Awakening between midnight and 3:00 in the morning used to be an accepted part of life. It was a well-known aspect of being human. People prayed in their beds, or got up and quietly toiled in the kitchen, tended to the fire, wrote letters—some even went to visit neighbors. Older generations called it “first sleep.”

The historical evidence for this is surprisingly rich. The idea of “first sleep” isn’t a fringe theory–it begins to appear everywhere once you know where to look. Historians–most notably Roger Ekirch–have uncovered hundreds of references in diaries, court records, and literature describing a nightly rhythm that feels almost foreign to us now. People would fall asleep shortly after dusk, sink into a deep “first sleep,” then wake naturally in the middle of the night for an hour or two. Then they’d fall back asleep for a few more hours until morning.

They didn’t call it insomnia. They didn’t reach for remedies or worry about productivity the next day. They simply got up–or stayed quietly in bed–and lived inside that hour, often referred to as “the watch.”

And, it was, by all accounts, a different kind of waking. It had a meditative quality to it. It was softer, unhurried. There are records–practical and poetic–suggesting that this was a time when the mind moved differently, when thoughts came untangled from the noise of the day.

Medieval and early modern court records casually reference crimes committed “after first sleep,” as if the timing needed no explanation.

Medical texts from the period offered guidance on how to use the waking interval. Writers like Charles Dickens and even Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned it in passing, assuming their readers understood the rhythm without question. In some cultures, that quiet stretch of wakefulness was even considered the ideal time for conception, when the body was thought to be most relaxed. And mind you, this wasn’t an odd or occasional habit–it was a shared human pattern, woven into daily life.

I’ve been waking up at 2:00 am for years and there’s a certain amount of shame involved. We’re taught that the healthiest of us close our eyes at 10:00 and sleep soundly–like a log, in fact–for eight hours until the next morning. Anything less, it’s suggested, requires five years of therapy and a big bottle of melatonin on our nightstands. But what if some of us are simply connecting to old patterns?

In the 1990s, sleep researcher Thomas Wehr conducted a simple but revealing experiment that helped explain this forgotten rhythm. Participants were placed in an environment with no artificial light and given extended periods of darkness–about fourteen hours each night, mimicking pre-industrial conditions. Within a few weeks, their sleep naturally split into two distinct segments. They would sleep for several hours, wake calmly for a period in the middle of the night, and then drift into a second stretch of sleep before morning. What stood out wasn’t just the pattern itself, but how people felt during that waking interval: not anxious or restless, but peaceful, reflective, and deeply at ease, as if the mind had entered a quiet, in-between state that modern life rarely allows.

What disrupts this natural rhythm now isn’t a flaw in the body, but a shift in the world around it. Artificial light stretches our evenings far beyond sunset, keeping the brain alert when it would once have begun to wind down. Screens add another layer, flooding the mind with stimulation and signaling wakefulness at the very hours once reserved for rest. Fixed schedules and the pressure to achieve a solid, uninterrupted eight hours have trained us to resist any waking in the night, turning what was once a calm interval into a source of stress.

What if we tried to recreate this pattern? Not by forcing ourselves into a rigid two-part sleep, but by gently recreating the conditions that once allowed it to happen. The most powerful shift is light: dim the house in the evening, turn off overheads, and let your body feel that the day is ending. Limit screens before bed, or at least soften their impact, so your brain isn’t being told it’s still midday. Go to sleep a little earlier when possible, giving yourself a longer window of darkness. And if you wake in the night, resist the urge to panic–keep the lights low, skip the phone, and allow yourself a quiet, unpressured interval. Read, sit, breathe. When you stop fighting the waking, the body often knows exactly how to find its way back into rest.