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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. When it's 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and you're staring at the ceiling trying to get back to sleep, what's your plan of action? How do you go about getting back to sleep? Well, my next guest found that many writers and sleep hackers recommend segmented sleep. Something these writers claim is an old fix for insomnia the way some of our pre-industrial ancestors went about sleeping, but is it that straightforward or are proponents of this type of sleep just romanticizing the past?

With us now, Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes the Work in Progress newsletter and hosts the podcast, Plain English and Derek Thompson has some answers. One of his recent stories in the Atlantic is, Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America's Insomnia? Hi, Derek. Welcome back to the WNYC.

Derek Thompson: Great to be here. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll open up the phones right away. How do you manage insomnia? What do you do when you're experiencing it or have you tried the segmented two sleep earlier evening and later at night approach? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Just to be clear what your article is about where, Derek, the segmented sleep you write about, it's not the siesta model from Spain that people might think of as sleep in the middle of the day for a few hours and then sleep some at night. This is two segments of sleep after dark, right?

Derek Thompson: That's right. This is nighttime comes, you have first sleep, then you wake up. There's a bit of an intermission. You get up, you do something, you do a little bit of work. You have a conversation, maybe you whittle by the fire. You start feeling tired after a few hours, and then you have "second sleep." This is a report from our pre-modern age in Europe when sleep really was a two-act play.

It was a historian, Roger Ekirch, who discovered this when writing a book about the pre-modern history of nighttime in Europe. He didn't know what he was looking for but came across a bunch of diaries with illusions to first and second sleep. Not only in England, but in Italy, in France, the French called this intermission [French Language] I should say, which is a French porte-manteau for wake, sleep.

This was what our ancestors were doing hundreds and hundreds of years ago before the industrial revolution took two sleep in its big, hairy arms, and mushed them together into the single block of six, seven, eight, nine-hour sleep that most of us try to get today.

Brian Lehrer: Why is the industrial revolution the dividing line? Something about the nature of the workday.

Derek Thompson: The nature of the workday is certainly important. You had the rise of factories essentially push back fall asleep time into the later night while keeping the morning wake up time fixed because people had to go into the factories to work in the industrial revolution. That was a huge part of it, but there are other parts of it too. Artificial light made a huge difference in terms of what people could actually do at night. If you had more gas lamps then after gas lamps, electricity, then it made sense to stay up a little bit later.

As most of us do today. There was caffeine, there were clocks. Then also I like how Roger points out the fact that a surging economy and the industrial revolution and the birth of that form of capitalism made a virtue of productivity. It instilled what he called an increasing sense of time consciousness in the West. It also resulted in our trying to elongate the contiguous workday so that we essentially had to scrunch together first and second sleep and get those seven-ish hours consecutively.

Brian Lehrer: Well, according to the sleep hackers you kept bumping into, as you dug deeper, was there a specific purpose to sleeping in two bouts before the industrial revolution? Why two bouts?

Derek Thompson: This is a really, really good question. It's very possible. Here's one interpretation. It's possible that humans naturally, especially in environments where they get a lot of daylight early in the day, tend to wake up early and then want to fall asleep when it becomes night time, but if you fall asleep around, say 8:00 PM, then your circadian rhythm might naturally awake you around 1:00.

If you get up and it becomes socialized among your tribe or your culture to get up and do something with your spouse, your kids, your group, then you might think, oh, it's normal to get up in the middle of the night, do something for an hour, start to feel tired again, and then go back to sleep essentially until dawn, but I think something else is happening here and you alluded to this in your open. I also think that a lot of these modern writers and sleep hackers are romanticizing the past.

They are conflating the question, what did hunter-gatherers do or what did pre-industrial Europeans do with the question, how should I get the best sleep today? That's where I thought the research that I did for this article got to some of its more surprising and maybe even most interesting elements. It might be the case that sure, pre-industrial European slept one way, but lots of hunter-gatherers around the world it seems, according to other research, actually slept in a single phase like Americans do today.

Then yet other hunter-gatherers seem to sleep in these one sleep plus a siesta or two-segmented sleeps, first sleep and second sleep. It might be the case that there is no one singular perfect paragon of sleep. It's just that sleep is flexible. Humans are flexible. Humanity is diverse, but no matter what, sleep likes a routine. Find what works and try to stick to it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, whether it's one or two or whatever for you. Of course, there are so many books nowadays that claim the solutions to our health and wellness problems can be found in the past that if we live, eat, and sleep like our ancestors did, we'll all live to 110. Of course, they tended to live to 35, so I don't know. It was before modern medicine. Neil in Brooklyn you're on WNYC. Hi Neil.

Neil: Well, hello, Brian. I'm so interested in what your speaker is talking about because I've stumbled into this over the past year or two. I have hit 60. I used to sleep through the night, but I also want to say that I've had issues of falling asleep at around 7:00 or 8:00 PM for a long time, getting groggy and since I'm an art journalist and very often at events, when the event is sometimes a lecturer or talk, I try to come in with coffee, chocolate and sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't. It's very weird going to sleep at 8:00 waking up at 1:00 AM. Working at the computer for one, two, three hours going back to sleep, but it seems to be working, but I wish I could be awake at 7:00 or 8:00 PM for events.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Coincidentally doing some split sleep. Let's talk to Vincent in Commack. Vincent, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Neil: Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: You got a story for us, Vincent?

Vincent: Yes, I just started a new job. I'm traveling a lot in the Northeast, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, upstate New York, and I'm in a new hotel practically every night, every other night. I found that I wake up, I go to bed my very regular time, around 10:30, 11:00, and I wake up at 3:00, and then it's extremely difficult to going back to sleep. Try reading books, it doesn't help. I don't touch the phone so there's no light or laptop bothering me. I don't turn the television on. I even tried going back to the lobby downstairs and walking till I'm exhausted and then trying to go back to sleep but once I come back to the room. Now, I've just been in the last few months, making due with about three, three-and-a-half hours of sleep a night.

Brian Lehrer: You need advice?

Vincent: Yes, that would really help because I don't think taking a hot water shower in the middle of the night, waking up and taking a hot steam shower, and trying to go back to sleep would help.

Brian Lehrer: What's the upshot here, Derek? Anything to offer Vincent from what all the sleep hackers you reported on for The Atlantic told you?

Derek Thompson: Sure. First thing to say is, especially given what David was saying in your earlier segment about scientific misinformation on the radio or on podcast. I definitely don't want to represent myself as a sleep physician or a sleep expert. I am a journalist who has spoken to a historian of pre-industrial Europe, this article wasn't even about finding ways to optimize modern insomnia. I will say this as a matter of solidarity. I suffer from middle-of-the-night insomnia.

In fact, it is my suffering of middle-of-the-night insomnia, which basically means I go to sleep pretty easily, but I wake up around 2:00 AM quite a bit that got me interested in the history of segmented sleep and made me reach out to Roger Ekirch. It's fascinating. I think that lots of people seem to suffer from this problem. I frankly think that middle of the night insomnia is probably underrepresented in a lot of writing. People talk a lot about difficulty falling asleep, but not a lot about the tens of millions of people who suffer from middle-of-the-night, insomnia.

The most common advice I see and that I've heard from doctors is that you're supposed to do something. You get out of bed, you reset your mind, you do some discrete tasks, sometimes they walk out of the room and drink a glass of water in the kitchen and walk back into the room. That doesn't always work. When it doesn't work, I would advise people, your soporific is not the history of pre-industrial Europe, you should speak to a doctor and maybe get some short-term medication that hopefully you don't develop a deep dependency on just to reset your circadian rhythm as you adopt certain routines that are very likely to or hopefully will standardize the circadian rhythm and make it likely that you feel drowsy at the right time and similar time every day.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We will call you Derek Joe Rogan Thompson just for saying that. [crosstalk]

Derek Thompson: There you go.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, a few media comments coming in. One of them, a caller says, "To get back to sleep, I turn on C-SPAN, ha, ha, ha, ha." Mark and Manhattan has an older media reference. Mark, you're on WNYC, hello. Hi, Mark, are you there?

Mark: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi.

Mark: Yes, I just pointed out, there's a reference in Araby by James Joyce, in which the nephew who wants to go out is waiting for his uncle. The uncle comes home and says, "It's too late. People are after their first sleep by now." It's only about ten o'clock, so I don't know, they're in bed. The other thing I just was going to add that I didn't tell your screener is that I have heard that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams used to get up in the middle of the night and write letters. For all the historians out there, the Jefferson, Adams correspondence is voluminous. That supposedly, that was a common practice in revolutionary times. That's all I had to add. Great to have got you. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Good historical reference, revolutionary times, two of them really. James Joyce, did you know that James Joyce reference sounds like something that could have found its way into your article about first sleep in the old days?

Derek Thompson: That's great. No, I have other references. Like the fact that in the 1540s, I hope I can say this on the air, Martin Luther of the Protestant Revolution wrote in his strategies to ward off the devil, "Almost every night when I wake up, I instantly chased the devil away with a fart." That was the Lutherian solution to the diabolical influences of midnight demons. There's that. There's also, Ben Franklin was very famous for celebrating his [French language], his break between first and second sleep. He would take, what I believe he called, a cold air bath which is a lovely euphemism for standing in front of an open window naked.

That's how Ben Franklin would celebrate that period between first and second sleep. Lots of strategies. The difficulty with embracing these strategies fully for the modern world is, I don't know how people's partners and spouses feel about them standing naked in front of an open window in the middle of the night. It might cause a little bit of alarm for the neighbors. More importantly, I think it's important to say that the things that allowed segmented sleep or biphasic sleep, two-phase sleep to thrive in pre-modern Europe, was the absence of lots of things that are just universal today.

It was the absence of electric light, it was the absence of any artificial light at all. It was the absence of the industrial workday, it was the absence of literacy. It was all sorts of things that we that we have today, which is one of the reasons why Roger Ekirch, the historian that I spoke to, I said, "Roger, you're more famous for segmented sleep than anyone in the world. Do you sleep in two phases?" He said, "Absolutely not. I don't, my spouse doesn't, none of my friends do." It's important to always to separate the interestingness of the past from what we should do today.

Brian Lehrer: One Harvard researcher quoted in your article said, "Every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep."

Derek Thompson: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: We will leave it there with Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of the Work in Progress newsletter, host of the podcast Plain English, his latest article about the history of segmented sleep. Derek, thanks a lot.

Derek Thompson: Thank you.

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