Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America’s Insomnia?

Anthropological studies of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers have also dispelled a popular myth about how humans should sleep.III Around the close of the early modern era (circa late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), historical texts suggest that Western Europeans would take two long bouts of sleep at night, separated by several hours of w

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With artificial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle. Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American civilization. Before, when cyclical time reigned, people valu... See more

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally

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