Your 2AM Insomnia Isn’t a Disorder — They Just Made You the Lab Rat
There is a phrase that appears over two thousand times in historical documents. It shows up in the works of Homer, Virgil, and Chaucer. It appears in French medical manuals and West African oral traditions. It surfaces in Brazilian travel journals and London court depositions. The phrase is “first sleep,” and it once required no explanation.
For thousands of years, every writer who used it assumed understanding. No writer ever stopped to define it for their readers. It was that ordinary, that universal, that deeply embedded in daily life. Then sometime in the early 1800s, the phrase disappeared from use. Not slowly, not through the natural drift of language over generations.
It vanished from every tongue that had ever carried it. An entire dimension of human experience was quietly removed from the vocabulary. And almost nobody alive noticed that it was gone. The man who finally noticed was A. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Tech. In the 1990s, while researching nighttime culture before the Industrial Revolution, he found a court record from 1697.
A nine year old girl named Jane Rowth gave testimony in a London courtroom. She told the judge her mother had woken after her “first sleep” and gone outside. The mother was later found dead. That phrase, first sleep, was written with the same casualness as “breakfast” or “Sunday.” No one in the courtroom questioned it.
No one asked the girl what it meant. Because in 1697, everyone already knew. Ekirch did not know. He had never encountered the term. So he started searching for more references, and the flood began. He found hundreds. Then thousands. Over two thousand references across twelve languages, spanning from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century.
What they described was not an oddity or a regional habit. It was the dominant way human beings had slept for all of recorded history. The pattern was remarkably consistent across centuries and continents. People retired between nine and ten in the evening. They slept for roughly three and a half hours. This was the first sleep. Then they woke, naturally, sometime after midnight.
They stayed awake for an hour, sometimes two. Then they returned to bed for the second sleep, which lasted until dawn. The Latin term was primus somnus. In French, premier sommeil. In Italian, primo sonno. Thucydides used it in his history of the Peloponnesian War. Julius Caesar’s military writers referenced prima nox when describing the timing of nighttime attacks. Livy wrote about it.
So did Cicero, Pliny the Elder, and Apuleius. The Asante and Fante peoples of West Africa had their own phrase in the Tshi language. A French priest visiting Brazil in 1555 recorded that the Tupinamba Indians ate during the night “after their first sleep” and then returned to bed. Surinamese Maroons practiced it. Australian Aboriginal communities practiced it. This was not a European habit. This was human.
The period between sleeps had a name too. It was called the watch. And it was not anxious wakefulness. It was not tossing and turning. It was considered the most intimate and productive hour of the entire day. People prayed. They read by candlelight or firelight. They visited neighbors in the dark.
They reflected on their dreams, which arrived more vividly at that hour than at any other. A sixteenth century French physician named Laurent Joubert specifically recommended that couples conceive after the first sleep. He wrote that they would “have more enjoyment” and “do it better.” Scholars and poets used the watch to compose their best work. Religious communities built midnight prayer around it.
The practice was so woven into daily life that folk songs referenced it casually. A medieval English ballad instructs, “At the wakening of your first sleep, you shall have a hot drink made.” Nobody treated the watch as strange. It was as natural as eating lunch. It was as expected as sunset. So what happened to it? In 1992, a psychiatrist named Thomas Wehr ran an experiment at the National Institute of Mental Health outside Washington.
He wanted to know how humans would sleep if you stripped away every trace of artificial light. He placed fourteen healthy adults in complete darkness for fourteen hours each day. No screens. No lamps. No clocks. Just darkness from early evening until morning, maintained for four full weeks. The first few nights, subjects slept eleven hours straight.
Wehr concluded they were repaying accumulated sleep debt they did not know they carried. But by the fourth week, something emerged that startled him. Every subject settled into the same rhythm. Three to five hours of sleep, followed by one to two hours of calm wakefulness, then another three to five hours of sleep. Biphasic sleep.
The exact pattern Ekirch was simultaneously uncovering in centuries of historical documents. Two completely independent lines of evidence, one from the archives and one from the laboratory, had converged on the same conclusion. But here is what makes this study impossible to set aside. During the waking interval between sleeps, Wehr measured his subjects’ hormones.
Prolactin, the hormone most associated with nursing mothers and deep relaxation, had surged to twice its normal waking level. And it stayed elevated throughout the entire night, even during the waking period. The subjects reported experiencing something they had never felt in their lives. Not sleep. Not ordinary wakefulness.
A state of profound, almost weightless calm. Wehr compared it to what advanced meditation practitioners spend years trying to achieve. His exact words deserve to be heard. He said, “Perhaps what those who meditate today are seeking is a state that our ancestors would have considered their birthright. A nightly occurrence.” A nightly occurrence.
For thousands of years, every human being on earth entered a chemically distinct state of consciousness for an hour each night. A state we have no modern word for. A state that cost nothing, required no training, and arrived automatically in the space between the two sleeps. We do not experience it anymore. We do not even have a name for what we lost. No pharmaceutical company has ever studied it.
No wellness brand has ever tried to replicate it. The closest modern analog is deep meditation, and people pay thousands of dollars to attend retreats pursuing a fraction of what used to arrive for free, every single night. Not because our biology evolved past it. Because our economy decided it was unproductive. Now, the skeptic in me needs to address something real.
In 2015, a team led by Jerome Siegel at UCLA studied three hunter-gatherer societies. The Hadza in Tanzania. The San in Namibia. The Tsimane in Bolivia. These groups had no electricity, no factory schedules, no artificial light beyond campfires.
If biphasic sleep were the human default, they should show it clearly. They did not. All three groups slept in one continuous block, averaging roughly six and a half hours. Siegel’s team argued that biphasic sleep was never universal. That it emerged only at higher latitudes with long winter nights. Not a birthright. A regional adaptation. Ekirch responded in the journal Sleep, citing documented evidence of biphasic patterns among equatorial cultures Siegel never examined. The Tupinamba. The Asante. The G/wi of southern Africa.
The debate is genuinely unresolved. Maybe biphasic sleep was universal. Maybe it was not. I will not pretend to settle a question that researchers with decades of expertise still argue over. But what nobody disputes is that wherever it existed, it vanished in response to the same forces.
And those forces had nothing to do with human biology. Follow the money. In 1807, London installed gas streetlights. By 1823, nearly forty thousand lamps illuminated over two hundred miles of London’s streets. In the United States, three hundred municipalities had street lamps by 1860. Artificial light pushed bedtimes later.
Later bedtimes compressed sleep into a single block. The watch shrank. The second sleep shortened. But lighting alone did not kill biphasic sleep. Industry killed it. In the 1830s, a reform campaign swept through Britain and the United States. It was called the Early Rising Movement. Ekirch describes it in his own words.
He says people, especially the urban middle class, began adopting the values of industrialization. Ambition. Efficiency. Punctuality. Profit. Factory owners needed synchronized labor. They needed workers who arrived at the same hour and worked ten to fourteen hour shifts. They needed employees who went home exhausted enough to collapse into one unbroken block of sleep.
The two sleep pattern was incompatible with that system. So the system eliminated it. By the 1820s, parenting manuals instructed mothers to wean children off biphasic sleep. Not because physicians said it was unhealthy. Because consolidated sleep produced more reliable workers. In 1787, a man named Levi Hutchins in New Hampshire built the first mechanical alarm clock. He did not build it to escape danger.
He built it to wake himself for work. That single device marks the moment sleep stopped belonging to biology and started answering to capital. And then a profession appeared that tells the whole story. In industrial Britain, workers who could not afford clocks hired people called knocker-uppers.
These were men and women who walked dark streets at three and four in the morning. They carried long bamboo poles and tapped on bedroom windows to drag factory workers out of sleep. A London knocker-upper named Mary Smith became famous for her technique. She used a peashooter to fire dried peas at upper story windows. She charged sixpence a week. Her daughter Molly inherited the job.
The profession survived well into the 1920s, even after cheap alarm clocks became widely available. Some workers preferred the human touch. They trusted a face at the window more than a machine on the nightstand. An entire paid industry existed for over a century. Its sole purpose was to wrench human beings out of their natural sleep cycle. The knocker-upper is the fossil record of the transition.
It marks the space between how your body wants to sleep and how industry demanded you sleep. And the fact that this profession is treated as a charming historical footnote, instead of evidence of biological coercion, tells you how thoroughly the rewrite succeeded. You have probably walked through buildings from this era. You have set alarms without questioning who decided you needed one.
You have been told since childhood that eight hours of unbroken sleep is normal. But that norm is younger than the telegraph. It is younger than photography. It is a product of gas lamps, factory whistles, and parenting manuals written to serve industrial output. I need to be honest about something.
I sat with this material for a long time before writing a word. Not because the evidence was weak. The opposite. This research is peer-reviewed, published in major journals, and freely available on a Virginia Tech professor’s website. My hesitation was different. I kept imagining someone watching this at two in the morning, unable to sleep. I imagined them hearing me say their insomnia might not be a disorder.
And then I imagined them using that as a reason to stop taking medication that genuinely helps them. I do not want that. That is not what this video is. But I also cannot look at the financial architecture built on top of this and pretend the numbers do not speak. The global sleep aid market was valued at roughly eighty seven billion dollars in 2024. That includes pharmaceuticals, supplements, devices, mattresses, apps, clinics, and therapies.
The insomnia drug market alone approaches four billion dollars. In the United States, between fifty and seventy million people report insomnia symptoms every year. The single most common complaint is middle of the night insomnia. Waking at two in the morning. Unable to fall back asleep. Diagnosed. Medicated. Billed. Ekirch has said this explicitly.
He believes a large number of people suffering from middle of the night insomnia are not experiencing a disorder at all. They are experiencing what he calls “a very powerful remnant, or echo, of this earlier pattern of sleep.” An echo. Your body, tonight, may try to do what every human body did for millennia. Wake after the first sleep. Enter the watch.
Reach for that prolactin-rich calm that Wehr’s subjects called unlike anything they had ever known. But you will not enter it. You will reach for your phone instead. The screen will flood your retinas with blue light. Your brain will interpret the light as morning. Cortisol will spike. Anxiety will follow. You will lie there thinking something is wrong with you. That your brain is malfunctioning. That you need help.
And tomorrow you might see a doctor who writes a prescription. A prescription for a condition that a sixteenth century French physician would have called Tuesday night. Sleep was redesigned, and no one alive remembers the original. The language itself was part of the engineering. The phrase “first sleep” appears continuously in English from the 1300s through the early 1800s. Then, across a single century, it vanishes entirely.
By the 1920s, no one uses it anywhere in any language. A concept so universal it appears in Homer. A concept so ordinary that no writer in twelve languages ever paused to explain it. Scrubbed from common vocabulary in under a hundred years. When you delete a word, you delete the idea it carried with it. You cannot question a pattern you have no language to describe. You cannot demand back what you cannot name.
The erasure of biphasic sleep was not only physical, bending bodies to fit factory clocks. It was linguistic. They took the words. The memory followed. What if you are not broken? What if the thing that wakes you at two in the morning is not a chemical imbalance or a stress response? What if it is the oldest clock you own? Still ticking. Still keeping the time it was built to keep.
Despite two centuries of forced rewiring. Thomas Wehr watched ordinary people rediscover a state of consciousness that modern life had buried. He called it “a condition not terribly familiar to modern sleepers.” He said our ancestors would have considered it their birthright. A birthright. Not a privilege or a luxury. A basic feature of human consciousness.
Available every night, free of charge, to every person who has ever lived. We traded it for factory whistles and alarm clocks. We traded it for gas lamps and shift schedules and the moral conviction that sleeping twice was lazy. And then, when our bodies kept trying to wake us at midnight anyway, we called it a disease.
We built an eighty seven billion dollar apparatus to treat it. Replaced by a diagnosis. Monetized by an industry. Erased from the language that once made it speakable. Two thousand references in twelve languages sit in the public record right now. The evidence is not hidden.
It is published, cited, and reviewed by peers. The only thing missing is the question that an eighty seven billion dollar industry has no financial incentive to ask. What if we were sleeping correctly the entire time?