We’ve posted before about alternative sleeping patterns and strategies for dividing your sleep into multiple chunks. These may sound like modern concepts designed to cope with today’s busy schedules; however, there is evidence that dividing up one’s sleep into shorter blocks is the historical norm. As Stephanie Hegarty writes in this BBC News article, “these [historical]references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.” and “During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed”.
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