5 ms·

Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms

124 points by _jsmi 5mo ago

subu311 5mo ago
You learn something new every day damn
clumsysmurf 5mo ago
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- _jsmi 5mo ago
  https://archive.ph/XQnHz https://archive.ph/XQnHz
niobe 5mo ago
I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented. By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
- opan 5mo ago
  >I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?
  - stereolambda 5mo ago
    You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already. Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
    - skrebbel 5mo ago
      Good thing the servants didn't need food or fridges.
      - stereolambda 5mo ago
        I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.
      - wongarsu 5mo ago
        If you weren't that wealthy, you might have part-time servants. If you were wealthy, your servants would eat in their own little dining room in your manor, and shop for food for you and the servants in the same shopping trip
        bluGill 5mo ago
        In many cases the correct term is slave. Servants are different and generally treated better. Although slave also comes with a very large spectrum of treatment (it mostly wasn't as bad as your high school history makes it out - bad yes, but not quite that bad)
    - dotancohen 5mo ago
      This is not how any class of people lived during any age of history.
      - swiftcoder 5mo ago
        Is it not? The whole idea that young single people should live alone in apartments that have dedicated kitchens, and cook food for themselves would be considered pretty absurd in most prior eras.
    - consp 5mo ago
  - Ekaros 5mo ago
    Either you lived with parents or maybe other relatives. Or in case of agricultural labour the living space and food was part of compensation and thus someone else cooked. Same goes for lot of seasonal work cooking was shared or someone did it for larger group. Then you had boarding houses that included well board meaning food and possibly laundry. Or you simply ate in communal ways with food from vendors. Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
  - sph 5mo ago
    Nuclear families are another modern invention.
  - pseudohadamard 5mo ago
    In the countryside if you weren't the oldest who was set to inherit the farm you were sent out to work either as a maid or farmhand on another farm. They provided you with food and lodging. If you were lucky, you somehow worked your way out of there. If you were unlucky, you spent your life as a maid or farmhand.
- senectus1 5mo ago
  we both work 9-5, and I the main bread winner and male am the one that does the shopping and cooking.
  - bluGill 5mo ago
    Cooking was commonly a male activity. Every culture had things a little different, but in nearly every culture there is some point where males are separate from the females for long enough that someone in each group needs to cook. Just hunting for the day means the men need to cook their own lunch. Armies rarely had separate cooks, you generally had some solider at each campfire that would cook. Mens and Women's work was a thing in most culture, but it was never around cooking. (except possibly there very richest where the men would cook while hunting, but the girls would have servants do it)
- frereubu 5mo ago
  Not a historian of work, but my understanding is that one point where 9-5 started was Henry Ford when he realised that longer working days led to a higher turnover of workers in a tight labour market. There's an interesting podcast that touches on it here: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-future-of-work https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-...
  - vidarh 5mo ago
    The push for the 8 hour working day started many decades before Ford. He was the first major employer to argue it benefited employers too, but many smaller employers had accepted it before that. May 1st as an international day for Labour demonstrations, for example, started in 1889 after a proposal from what is now the AFL-CIO to resume the fight for the 8 hour day in commemmoration of the Chicago Haymarket massacre.
    - frereubu 5mo ago
      Like I say, not a historian, so thanks for the pointer.
- bluGill 5mo ago
  That is not how it worked for most. The vast majority of the population were farmers of some sort living in tiny villages. The market was open only rarely: perhaps every two weeks, but there is no reason to assume a regular schedule! Market days where what made sense for the village - no market when everyone is harvesting, or when the weather is bad. Everyone knew when that day was and he whole family went to market on together. Markets were not "craftsmen" with their stalls. There were some traveling traders who worked like that. Often you just knew what you had at home to trade and were just making arrangements. A set workday/shift is required for several jobs where one person cannot work unless someone else is working too. Assembly lines are an obvious example, which the British seem to have started development on first (though they didn't look anything like Henry Fords assembly line you can see the start of this "The Wealth of the Nations"). Shift work is also required when you all depend on a steam engine - miners can be paid by the ton and thus leave at any time, but as soon as the man running the pump leaves the mine floods and everyone else is forced to stop. Two cabinet makers in a shop (this implies a large cities to need two cabinet makers in a shop as opposed to journeymen who travel between villages doing work) by contrast only rarely are doing something that needs two people (and often when they do they have an apprentice). They can each leave to go buy something whenever they feel like it. Most jobs would be this style, there is a deadline of when the job needs to be done (sometimes flexible sometimes not), but so long as it is done on time nobody cares when you do it.
Klaster_1 5mo ago
With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.
p2detar 5mo ago
> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule > An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic. I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
- ljf 5mo ago
  Apparently it was common in pre industrial Britain https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
  - notahacker 5mo ago
    But that's pretty much exactly what the OP mentioned. An academic was intrigued by the idea that some texts mentioned the idea of "second sleep" in passing and devised a theory of everybody's sleep every night being neatly broken into two halves with an hour of wakefulness in the middle because people go to bed up early and get up late in the absence of artificial light. But all the evidence from cultures which have little or no access to artificial light even today contradicts the idea of that being a natural, universal response to lack of daylight, and it arguably makes even less sense as a universal approach to daylight patterns in the relatively northern UK, where darkness ranges from 6 hours in the summer to 16 in the winter. The textual evidence is congruent with sleeping patterns being not much different to the modern day, where people also often wake in the middle of the night and go back to sleep (sometimes even getting up to make a drink and twiddle their phone in between) but just don't refer to them as numbered "sleeps" very often
- fasteo 5mo ago
  I thought that biphasic sleep was a fact, since there is plenty of evidence of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in doctors’ prescriptions from the pre-industrial era.
aarroyoc 5mo ago
As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues. When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is). And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours. Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
- andai 5mo ago
  We should just work less. Problem solved!
  - amunozo 5mo ago
    That's the true South European spirit! So many problems in life would become easier reducing the working hours .
    - junga 5mo ago
      In Germany it's a common prejudice that people in southern Europe work less. Data shows otherwise: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250514-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
kristjank 5mo ago
This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store. I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
- pprotas 5mo ago
  It’s not discrimination man. People (including bank and post office workers) work during 9-5 working hours, so it makes sense that these services are only open during working hours.
  - jorisw 5mo ago
    You’re reasoning from a presumption that ‘people’ _should_ all work 9-5. Why should they, and their customers, have the same working hours?
    - snayan 5mo ago
      You're right. Why do their customers insist on working the same hours they do? You'd think they'd work different hours so they could run their errands when things are open.
    - pprotas 5mo ago
      No one presumes you 'should' work 9-5, but that is the way it is, and the bank/postal office/whatever employees don't have the option to work evenings. It is the way it is. Now whether we could have a better system -- Sure! I'm all for a better society. I'm just saying it's not the way it is because of discrimination or some other conspiracy.
- nkrisc 5mo ago
  People working night shifts or other odd hours are not functional members of society? WTF? Get mad at your employer. My 9-5 office jobs always allowed me to take an hour or so to run errands that could only be done during work hours.
4ndrewl 5mo ago
You don't even need to go back that far. The biphasic sleep regime was still happening a few hundred years ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
cyberax 5mo ago
> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon". Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night. This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by. By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
- readonkeyless 5mo ago
  It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead. I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night. I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
  - Fr0styMatt88 5mo ago
    What I’m curious about is what lead to larks ‘winning’ in the sense that there’s this massive prejudice against night owls. Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?
usernametaken29 5mo ago
One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5). Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…
- manmal 5mo ago
  For me, sleep before midnight is the most important factor. If I need my brain working well the next day, all I need to do is go to bed by 10PM. Even if I wake at 5:30, it will be fine. BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
  - txzl 5mo ago
    same. but, mostly no recall lately. as I go to bed at 2:00 and sleep 6 hours max
    - manmal 5mo ago
      Ouch that’s rough. A few nights like that and life just feels hard for me. Gloomy outlook, bad memory etc
      - wafflemaker 5mo ago
        Ha ! Slept just 2:50h today according to the fitness tracker. Not my top form. Many days like that are actually exceptionally nice (given expectations of the contrary). I look at it as a low energy situation, where the regular ego train of thought gets extinguished. Had one long, rare moment, where I genuinely enjoyed just being at work, tired. People around, things happening - just enjoying being there. Wonder how much it had to do with me getting a couple therapy session the day before, having mum flying over to visit for 17th may festivities and listening to a good part of Ram Dass podcast where post-stroke Ram Dass was discussing sth with the host on Skype.
  - draven 5mo ago
OutOfHere 5mo ago
There are three aspects of solar sleep: 1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am. 2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise. 3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.
- klondike_klive 5mo ago
  "Here's the nap room. Don't be seen using it."
- Fr0styMatt88 5mo ago
  I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible. If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30. If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day. Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.
  - darkwater 5mo ago
    > I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible. You just need to get used to it, then you will feel horrible if you miss the nap. :)
  - fc417fc802 5mo ago
    If it doesn't come naturally don't worry about it. Not everyone is the same. It sounds like the most beneficial thing for you is probably what you're already doing. For myself my attentiveness and energy tend to slump later in the day if I don't so obviously I'm better off the other way around from you.
trashb 5mo ago
it's not really on topic but it seems the author has an account here as well. I really like this website's design. It is functional and easy to parse, more websites should be like this.
metalman 5mo ago
"norms", ha! anyone who thinks there are norms, isn't normal. in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff, shift worker(which shift?, split shift) et fucking cetera.
zokier 5mo ago
The article is ignoring the effects of latitude completely. Solar days are very different in southern europe like greece or spain compared to e.g. nordics (norway/sweden/finland). Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic
txhwind 5mo ago
I really hate modern time schedule. It's nightmare to be forced to get up 6am or 7am every workday since childhood. The only relief is natural wakeup on weekend.
gregwebs 5mo ago
I see these claims pop up occasionally and I have found them both very overstated but potentially insightful. With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not. However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible. There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1] But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility. Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep. My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired. References * [1] Hunter Gather Sleep study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01157-4 * Why We Nap * The Old Way * Keep the River on Your Right
gonzalohm 5mo ago
Not sure I get the point of the author. I really like the Mediterranean schedule but it's far from "solar based" we stay up until midnight normally. I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc. It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...
- stavros 5mo ago
  He's saying it was solar-based up until a hundred years ago or so, no?
  - timerol 5mo ago
    It's an odd article, because it claims that shops being open until 10pm (after a siesta break) is the solar-based schedule
- druskacik 5mo ago
  Time off of work to get a haircut is insane. Aren't there barbershops open in the evening?
  - gonzalohm 5mo ago
    The two I like close at 5pm. I live in a rural-ish area. I don't really take time off, I just start working earlier and finish earlier that day. But still, in Spain, even the store in the tiniest town opens at least until 8-9
erelong 5mo ago
It'd be cool to see more people experiment witg different sleep schedules to find what works best for them
- xethos 5mo ago
  It's actually the rest of the world that makes this difficult, in my experience. Working graveyard is fine, it's the hardware stores, the grocery stores, social life, and acceptable hours to do, say, laundry in an apartment, or mow ones lawn, that can make life hard
Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
When I first started working as a teenager and later in my 20s, I found it shockingly cruel that I am somehow not supposed to have any work slowdown at all in the early afternoon, and especially not supposed to take even a short rest around 2pm when myself and everyone else's bodies slow down to finish digesting lunch. It's a human rhythm that most of us have, along with the second wind around 3 or 4pm, but we have to pretend every single day that it isn't happening, leading to huge caffeine consumption. Just let me lay my head down for 15 min on my desk ffs!
oh_fiddlesticks 5mo ago
If you're interested in poly phasic sleep, the book "Life Time" by Professor (of circadian neuroscience) Russell Foster goes further.

124 points by _jsmi 5mo ago

You learn something new every day damn

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_jsmi 5mo ago
https://archive.ph/XQnHz https://archive.ph/XQnHz

niobe 5mo ago

I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented. By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.

opan 5mo ago
>I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?
- stereolambda 5mo ago
  You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already. Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
  - skrebbel 5mo ago
    Good thing the servants didn't need food or fridges.
    - stereolambda 5mo ago
      I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.
    - wongarsu 5mo ago
      If you weren't that wealthy, you might have part-time servants. If you were wealthy, your servants would eat in their own little dining room in your manor, and shop for food for you and the servants in the same shopping trip
      - bluGill 5mo ago
        In many cases the correct term is slave. Servants are different and generally treated better. Although slave also comes with a very large spectrum of treatment (it mostly wasn't as bad as your high school history makes it out - bad yes, but not quite that bad)
  - dotancohen 5mo ago
    This is not how any class of people lived during any age of history.
    - swiftcoder 5mo ago
      Is it not? The whole idea that young single people should live alone in apartments that have dedicated kitchens, and cook food for themselves would be considered pretty absurd in most prior eras.
  - consp 5mo ago
- Ekaros 5mo ago
  Either you lived with parents or maybe other relatives. Or in case of agricultural labour the living space and food was part of compensation and thus someone else cooked. Same goes for lot of seasonal work cooking was shared or someone did it for larger group. Then you had boarding houses that included well board meaning food and possibly laundry. Or you simply ate in communal ways with food from vendors. Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
- sph 5mo ago
  Nuclear families are another modern invention.
- pseudohadamard 5mo ago
  In the countryside if you weren't the oldest who was set to inherit the farm you were sent out to work either as a maid or farmhand on another farm. They provided you with food and lodging. If you were lucky, you somehow worked your way out of there. If you were unlucky, you spent your life as a maid or farmhand.
senectus1 5mo ago
we both work 9-5, and I the main bread winner and male am the one that does the shopping and cooking.
- bluGill 5mo ago
  Cooking was commonly a male activity. Every culture had things a little different, but in nearly every culture there is some point where males are separate from the females for long enough that someone in each group needs to cook. Just hunting for the day means the men need to cook their own lunch. Armies rarely had separate cooks, you generally had some solider at each campfire that would cook. Mens and Women's work was a thing in most culture, but it was never around cooking. (except possibly there very richest where the men would cook while hunting, but the girls would have servants do it)
frereubu 5mo ago
Not a historian of work, but my understanding is that one point where 9-5 started was Henry Ford when he realised that longer working days led to a higher turnover of workers in a tight labour market. There's an interesting podcast that touches on it here: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-future-of-work https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-...
- vidarh 5mo ago
  The push for the 8 hour working day started many decades before Ford. He was the first major employer to argue it benefited employers too, but many smaller employers had accepted it before that. May 1st as an international day for Labour demonstrations, for example, started in 1889 after a proposal from what is now the AFL-CIO to resume the fight for the 8 hour day in commemmoration of the Chicago Haymarket massacre.
  - frereubu 5mo ago
    Like I say, not a historian, so thanks for the pointer.
bluGill 5mo ago
That is not how it worked for most. The vast majority of the population were farmers of some sort living in tiny villages. The market was open only rarely: perhaps every two weeks, but there is no reason to assume a regular schedule! Market days where what made sense for the village - no market when everyone is harvesting, or when the weather is bad. Everyone knew when that day was and he whole family went to market on together. Markets were not "craftsmen" with their stalls. There were some traveling traders who worked like that. Often you just knew what you had at home to trade and were just making arrangements. A set workday/shift is required for several jobs where one person cannot work unless someone else is working too. Assembly lines are an obvious example, which the British seem to have started development on first (though they didn't look anything like Henry Fords assembly line you can see the start of this "The Wealth of the Nations"). Shift work is also required when you all depend on a steam engine - miners can be paid by the ton and thus leave at any time, but as soon as the man running the pump leaves the mine floods and everyone else is forced to stop. Two cabinet makers in a shop (this implies a large cities to need two cabinet makers in a shop as opposed to journeymen who travel between villages doing work) by contrast only rarely are doing something that needs two people (and often when they do they have an apprentice). They can each leave to go buy something whenever they feel like it. Most jobs would be this style, there is a deadline of when the job needs to be done (sometimes flexible sometimes not), but so long as it is done on time nobody cares when you do it.

Klaster_1 5mo ago

With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.

p2detar 5mo ago

> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule > An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic. I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?

ljf 5mo ago
Apparently it was common in pre industrial Britain https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
- notahacker 5mo ago
  But that's pretty much exactly what the OP mentioned. An academic was intrigued by the idea that some texts mentioned the idea of "second sleep" in passing and devised a theory of everybody's sleep every night being neatly broken into two halves with an hour of wakefulness in the middle because people go to bed up early and get up late in the absence of artificial light. But all the evidence from cultures which have little or no access to artificial light even today contradicts the idea of that being a natural, universal response to lack of daylight, and it arguably makes even less sense as a universal approach to daylight patterns in the relatively northern UK, where darkness ranges from 6 hours in the summer to 16 in the winter. The textual evidence is congruent with sleeping patterns being not much different to the modern day, where people also often wake in the middle of the night and go back to sleep (sometimes even getting up to make a drink and twiddle their phone in between) but just don't refer to them as numbered "sleeps" very often
fasteo 5mo ago
I thought that biphasic sleep was a fact, since there is plenty of evidence of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in doctors’ prescriptions from the pre-industrial era.

aarroyoc 5mo ago

As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues. When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is). And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours. Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.

andai 5mo ago
We should just work less. Problem solved!
- amunozo 5mo ago
  That's the true South European spirit! So many problems in life would become easier reducing the working hours .
  - junga 5mo ago
    In Germany it's a common prejudice that people in southern Europe work less. Data shows otherwise: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250514-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

aaron695 5mo ago

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kristjank 5mo ago

This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store. I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.

pprotas 5mo ago
It’s not discrimination man. People (including bank and post office workers) work during 9-5 working hours, so it makes sense that these services are only open during working hours.
- jorisw 5mo ago
  You’re reasoning from a presumption that ‘people’ _should_ all work 9-5. Why should they, and their customers, have the same working hours?
  - snayan 5mo ago
    You're right. Why do their customers insist on working the same hours they do? You'd think they'd work different hours so they could run their errands when things are open.
  - pprotas 5mo ago
    No one presumes you 'should' work 9-5, but that is the way it is, and the bank/postal office/whatever employees don't have the option to work evenings. It is the way it is. Now whether we could have a better system -- Sure! I'm all for a better society. I'm just saying it's not the way it is because of discrimination or some other conspiracy.
nkrisc 5mo ago
People working night shifts or other odd hours are not functional members of society? WTF? Get mad at your employer. My 9-5 office jobs always allowed me to take an hour or so to run errands that could only be done during work hours.

4ndrewl 5mo ago

You don't even need to go back that far. The biphasic sleep regime was still happening a few hundred years ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...

cyberax 5mo ago

> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon". Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night. This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by. By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.

readonkeyless 5mo ago
It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead. I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night. I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
- Fr0styMatt88 5mo ago
  What I’m curious about is what lead to larks ‘winning’ in the sense that there’s this massive prejudice against night owls. Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?

usernametaken29 5mo ago

One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5). Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…

manmal 5mo ago
For me, sleep before midnight is the most important factor. If I need my brain working well the next day, all I need to do is go to bed by 10PM. Even if I wake at 5:30, it will be fine. BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
- txzl 5mo ago
  same. but, mostly no recall lately. as I go to bed at 2:00 and sleep 6 hours max
  - manmal 5mo ago
    Ouch that’s rough. A few nights like that and life just feels hard for me. Gloomy outlook, bad memory etc
    - wafflemaker 5mo ago
      Ha ! Slept just 2:50h today according to the fitness tracker. Not my top form. Many days like that are actually exceptionally nice (given expectations of the contrary). I look at it as a low energy situation, where the regular ego train of thought gets extinguished. Had one long, rare moment, where I genuinely enjoyed just being at work, tired. People around, things happening - just enjoying being there. Wonder how much it had to do with me getting a couple therapy session the day before, having mum flying over to visit for 17th may festivities and listening to a good part of Ram Dass podcast where post-stroke Ram Dass was discussing sth with the host on Skype.
- draven 5mo ago

OutOfHere 5mo ago

There are three aspects of solar sleep: 1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am. 2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise. 3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.

klondike_klive 5mo ago
"Here's the nap room. Don't be seen using it."
Fr0styMatt88 5mo ago
I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible. If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30. If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day. Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.
- darkwater 5mo ago
  > I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible. You just need to get used to it, then you will feel horrible if you miss the nap. :)
- fc417fc802 5mo ago
  If it doesn't come naturally don't worry about it. Not everyone is the same. It sounds like the most beneficial thing for you is probably what you're already doing. For myself my attentiveness and energy tend to slump later in the day if I don't so obviously I'm better off the other way around from you.

trashb 5mo ago

it's not really on topic but it seems the author has an account here as well. I really like this website's design. It is functional and easy to parse, more websites should be like this.

metalman 5mo ago

"norms", ha! anyone who thinks there are norms, isn't normal. in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff, shift worker(which shift?, split shift) et fucking cetera.

zokier 5mo ago

The article is ignoring the effects of latitude completely. Solar days are very different in southern europe like greece or spain compared to e.g. nordics (norway/sweden/finland). Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic

txhwind 5mo ago

I really hate modern time schedule. It's nightmare to be forced to get up 6am or 7am every workday since childhood. The only relief is natural wakeup on weekend.

gregwebs 5mo ago

I see these claims pop up occasionally and I have found them both very overstated but potentially insightful. With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not. However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible. There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1] But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility. Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep. My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired. References * [1] Hunter Gather Sleep study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01157-4 * Why We Nap * The Old Way * Keep the River on Your Right

gonzalohm 5mo ago

Not sure I get the point of the author. I really like the Mediterranean schedule but it's far from "solar based" we stay up until midnight normally. I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc. It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...

stavros 5mo ago
He's saying it was solar-based up until a hundred years ago or so, no?
- timerol 5mo ago
  It's an odd article, because it claims that shops being open until 10pm (after a siesta break) is the solar-based schedule
druskacik 5mo ago
Time off of work to get a haircut is insane. Aren't there barbershops open in the evening?
- gonzalohm 5mo ago
  The two I like close at 5pm. I live in a rural-ish area. I don't really take time off, I just start working earlier and finish earlier that day. But still, in Spain, even the store in the tiniest town opens at least until 8-9

erelong 5mo ago

It'd be cool to see more people experiment witg different sleep schedules to find what works best for them

xethos 5mo ago
It's actually the rest of the world that makes this difficult, in my experience. Working graveyard is fine, it's the hardware stores, the grocery stores, social life, and acceptable hours to do, say, laundry in an apartment, or mow ones lawn, that can make life hard

Schlagbohrer 5mo ago

When I first started working as a teenager and later in my 20s, I found it shockingly cruel that I am somehow not supposed to have any work slowdown at all in the early afternoon, and especially not supposed to take even a short rest around 2pm when myself and everyone else's bodies slow down to finish digesting lunch. It's a human rhythm that most of us have, along with the second wind around 3 or 4pm, but we have to pretend every single day that it isn't happening, leading to huge caffeine consumption. Just let me lay my head down for 15 min on my desk ffs!

oh_fiddlesticks 5mo ago

If you're interested in poly phasic sleep, the book "Life Time" by Professor (of circadian neuroscience) Russell Foster goes further.