Your Crazy Nocturnal Covid Schedule is Actually Kind of Normal
By: K. Holland
Tags: Sleep, Covid 19, Health, Pandemic, Productivity

Your Crazy Nocturnal Covid Schedule is Actually Kind of Normal

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

As we approach the shortest day of the year, the struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy is rapidly falling by the wayside—and our feral tendencies are emerging. The exhaustion of a sustained crisis that has dragged on for nearly a year and the cold darkness of winter mean that ambitious efforts to maintain some sense of normalcy have given way to stress, anxiety, depression, and a full-fledged metal health crisis even among those lucky enough not to be struggling with food insecurity or economic catastrophe. Especially for those who are unemployed or working from remote, the absence of a commute, workplace, and school run that used to structure the day has left a void many are struggling to fill. Self-motivation can only go so far — instead, the patterns of the day have slipped into a new more fluid reality.

Nowhere is this disruption more evident than in our sleep, the most basic of human needs. Studies have linked sleep to mental health and wellness. Yet during this tumultuous time, wake times have shifted, bedtimes are creeping back. Others have embraced going nocturnal. While sleep is always a struggle (see insomnia, newborns, etc.), the upheaval of the pandemic that has come for so much this year has also, it seems, come for the myth of the eight-hour sleep. For those who worry about whether they sleep too little, too much, or at the “wrong” times, it might be comforting to know that the notion of an uninterrupted eight-hour stretch is a modern contrivance — a relatively short-lived phenomenon that traces its origin to electrification.

In his book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian Robert Ekirch documents this phenomenon as he chronicles the history of sleep. Without the widespread use of gas or electric lighting, the night was often dark and (to quote Game of Thrones) “full of terror.” People went to bed when it got dark, and stayed inside to avoid common fears of the time, which included demons, cutthroats and robbers, or even just stumbling into a ditch. Of particular comfort are Ekirch’s findings that over the course of human history, segmented sleep was not only common but an accepted practice:

…Before the industrial age, people often slept for a few hours after dinner, then woke after midnight to engage in restful contemplation and prayer, conversation or sex, and then resumed sleeping until daybreak.

Supporting these findings, which Ekirch found evidenced in journals and terms such as first and second sleep, are modern sleep studies. Scientists have observed that humans, when kept in perpetual darkness, eventually revert to a biphasic sleep cycle, resting for four hours only to wake for an hour or two, then sleep for another four hours. Sometimes participants took as long as two hours to fall asleep. All of it calls into question the very concept of insomnia as a modern concept, inconvenient as it may be.

It shouldn’t be surprising that during the pandemic sleep is yet another aspect of life being renegotiated. Biphasic or polyphasic sleep is something humans have long experimented with, albeit usually with an eye toward increasing productivity. Ben Franklin, Nikolai Tesla and Thomas Jefferson are all rumored to have been polyphasic sleepers, employing rigid schedules of napping every two hours for 45 minutes to radically reduce the amount of sleep necessary. More recently, Silicon Valley life hackers have dabbled in polyphasic sleep as a means of training their bodies to accept less sleep and free up additional hours in the day. If 2020 finds us less worried about increasing productivity than just surviving, relaxing your sleep standards to get through the day seems ambitious enough.

As we spend another season sheltering at home, shut away indoors during the dark of winter it’s little wonder that our sleep habits are starting to resemble the patterns of the pre- industrial era. It might even help us relax a bit if we learn to embrace it. So if COVID-19 has you tossing and turning at night, let go of the myth of the eight hour sleep. Cut yourself and your teen some slack, and when you wake from first sleep, know there is a second sleep waiting for you. In the meantime, spend some quiet time in the dark listening to Nocturne about how the residents of Tromso get through the long Polar Night, or try Ekirch’s NPR interview, A Fitful History of Sleep.