Apparently there is evidence that medieval and ancient peoples followed the practice of going to sleep for a couple of hours, then waking up and performing various tasks, and then going back to bed and sleeping until morning.
Here’s a really interesting article about that, but there is actually a lot of information on the internet and in books.
I do this sometimes, though not intentionally, and often not willingly. Last night I went to bed at 10:30 and woke up at 1:30 and didn’t feel sleepy. So I got up and went in the living room and watched YouTube videos for a while, read a little, then went back to bed at 4:00 and slept until 7:00. Now that I’m retired, this isn’t very consequential, but it still irritates me when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep.
Does anybody here do this intentionally? Maybe to get a couple of hours during the night when you can work on something without interruption. Maybe you’re writing a novel, or you are praying or meditating, or you want to read without interruption. Or just piddle around. In a detective novel series that I’m reading, often the Scotland Yard inspector can’t sleep, and he gets up at 2:00 in the morning and walks all over the little village where he’s staying temporarily while hunting for a murderer. This doesn’t seem very smart. But he always survives. Okay, occasionally he finds a dead body, but I digress.
I have suffered with chronic/relapsing insomnia all my life. Possibly because my father was a three shift steel mill worker and we never had a consistent schedule for anything.
My default sleep schedule is to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning but that becomes difficult to deal with when one needs to be up at 7 AM for work. It’s a constant battle with me and sometimes devolves into periods of no sleep at all.
When I initially read about this I figured it could work as a hybrid sleep schedule for me especially during periods when my insomnia was acting up.
I will sometimes sleep a bit early in the evening after work, get up and do whatever and go back to sleep after midnight or one. I try to keep track of the hours slept just for my own knowledge.
I don’t do this routinely. I generally do this if I am having a severe attack of multiple days of insomnia or sometimes in preparation for or returning from overseas travel.
Not if I can help it. However, occasionally I have to get up early for something or other. Afterward, I can usually fall back asleep easily. So I might go to bed at 3, wake up at 6 for something, back to bed at 7, then up again at 11.
My daughter does it. She comes home from work, sleeps about four hours, gets up for about four hours, then goes back to sleep until it’s time to get up for work.
Despite my chronic insomnia and the fact that I used to have to get up at 4 a.m. to work a morning shift, I can’t handle that kind of schedule.
I normally go to bed around 11pm on nights when I have to get up for work the next morning. However, I’m involved in a group in the MMORPG I play, which runs a role-playing event on Wednesday evenings (we operate an in-game bar and club, where other players come to socialize and role-play with those of us on the staff, and each other), which is open from 9pm until 1am.
So, in order to stay up that late, I take about a 90-minute nap on “bar evenings,” from around 7pm to 8:30pm, then I get back up, and log onto the game in time for the “bar” to open.
I sleep very poorly and have most of my adult life. I fall asleep if I have enough help from various chemicals (all Dr. prescibed or authorized) but invariably wake up a couple hours later to begin my night of tossing and turning.
I say that to say this: I’ve tried just getting up and doing something in the wee hours of the morning when that happens, as was recommended many years ago by a therapist I was seeing at the time. I would make it a couple of hours, start getting sleepy again, then go back to bed only to toss and turn again. Then I’d eventually get a bit more sleep before waking up for good. By midday I’d feel like I was coming down with the flu and absolutely needed to go to bed. If that was on a weekend, great – I’d go take a nap. During the week I’d be fucked because I’m a teacher and was suddenly brain-dead halfway through the day when I had a room full of students. Very ungood.
So the experiment ended.
After years, literal years, of trial and error I think I’ve found, knock on wood, a combination of meds, bedtime routines, and sleep fantasies that seem to work to put me into some semblance of sleep. After a night of sort-of slumber I’m usually ok to function for the day. I have a love/hate relationship with caffeine (It’s Complicated) that I’m still working the kinks out of. That hasn’t helped either. Or maybe it has. But the getting up for a few hours in the night thing never worked for me.
Rather too frequently, but I don’t turn on the light (there’s a night light by the toilet) and it allows me to not wake up fully for the process, and I usually have no problem going back to sleep.
Maybe once a week or less, I am wakeful in the small hours, so I get up and do something else (I do what one is not supposed to do, go onto the computer) for an hour or 90 minutes, and then I am able to go back to sleep. This is not intentional, but it doesn’t stress me too much. I think it happens when I have had 2 or 3 nights in a row of good sleep and/or maybe a little extra sleep, and my body just doesn’t need as much that night. Or it can happen when the night is too warm, and sitting up allows my body a chance to cool down again.
I’ve always been a night owl, which I had to fight the efforts of during my working life. Since retirement, I just go with it. My usual routine is to sleep from 1 to maybe 2:30 or 3 a.m., get up, read/play on the computer, and then go back to sleep from 5 a.m. to around 9. Added together, this gives me the equivalent of a 'full night’s sleep.
I just know to never make appointments for the early morning, and my friend’s know not to expect coherence if they telephone me before 10 or so. Gotta love retirement!
Over in the MMP, I refer to the mid-sleep awakening as my “bio break.” I usually wake up both thirsty AND needing to go pee - such a maddening combination - plus if I didn’t eat much before bed I’m now way too hungry to fall back asleep.
My life - and work life, especially - has improved dramatically since I made my peace with this arrangement.
I’m GONNA wake up after about four hours, I’m GONNA not be sleepy for a bit, usually about an hour or two, and then I am absolutely gonna crash again.
I usually awaken in the night (2 to 5 AM) to pee. If I’ve had any alcohol the day before, often I’ll have trouble falling back asleep; other times, this happens only rarely (i.e., I am able to fall back asleep within 20 minutes).
I always vow to use this “extra wake time” wisely – read a good book! meditate! – but instead I usually fritter it away (sometimes on this very message board). Plus, when I do read a book, occasionally I’ll get so into it, it will impede my falling back asleep. (That happens maybe three times a year).
I want to go on record as saying I’m dubious about the extent and ubiquitousness of ‘first and second sleep.’
I’m sure that some people have done and are still doing this, and maybe in certain populations it was a widespread thing.
But, I’m also doubtful that it is a standard human behavior or ‘natural’ to be healthy. The concept has been popularized because its an interesting story and ripe for conversation.
For a while, my dad would get up in the middle of the night to stoke the wood stove; but it wasn’t because of some inherent human behavior.
I always get woken up by our dog Loki at 3. I take her out to pee, then I pee, then I fall back to sleep as my head hits the pillow. I actually enjoy this, waking at 3 knowing I have a few more hours to sleep.