#biphasic sleep

[cw-drixon]

Just tried biphasic sleep for the first time last night, and thought what better way to celebrate than to finally start a Tumblr account and draw one of my OCs sleeping on the job.

[paxesoterica]

The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps'

For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear?

[syn0vial]

has anyone on here ever tried the biphasic "sleep for ~4 hours, wake up and do stuff for 30-60 minutes, sleep for another ~4 hours" routine? if so, how did it work out and is there any extra info i should keep in mind when considering trying it for myself?

[theriu]

What is Biphasic Sleep? | Sleep Foundation

Biphasic sleep describes a sleep pattern in which a person sleeps in two segments per day. Learn about potential benefits and how to try thi

My word, this could be a GAMECHANGER. You mean all those times where I "mistakenly" took a nap in the evening and then woke up at 10 or 11 and didn't want to go back to sleep might actually be natural and okay if done correctly?!

[thecurioustale]

The Majuscular & Minuscular Days

The Relancii day is longer than our day here on Earth—32% longer, in fact. Now you might think that, when it comes to sleep–wake cycles, our viutari counterparts would simply sleep longer and be awake for longer than what we humans are built for. But this isn't necessarily how they do it. Or at least it's not the only way.

On Relance most societies have the concept of what I call the "majuscular day" and the "minuscular day." You can probably infer from context what these are: a primary wakeful period during the daylight hours, and a secondary wakeful period deep in the night, respectively. So their waking hours and their sleeping hours are both split in two.

The Relancii minuscular day, far from being an afterthought, is often quite elaborate, and even has a customary meal associated with it: flame, the seventh and final meal of the day (in some reckonings). While people don't typically go out in public or perform hard labor during the minuscular day, it is a good time for household chores, study, and casual downtime.

I first came up with this idea of a second waking period of my own accord to help structure my own personal life. I have non-24 sleep–wake syndrome, which means that my circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours and thus, when left to my own devices, I will on average gradually go to sleep later and later each day: deep in the night, after dawn, around midday, in the afternoon, and finally all the way back around the clock to the early night again—and the cycle repeats from there. And, as far as the calendar is concerned, I will have lost one day in the course of one cycle; i.e. I will have had let's say eight waking days when the calendar will say nine days have passed. (In fact the actual number varies quite a lot.)

(The other direction, of going to sleep earlier on average, is also possible, but is extremely rare, and this is already a rare condition to begin with.)

I have powerful insomnia if I try to sleep when I'm not tired, so if for any reason I wake up with significantly less than a full night's sleep under my belt, I have learned through harsh experience that I may as well get up and do stuff, because otherwise I'll just lie there in bed going insane. Then, what will sometimes happen is that I will tire out after an hour or two, and i will be able to actually go back to sleep.

To the extent that I associate this with the dark of night, I came to think of it as my own personal secret day, hidden away in the privacy and calmness of nighttime.

Years later, when I determined that the Relancii day is longer than our own, I introduced this concept as a cultural regularity across Relance and devised the names "majuscular day" / "minuscular day." Much like with the Ribbon of Dajar (i.e. the Belt / Girdle of Venus), I use these terms in real life now, too.

While the convention varies from society to society on Relance, and between individuals within societies, it is normalized in most places to have a second waking period in the night. This is particularly true in the dark seasons, when nearly two-thirds of those long days are in darkness. You can't sleep for all of that!

What's truly wild—and I'm sure some of you were screaming at me to mention this—is that this is something that we do on Earth, too! It's not just weirdos like me; it's actually quite common throughout history, prior to electrification and the regularization of indoor lighting at nighttime, for people to have taken two sleeps and had an intermediate waking period in a given 24-hour period. This practice even has a scientific name, identifying it as a topic of study: biphasic sleep. The topic is still fairly niche and the data rather thin, so don't allow my generalizations to give you the impression that I speak ironclad truths here. But the way I tell it is the way I see it myself.

Here's an interesting article about biphasic sleep from BBC Future back in 2022, which goes into both the history and the science. What surprised me the most in my historical research on this is that, to my estimation, human cultures have generally conceptualized this biphasic sleep by focusing not so much on the midnight waking period as on the two different sleeping periods. From the Wikipedia article on what they call polyphasic sleep:

Ekirch has found that the two periods of night sleep were called "first sleep" (occasionally "dead sleep") and "second sleep" (or "morning sleep") in medieval England. He found that first and second sleep were also the terms in the Romance languages, as well as in the language of the Tiv of Nigeria. In French, the common term was premier sommeil or premier somme; in Italian, primo sonno; in Latin, primo somno or concubia nocte.[12]: 301–302  He found no common word in English for the period of wakefulness between, apart from paraphrases such as first waking or when one wakes from his first sleep and the generic watch in its old meaning of being awake.

So they had common names for the two sleeps but no common name for the waking interval in between, nor any contrasting word for the main waking interval during the day. I found this quite surprising both conceptually and in terms of my personal experience, and you can anticipate my surprise simply by looking at my own conceptualization: I had named the majuscular and minuscular days but not the two sleeping periods, and, in my personal life prior to bringing this to Relance, even without these terms I had conceptualized the midnight waking period as a phenomenon in its own right rather than focusing on the two sleeps surrounding it. The sleeps were an afterthought to me, except to note from my personal expeirence that the first sleep is more desperately needed and harder to rouse from, while the second is more serene and stable. I wonder if my impression is true that societies historically focused on the sleeps rather than the wakes, and if so why they did it that way. To me it is so much more useful to conceptualize it in terms of the waking periods rather than the sleeps.

On a tangential vein, on Relance there is also a counterpart in the bright seasons to the often quite lengthy minuscular day in the dark seasons: a sort of "grand nap" in the middle of the day, not unlike the siesta, where instead of cleaving the night in two and stuffing some daytime in between the halves, people cleave the day in two and stuff some night in between. This is less universal across Relance, but still quite common. And, like I was saying, I haven't finalized the vocabulary for this yet. But it's an especially useful concept in places like Soda Fountain, which are far too hot in the summer middays for most people to be super productive anyway.

[antiqueissues]

slowly realizing more and more of the influence our modern life has even on how we depict historical fiction. humans all over the world up until the industrial revolution used to apparently sleep twice a night? it's called biphasic sleep apparently. from 9pm - 11 pm, chilling awake during The Watch™ until around 1pm doing chores or having sex or whatever these fuckers were up to, then going to sleep again and waking up at dawn again?

now I am incapable of ignoring that fact and will have to include that into any and all fanfictions playing in medieval times. great. knowledge is just making shit HARDER ffs

[glowingghosty]

the study that "proved" humans sleep in 2 stages is so funny. it was just 7 guys in a dark room for a month. it was dark for 14 hours and while yes, they eventually did fall into this interpreted sleep pattern, they also took TWO HOURS on average to fall asleep. for 14 hours in this dark room they were NOT ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING including listen to music or exercise. it's not even clear if they had any real activities when it was light.

THEY WERE BORED AS FUCK!! my sleep is interrupted too when i don't get enough stimulation!! they slept for 4 hours, woke up for 2-3 hours AND WEREN'T ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING DURING, and then went back to sleep for 4 more. that sucks. that study sucks. lmao

[entanglingbriars]

Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America’s Insomnia?

I asked Ekirch this question: As the historian most associated with biphasic sleep, had his research encouraged him, a spouse, or a friend, to become a biphasic sleeper? “Not at all,” he said. “At no time in history have conditions for human slumber been better than today.” Compared with 99 percent of our ancient ancestors, we have better beds, better blankets, better houses, and fewer late-night pests. If the purpose of sleep is mental and physical well-being, “there is very good reason to believe that uninterrupted sleep at night best achieves that outcome,” Ekirch told me.