I Slept Like A Medieval Peasant For A Week To Fix My Sleep Cycle – Here's How It Went

Even though I write a lot about sleep for my job, I’ve been struggling with insomnia for years (my average sleep time is just under six hours, which I am painfully aware is bad for me). 

Though I’ve found some tips that help, in general, the pattern stays the same. I start my screen-free bedtime routine at 8pm, read until 9, sleep ’til about 3am, and then stay agonisingly, anxiety-inducingly awake until my 6am-ish workout.

So when I heard that Medieval peasants had a similar-ish sleep pattern some experts describe as more attuned to our body’s natural clock, I thought: why not give it a go?

For millennia, historian Roger Ekirch explains in his book At Day’s Close: A History Of Nighttime, humans slept in two phases. In the 17th century, he says it was typical for a person to kip from about 9pm-11pm and get up at around 11pm-1am. 

Then, they’d get up and do something useful, like combing wool or, in one case the author noted, brewing beer. It was also a time for praying and sex. 

After a couple of hours, people would get back to sleep. This is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) congruent with current sleep advice, which suggests getting up out of bed if you can’t get back to sleep and focusing on a screen-free task like reading. 

I decided I’d fall asleep at 9pm, as usual, and get up at 1am if I could (though part of the point is to avoid alarm clocks – some experts think industrialised communities feel exhausted not because we’re not getting enough sleep, but because our body clock is more out of whack than those with less tech). 

Monday 

I nodded off just fine (9:45pm) and, per my smartwatch data, woke up at 00.01am (a bit ahead of schedule). 

For 17 measly minutes, I read some pages of my book and then nodded straight back off on the sofa. Brilliant, I thought the next day – maybe this was the answer to my sleep issues? 

Total time slept: 7 hours 57 minutes 

Tuesday 

This time, perhaps because I’d had more sleep than I’m used to, I fell asleep closer to 10. I got up at 00:41am and if I’m honest, found it hard to get out of bed – still, in for a ha’penny, in for a shilling, I told myself. 

Late-night lamplit crochet was that night’s task. I was out like a light by 2:21am; again, I felt very encouraged by my progress. 

Total time slept: 7 hours 04 minutes

Wednesday 

This is where things began to fall apart. Though my usual Tuesday routine, which means I don’t get home ’til half eight, always disrupts my sleep, I started off OK; I fell asleep at 10:39pm. 

But when I got up again at 3:20am, I simply could not get back to sleep. No amount of reading, crocheting, tidying, laundry, or yoga worked; I felt trapped back in my previous “first phase fine, second phase awful” loop. 

Total time slept: 4 hours 41 minutes 

Thursday 

I don’t know whether the anxiety had simply gotten to me, but I didn’t even manage to get to sleep (usually the easiest part for me) ’til 11:08pm on the fourth night.

I slept until 3:16, after which point, I’ll be honest, I began scrolling through my phone. I know this is 1) bad and 2) not something a Medieval peasant did, but I argue that’s more down to a lack of opportunity than inclination. 

A 20-minute kip from 4am ’til 4:19 did little to make me feel more rested. 

Total time slept: 4 hours 29 minutes

Friday 

I noticed that the new sleeping schedule had started to affect my (admittedly already-suffering) workouts, which led me to stress; what if I couldn’t exercise that day? Would that mean I’d be even less tired? Would I sleep at work?

This anxiety might be why, after waking up from a decent 9:12pm bedtime at 2:36, I was again unable to get back to sleep. This time, I tried to deep-clean my oven to keep my mind off my stresses, but perhaps this was too overstimulating.

Total time slept: 5 hours 2 minutes 

Saturday and Sunday

I gave up. I won’t dignify the mini naps and stop-and-start sleep throughout the night by pretending I was still sticking to the routine; I scrolled on my phone, stayed frustratedly awake in bed, and generally modern insomnic-ed it.

So... what’s the verdict?

I’ll be honest, I personally felt a little disappointed.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be, though. Ekirch notes in his book that in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of artificial light changed how we sleep forever. 

Workers were forced to adapt a single-phase sleep as work demands shifted from natural, seasonal timeframes to “clock time”; this has stuck. 

It is no accident that I felt more anxious, less prepared, and even had worse sleep after dedicating hours of my limited, modern-day time off to midnight crafting, then. 

As Ekirch tells the BBC, “There’s no going back because conditions have changed.” Perhaps two-phase sleep would have worked for me if I was living a screen-free life in a Medieval farm; but I’m not. 

Instead, I’m a 21st-century nine-to-fiver with sports bras and a gym phone. Perhaps in the future, I’ll look for advice that aligns a little better with that reality.