The No Wake Zone: Can’t sleep through the night? You’re not supposed to.

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In a study conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health during the 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr and his colleagues found that when research subjects were deprived of artificial light and restricted to a dark room for 14 hours a day (closely approximating the natural light-dark conditions of winter) for several weeks, their sleep pattern shifted dramatically. They didn’t sleep solidly for 8 or 10 or 14 hours, but first lay quietly in bed for 2 hours, then slept in two sessions of about 4 to 5 hours each, separated by 1 to 3 hours of calm, reflective wakefulness. Unlike insomniacs, who show elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the subjects had heightened levels of prolactin, the pituitary hormone that stimulates lactation in mothers and permits chickens to brood contentedly on their eggs, during their periods of nighttime wakefulness. Their brain-wave measurements at these times resembled a state of meditation.

This bimodal sleep pattern appears to have been the normal way human beings slept throughout preindustrial history, before the invention of electric light put an end to it. In At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, historian A. Roger Ekirch demonstrates, through a wealth of written evidence (diaries, philosophical treatises, religious tracts, plays, legal depositions, medical books, and the like), that before the 19th century, people in Western Europe frequently wrote of sleep intervals “as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was common knowledge that required no elaboration.” People might get up and do chores, smoke a pipe, engage in prayer or reading, converse, visit neighbors, make love, or simply lie there in contemplation and fantasy.

Midnight or early-morning insomnia is possibly more “natural” than the pattern of 8 hours of straight sleep we’ve come to expect, but often fail to achieve. Perhaps we ought to accept the reality of those hours awake and cultivate a better attitude toward the inevitable. According to some sleep researchers, lying quietly and peacefully awake can be as restful and restorative as sleep. And it’s undoubtedly true that expending much anxiety on insomnia just makes it worse.

Mary Sykes Wylie is a senior editor at Psychotherapy Networker, a bi-monthly magazine that promotes intellectual adventure and collective exchange in its field. This article was excerpted from the March-April 2008 issue; www.psychotherapynetworker.org.

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