I'm in the airport on my way home from our trip to the Middle East, so I'm keeping this week's message brief.
For part of our trip, we were traveling as part of a homeschooling pop-up. One night in the desert of Oman, a group of parents were lounging around waiting for our children to descend from the sand dunes. One parent mentioned hearing that traditional peoples often have extended periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night, splitting sleep into two distinct periods.
Because I get questions about this fairly often, I thought I'd share a resource that many people feel debunks the idea that it's historically normal to have periods of extended wakefulness in the middle of the night. Several "pre industrial" populations from around the world were studied, and the researchers found that none of these communities have extended periods of wakefulness in the night, nor do most go to sleep around sunset.
The concept of "segmented sleep" or "first and second sleeps" was brought to light through Medieval texts, but there is some question about whether the interpretation of these texts was correct when the information came to light about 20 years ago.
This isn't to say that segmented sleep isn't healthy or normal for some individual people, but I do have questions about whether segmented nighttime sleep is standard or desirable in general. I continue to find that most clients feel best when they have long periods of uninterrupted sleep at night, but I'm always open to new info 
Take care,
Camille
