Why we used to sleep in two segments – and how the modern shift changed our sense of time

By Darren Rhodes, Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and Environmental Temporal Cognition Lab Director, Keele University, Keele University

Continuous sleep is a modern habit, not an evolutionary constant, which helps explain why many of us still wake at 3am and wonder if something’s wrong. It might help to know that this is a deeply human experience.

For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted…

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