Are two sleeps better than one?
In the winter, a typical Saturday night at our house means watching TV after dinner and maybe dozing off for a few minutes now and then. If we’re feeling wild, we might stay up late, sometimes past 9:30.
But this weekend I have something even crazier in mind: going to bed at 8.
It’s not because we’re dull, although one could make that argument. It’s because I was watching YouTube again.
I was trying to learn who this Sabrina Carpenter person was so I could feel relevant for a minute, but then I saw a different video that piqued my interest.
My interest is very piquable. It’s a problem.
“We all want to figure out the One Simple Trick to sleeping through the night.”
In the video, a historian, having no connection to Sabrina Carpenter whatsoever, was talking about “biphasic sleep,” or what they used to call, in the old days, “first sleep” and “second sleep.” I was hooked.
For my over-50 friends and me, sleep is one of the main topics of conversation, right up there with our declining short-term memories and who all these “famous” people are at the Grammys.
It’s not just us. Our culture is rife with sleep-promoting advice, special mattresses, bedtime routines, melatonin, and low-dose THC gummies. We all want to figure out the One Simple Trick to sleeping through the night.
The harder we try, it seems, the worse we do. Researchers have even discovered that people who wear fitness watches to track and help improve their sleep quality have an increased risk of developing insomnia. I’m no gadget expert, but that seems counterproductive.
The historian said that in the past, people tended to divide their nights into two sessions of sleep with a “watch” in between.
Before artificial light changed our effective day length, people went to bed earlier, presumably because they found it boring to sit around in the dark without any screens to stare at. After a few hours, however, they’d naturally wake up—same as me most nights. That was the first sleep.
But they wouldn’t lie in bed cycling through the next day’s to-dos, cringing over something dumb they had said the day before, or imagining unlikely catastrophes—my personal playlist. They’d get up, tend the fire, have a snack, maybe check outside for marauders (whom I hear were popular back in the day), chat for a bit, and then go back to bed for their second sleep until morning.
Humans might even be wired for this. Modern experiments have shown that subjects who were deprived of clocks and artificial lighting reverted to biphasic sleep schedules.
I’m a good sleeper in general, but I don’t believe I’ve ever made it through the night without waking up at least once. And with a small bladder, a restless dog, and a cover-stealing husband, I don’t expect to ever see a solid eight hours.
I told Mark I had a great idea for this weekend: Instead of “resting our eyes” in the living room after dinner, we’d listen to our bodies and go to bed as soon as we felt drowsy. Then, when we inevitably woke up later, we’d go downstairs.
We could sit by the wood stove with just enough light to see by. For an hour or two, until we got tired again, I’d knit or do something even more appropriately old-fashioned, like make cornhusk dolls or churn butter. Mark could whittle, maybe? (I’m still working out the details.)
Even if we just talked, it sounded more enjoyable than the alternative. Most nights at that time, I’m wide awake in bed, fighting increasingly dire thoughts of impending societal and/or climate collapse.
But Mark wanted no part of it. To be fair, he operates on a different schedule; he doesn’t activate his own existential dread spiral until just before dawn. That’s too close to wake-up time to allow for a proper second sleep.
I want to try it, though, even if I have to go it alone.
Saturday night, if I start to nod off on the couch, I’m going to give myself permission to turn in absurdly early and get up for a while in the middle of the night. I just want to see if a sleep break (a reverse siesta, if you like) could help me get better rest overall.
Mark says that if I tell people I’m doing this, they’ll think I’m a weirdo.
Whatever. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
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(Originally published in the Addison Independent February 2025.)
