modern vs traditional sleep habits

heard or read about something that interested me. after the advent of artificial lightning most societies lost an old custom. apparently people had held different sleeping patterns based on natural daylight and went to sleep much earlier. in the middle of the night it was normal to wake, at about one or two, and spend a little while reading or smoking a pipe before going back to sleep. when i learned that i thought about how long that trait must have been around. for all of the history of man before electricity, most of human history, there was a certain sleep schedule and then relatively recently we went away from it. what stuck with me was that something that people had done for so long went away and was mostly forgotten. thinking of where i am going in life, that sounds like something that i could enjoy. i wonder what other customs we held in more agrarian times that could be brought back in a homesteading life.

realizing that such customs were organic and developed naturally to fit with a certain lifestyle, it could be argued that such things are necessary to someone seeking to return to that existence.

A piece on NPR mentioned this as part of a story about our changing sleeping habits.

Apparently they referred to them as "first" and "second" sleep.

Sounds like something that only came about once we were able to steadily produce candles and other forms of easily lit artificial lights though.

Jesus Martinez wrote:Sounds like something that only came about once we were able to steadily produce candles and other forms of easily lit artificial lights though.

I can smoke a pipe in the dark. Sometimes prefer it.

Maybe this thread could be added on to for other things that people think about that were once done and no longer is..I'd be very interested in readinig those things.

I know that when I was a child my grandfather was a trapper and my parents family were raised as foragers also, they used to take long trips to areas that had abundant wild food such as wild blueberries or cranberries, and gather and sell them for income as well as using some for home use..and msot of the animals we consider rodents now were regularly eaten, I remember squirrel hunting with my dad

I have a great deal of variability in my sleep patterns. I sleep longer during the winter months but as mentioned above, I tend to get up in the middle of the night for an hour or so. I usually grab a drink and sit down for a while to sketch or design and throw some more wood in the stove. After about two hours I go back to bed. There I sleep until sunrise.
In the summer I tend to sleep a lot less. Four or five hours a night usually gets me through a day.

I know that a lot of people suffer with some type of depression during the winter months when sunlight is low and short.