Your 2AM Insomnia Isn't a Disorder — They Just Made You the Lab Rat — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00There is a phrase that appears over two thousand  times in historical documents. It shows up in the
2. 0:05works of Homer, Virgil, and Chaucer. It appears  in French medical manuals and West African oral
3. 0:11traditions. It surfaces in Brazilian travel  journals and London court depositions. The
4. 0:17phrase is "first sleep," and it once required no  explanation. For thousands of years, every writer
5. 0:22who used it assumed understanding. No writer  ever stopped to define it for their readers.
6. 0:28It was that ordinary, that universal, that  deeply embedded in daily life. Then sometime
7. 0:34in the early 1800s, the phrase disappeared from  use. Not slowly, not through the natural drift
8. 0:41of language over generations. It vanished  from every tongue that had ever carried
9. 0:45it. An entire dimension of human experience  was quietly removed from the vocabulary. And
10. 0:51almost nobody alive noticed that it was gone. The man who finally noticed was A. Roger Ekirch,
11. 0:57a history professor at Virginia Tech. In the  1990s, while researching nighttime culture before
12. 1:04the Industrial Revolution, he found a court record  from 1697. A nine year old girl named Jane Rowth
13. 1:11gave testimony in a London courtroom. She told the  judge her mother had woken after her "first sleep"
14. 1:16and gone outside. The mother was later found dead.  That phrase, first sleep, was written with the
15. 1:22same casualness as "breakfast" or "Sunday." No  one in the courtroom questioned it. No one asked
16. 1:27the girl what it meant. Because in 1697, everyone  already knew. Ekirch did not know. He had never
17. 1:33encountered the term. So he started searching for  more references, and the flood began. He found
18. 1:39hundreds. Then thousands. Over two thousand  references across twelve languages, spanning
19. 1:44from ancient Greece to the early twentieth  century. What they described was not an oddity
20. 1:49or a regional habit. It was the dominant way human  beings had slept for all of recorded history.
21. 1:55The pattern was remarkably consistent across  centuries and continents. People retired between
22. 2:00nine and ten in the evening. They slept for  roughly three and a half hours. This was the first
23. 2:05sleep. Then they woke, naturally, sometime after  midnight. They stayed awake for an hour, sometimes
24. 2:10two. Then they returned to bed for the second  sleep, which lasted until dawn. The Latin term
25. 2:15was primus somnus. In French, premier sommeil. In  Italian, primo sonno. Thucydides used it in his
26. 2:22history of the Peloponnesian War. Julius Caesar's  military writers referenced prima nox when
27. 2:27describing the timing of nighttime attacks. Livy  wrote about it. So did Cicero, Pliny the Elder,
28. 2:33and Apuleius. The Asante and Fante peoples of West  Africa had their own phrase in the Tshi language.
29. 2:39A French priest visiting Brazil in 1555 recorded  that the Tupinamba Indians ate during the night
30. 2:45"after their first sleep" and then returned to  bed. Surinamese Maroons practiced it. Australian
31. 2:51Aboriginal communities practiced it. This was  not a European habit. This was human.
32. 2:56The period between sleeps had a name too. It  was called the watch. And it was not anxious
33. 3:01wakefulness. It was not tossing and turning. It  was considered the most intimate and productive
34. 3:06hour of the entire day. People prayed. They  read by candlelight or firelight. They visited
35. 3:12neighbors in the dark. They reflected on their  dreams, which arrived more vividly at that hour
36. 3:17than at any other. A sixteenth century French  physician named Laurent Joubert specifically
37. 3:22recommended that couples conceive after the  first sleep. He wrote that they would "have
38. 3:26more enjoyment" and "do it better." Scholars  and poets used the watch to compose their best
39. 3:32work. Religious communities built midnight  prayer around it. The practice was so woven
40. 3:37into daily life that folk songs referenced it  casually. A medieval English ballad instructs,
41. 3:42"At the wakening of your first sleep, you shall  have a hot drink made." Nobody treated the watch
42. 3:47as strange. It was as natural as eating  lunch. It was as expected as sunset.
43. 3:53So what happened to it? In 1992, a  psychiatrist named Thomas Wehr ran
44. 3:58an experiment at the National Institute of Mental  Health outside Washington. He wanted to know how
45. 4:03humans would sleep if you stripped away every  trace of artificial light. He placed fourteen
46. 4:08healthy adults in complete darkness for fourteen  hours each day. No screens. No lamps. No clocks.
47. 4:15Just darkness from early evening until morning,  maintained for four full weeks. The first few
48. 4:22nights, subjects slept eleven hours straight.  Wehr concluded they were repaying accumulated
49. 4:26sleep debt they did not know they carried. But by  the fourth week, something emerged that startled
50. 4:31him. Every subject settled into the same rhythm.  Three to five hours of sleep, followed by one to
51. 4:37two hours of calm wakefulness, then another three  to five hours of sleep. Biphasic sleep. The exact
52. 4:43pattern Ekirch was simultaneously uncovering  in centuries of historical documents. Two
53. 4:48completely independent lines of evidence, one  from the archives and one from the laboratory,
54. 4:53had converged on the same conclusion. But here is what makes this study impossible
55. 4:58to set aside. During the waking interval between  sleeps, Wehr measured his subjects' hormones.
56. 5:05Prolactin, the hormone most associated  with nursing mothers and deep relaxation,
57. 5:09had surged to twice its normal waking level. And  it stayed elevated throughout the entire night,
58. 5:14even during the waking period. The subjects  reported experiencing something they had
59. 5:19never felt in their lives. Not sleep. Not  ordinary wakefulness. A state of profound,
60. 5:25almost weightless calm. Wehr compared it to what  advanced meditation practitioners spend years
61. 5:30trying to achieve. His exact words deserve to be  heard. He said, "Perhaps what those who meditate
62. 5:36today are seeking is a state that our ancestors  would have considered their birthright. A nightly
63. 5:42occurrence." A nightly occurrence. For thousands  of years, every human being on earth entered a
64. 5:49chemically distinct state of consciousness for  an hour each night. A state we have no modern
65. 5:54word for. A state that cost nothing, required no  training, and arrived automatically in the space
66. 6:00between the two sleeps. We do not experience  it anymore. We do not even have a name for
67. 6:04what we lost. No pharmaceutical company has ever  studied it. No wellness brand has ever tried to
68. 6:10replicate it. The closest modern analog is deep  meditation, and people pay thousands of dollars
69. 6:16to attend retreats pursuing a fraction of what  used to arrive for free, every single night.
70. 6:21Not because our biology evolved past it. Because  our economy decided it was unproductive.
71. 6:27Now, the skeptic in me needs to  address something real. In 2015,
72. 6:33a team led by Jerome Siegel at UCLA studied three  hunter-gatherer societies. The Hadza in Tanzania.
73. 6:40The San in Namibia. The Tsimane in Bolivia. These  groups had no electricity, no factory schedules,
74. 6:47no artificial light beyond campfires. If biphasic  sleep were the human default, they should show it
75. 6:54clearly. They did not. All three groups slept in  one continuous block, averaging roughly six and
76. 6:59a half hours. Siegel's team argued that biphasic  sleep was never universal. That it emerged only
77. 7:05at higher latitudes with long winter nights.  Not a birthright. A regional adaptation. Ekirch
78. 7:12responded in the journal Sleep, citing documented  evidence of biphasic patterns among equatorial
79. 7:17cultures Siegel never examined. The Tupinamba.  The Asante. The G/wi of southern Africa. The
80. 7:24debate is genuinely unresolved. Maybe biphasic  sleep was universal. Maybe it was not. I will not
81. 7:30pretend to settle a question that researchers with  decades of expertise still argue over. But what
82. 7:35nobody disputes is that wherever it existed, it  vanished in response to the same forces. And those
83. 7:42forces had nothing to do with human biology. Follow the money. In 1807, London installed gas
84. 7:49streetlights. By 1823, nearly forty thousand  lamps illuminated over two hundred miles of
85. 7:56London's streets. In the United States,  three hundred municipalities had street
86. 8:01lamps by 1860. Artificial light pushed bedtimes  later. Later bedtimes compressed sleep into a
87. 8:07single block. The watch shrank. The second  sleep shortened. But lighting alone did not
88. 8:12kill biphasic sleep. Industry killed it. In the 1830s, a reform campaign swept through
89. 8:19Britain and the United States. It was called  the Early Rising Movement. Ekirch describes
90. 8:24it in his own words. He says people,  especially the urban middle class,
91. 8:27began adopting the values of industrialization.  Ambition. Efficiency. Punctuality. Profit. Factory
92. 8:35owners needed synchronized labor. They needed  workers who arrived at the same hour and worked
93. 8:40ten to fourteen hour shifts. They needed  employees who went home exhausted enough
94. 8:44to collapse into one unbroken block of sleep.  The two sleep pattern was incompatible with
95. 8:49that system. So the system eliminated it.  By the 1820s, parenting manuals instructed
96. 8:54mothers to wean children off biphasic sleep.  Not because physicians said it was unhealthy.
97. 8:59Because consolidated sleep produced more reliable  workers. In 1787, a man named Levi Hutchins in New
98. 9:06Hampshire built the first mechanical alarm clock.  He did not build it to escape danger. He built it
99. 9:12to wake himself for work. That single device  marks the moment sleep stopped belonging to
100. 9:17biology and started answering to capital. And then a profession appeared that tells the
101. 9:22whole story. In industrial Britain, workers  who could not afford clocks hired people
102. 9:27called knocker-uppers. These were men and women  who walked dark streets at three and four in
103. 9:31the morning. They carried long bamboo poles and  tapped on bedroom windows to drag factory workers
104. 9:36out of sleep. A London knocker-upper named Mary  Smith became famous for her technique. She used
105. 9:42a peashooter to fire dried peas at upper story  windows. She charged sixpence a week. Her daughter
106. 9:48Molly inherited the job. The profession survived  well into the 1920s, even after cheap alarm clocks
107. 9:54became widely available. Some workers preferred  the human touch. They trusted a face at the
108. 9:59window more than a machine on the nightstand. An  entire paid industry existed for over a century.
109. 10:04Its sole purpose was to wrench human beings out  of their natural sleep cycle. The knocker-upper
110. 10:10is the fossil record of the transition. It  marks the space between how your body wants
111. 10:14to sleep and how industry demanded you sleep.  And the fact that this profession is treated as
112. 10:19a charming historical footnote, instead of  evidence of biological coercion, tells you
113. 10:24how thoroughly the rewrite succeeded. You have probably walked through buildings
114. 10:28from this era. You have set alarms without  questioning who decided you needed one.
115. 10:33You have been told since childhood that eight  hours of unbroken sleep is normal. But that
116. 10:38norm is younger than the telegraph. It is younger  than photography. It is a product of gas lamps,
117. 10:43factory whistles, and parenting manuals  written to serve industrial output.
118. 10:47I need to be honest about something. I sat with  this material for a long time before writing a
119. 10:52word. Not because the evidence was weak. The  opposite. This research is peer-reviewed,
120. 10:58published in major journals, and freely available  on a Virginia Tech professor's website. My
121. 11:04hesitation was different. I kept imagining  someone watching this at two in the morning,
122. 11:09unable to sleep. I imagined them hearing me  say their insomnia might not be a disorder.
123. 11:14And then I imagined them using that as a reason  to stop taking medication that genuinely helps
124. 11:18them. I do not want that. That is not what  this video is. But I also cannot look at the
125. 11:24financial architecture built on top of this  and pretend the numbers do not speak.
126. 11:29The global sleep aid market was valued at  roughly eighty seven billion dollars in
127. 11:342024. That includes pharmaceuticals, supplements,  devices, mattresses, apps, clinics, and therapies.
128. 11:42The insomnia drug market alone approaches  four billion dollars. In the United States,
129. 11:47between fifty and seventy million people report  insomnia symptoms every year. The single most
130. 11:53common complaint is middle of the night insomnia.  Waking at two in the morning. Unable to fall back
131. 11:58asleep. Diagnosed. Medicated. Billed. Ekirch has said this explicitly. He believes
132. 12:05a large number of people suffering from middle  of the night insomnia are not experiencing a
133. 12:09disorder at all. They are experiencing what he  calls "a very powerful remnant, or echo, of this
134. 12:16earlier pattern of sleep." An echo. Your body,  tonight, may try to do what every human body did
135. 12:22for millennia. Wake after the first sleep. Enter  the watch. Reach for that prolactin-rich calm that
136. 12:28Wehr's subjects called unlike anything they had  ever known. But you will not enter it. You will
137. 12:34reach for your phone instead. The screen will  flood your retinas with blue light. Your brain
138. 12:39will interpret the light as morning. Cortisol  will spike. Anxiety will follow. You will lie
139. 12:45there thinking something is wrong with you. That  your brain is malfunctioning. That you need help.
140. 12:50And tomorrow you might see a doctor who writes  a prescription. A prescription for a condition
141. 12:54that a sixteenth century French physician would  have called Tuesday night. Sleep was redesigned,
142. 12:59and no one alive remembers the original. The language itself was part of the engineering.
143. 13:04The phrase "first sleep" appears continuously  in English from the 1300s through the early
144. 13:091800s. Then, across a single century, it vanishes  entirely. By the 1920s, no one uses it anywhere in
145. 13:16any language. A concept so universal it appears  in Homer. A concept so ordinary that no writer
146. 13:23in twelve languages ever paused to explain it.  Scrubbed from common vocabulary in under a hundred
147. 13:29years. When you delete a word, you delete the idea  it carried with it. You cannot question a pattern
148. 13:36you have no language to describe. You cannot  demand back what you cannot name. The erasure
149. 13:41of biphasic sleep was not only physical, bending  bodies to fit factory clocks. It was linguistic.
150. 13:47They took the words. The memory followed. What if you are not broken? What if the thing
151. 13:52that wakes you at two in the morning is not a  chemical imbalance or a stress response? What if
152. 13:57it is the oldest clock you own? Still ticking.  Still keeping the time it was built to keep.
153. 14:02Despite two centuries of forced rewiring. Thomas  Wehr watched ordinary people rediscover a state
154. 14:08of consciousness that modern life had buried.  He called it "a condition not terribly familiar
155. 14:13to modern sleepers." He said our ancestors would  have considered it their birthright. A birthright.
156. 14:19Not a privilege or a luxury. A basic feature of  human consciousness. Available every night, free
157. 14:26of charge, to every person who has ever lived. We  traded it for factory whistles and alarm clocks.
158. 14:32We traded it for gas lamps and shift schedules and  the moral conviction that sleeping twice was lazy.
159. 14:37And then, when our bodies kept trying to wake us  at midnight anyway, we called it a disease. We
160. 14:42built an eighty seven billion dollar apparatus to  treat it. Replaced by a diagnosis. Monetized by an
161. 14:48industry. Erased from the language that once made  it speakable. Two thousand references in twelve
162. 14:54languages sit in the public record right now. The  evidence is not hidden. It is published, cited,
163. 15:00and reviewed by peers. The only thing missing is  the question that an eighty seven billion dollar
164. 15:05industry has no financial incentive to ask. What  if we were sleeping correctly the entire time?