This piece was originally published in The Guardian UK on 5 April 2016. It generated an enormous amount of interest (over 9,000 shares) and comments (over 500) soon after publication. I was then interviewed by Stephen Quinn on his show “On the Coast” on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio One in Vancouver on 11 April 2016.
Do you get enough sleep? Of course you don’t. Very few people with busy jobs, young children or smartphones do. Last week, there was yet another report about our insomnia, with the Royal Society for Public Health finding we are under-sleeping by about an hour a night, which is about the equivalent of an entire night’s sleep per week. The zombie apocalypse isn’t coming – the walking dead are already here.
Over the years, as the pace of life has quickened, I’ve been forced to change my sleep habits. My latest attempts have taken me to the world of segmented sleep. Segmented sleep is when you sleep overnight in two distinct chunks. The first sleep begins in the early evening (at around 7pm or 8pm), followed by a waking period of a few hours in the middle of the night (usually around midnight) – which the French elegantly call dorveille, or wakesleep – and then finally a second sleep, through to morning.
There is extensive research showing that humans have historically slept this way. During the dorveille, people often read, wrote, prayed, and even visited neighbours. Conception was even believed to be more likely between the two sleeps. The change came in the late 19th century; the culprit was Thomas Edison. With the invention of the light bulb, the night was illuminated with lamplight and became a time for activity. The early sleep at dusk quickly fell out of favour – there was too much fun to be had. As a result, we went to bed later, and ended up mashing the two smaller sleeps together into one big one.
I wish I could tell you that I came to trying segmented sleeping voluntarily. The truth is that it was thrust upon me by modern life. When I was at high school and university, I got an eight-hour sleep without fail. It was less at university, when there were more parties to go to, and then 8am lectures to attend, but it was still a solid block. The changes came later with a job and family. International time-zones, combined with a new baby, meant the glory days of blissful, uninterrupted sleep through the night disappeared like the tail-end of a dream.
Working as a scientist, living in California and liaising with collaborators in Australia meant that I often needed to be up in the middle of the night. Later, as a writer in London, it was the same. The night-time waking period was primetime.
Then, you introduce a newborn to the scene. Unlike his parents’, my son’s body clock was uncorrupted. Invariably he would fall asleep in the early evening and we – exhausted from the day – would follow suit soon afterwards. In the early months, his mother would get up for his essential midnight feed, which meant that I got up too; I would make some toast and tea and put on a load of the never-ending washing.
There’s a famous scene in The Simpsons where a nefarious-looking Bart is flying a kite at night; Marge bemoans his lack of boundaries and calls the activity “unwholesome” before Bart turns creepily and hisses “Hello, mother dear”. No, you won’t yet find me flying a kite at two in the morning, but you will catch me hanging wet clothes on the line by moonlight. By lunchtime the next day, they’re dry.
“Hello, mother dear.”
Segmented sleep is also more in sync with our body clocks. Most people are tired at the end of the day. Top it off with a hearty dinner and your body is soon producing insulin to balance sugar levels. This causes the amino acid tryptophan to move into the brain, where it is metabolised into serotonin and melatonin. Together, these neurotransmitters have a calming effect, and your eyes start to close. Listen to your body, let them close, and see what happens. Sure, you’ll miss an evening of broadcast television, but that’s no huge loss in our age of streaming media.
More constructively, night-time is the quietest time, and so for me, as a writer, it is the time when I’m most productive. The whole world is asleep – my stories peek around the corner, check that the coast is clear, and gradually creep on to the page. I was comforted to find that many writers feel the same about segmented sleep – that the waking period in the depths of night is a golden time for creativity. There’s a unique intimacy during the dorveille, a hushed tranquility and peace. It’s almost a confessional between you and the page.
Of course, there are some drawbacks to an unorthodox sleeping pattern. Returning to sleep after the waking period can sometimes be hard. I often find this when my brain is fertile from writing, especially if I’ve had a particularly productive dorveille. But it’s rare – the body clock kicks in, and the second sleep comes naturally. Personally, I’ve also found this to be the deeper, more restful sleep.
Practically, there are also struggles, especially at weekends. If a friend wants to go for a late dinner, you try to negotiate for something earlier. It’s like being on an intermittent fasting diet – you can still eat/sleep, it just needs to be on certain days, at certain times. Fortunately, when one is a new parent, evenings out happen less often than they used to. But, like fasting, some sacrifices need to be made. And hey, we’re all human, we can indulge. A late night out eating, say, a bacon cheeseburger, won’t kill you.
We’re often told it’s not the amount of sleep you get which is important – it’s the quality. We’re also told never to eat anything our great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food. Given that segmented sleeping is something our great-grandmothers might just recognise, and its sound scientific basis as a sleep regime is in tune with our natural circadian rhythms, perhaps it’s just the thing to solve our chronic sleep shortage.
And yes, this piece was written during Friday night’s dorveille. My second sleep came easily, restfully.
From the Plastic Pen 