift (midnight to 8 AM) if I slept for 2-3 hours beforehand. I’d then sleep for 4-5 hours after getting off work. It was a lot easier than trying to sleep for 8 hours at a stretch. Rotating shift work was like perpetual jet lag and very hard on the body. I did it for 6 years and I swear it aged me 12 years.

    1. I know when I worked third shift I preferred to come home, sleep for a few hours, then get up for the early afternoon and get a couple more hours in before going back in to work.

      (And of course the idea that people can’t sleep in the day is just silly.)

      1. I did the same thing last winter when I worked an overnight job, down to the hours you describe. It worked well for me too.

      2. Split sleeping also allowed me to do things during the day when everything is open. It made me feel less like a vampire. Rotating shift work still left me feeling like crap, split sleeping just helped somewhat.

  4. One interesting bit of speculation in the comments is that the “two sleep” behavior might be an evolved response to the use of fire. If one needs to have a fire burning through the night for survival, then there would be some evolutionary advantage to naturally waking up a few hours into the night.

    1. That makes sense to me. You have to wake up in the middle of the night to tend the fire, to keep the predators at bay.

      I can’t sleep for more than 4-5 hours at a stretch. Usually that means that I stay up late. If I fall asleep too early, then I wake up in the wee hours of the morning and am wide awake. Then I get tired and go back to sleep around 5 or 6 AM. Trouble is, I have to be at work at 9. That’s an almost certain recipe for oversleeping my alarm and being late for work.

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