3 a.m. is a special kind of hell

The witching hour of insomnia. But what if disrupted sleep was actually biologically natural?

Oct 08, 2025

At 3 a.m., I am a ghost, wandering around my apartment in the dark.

3:30 a.m. I will sometimes read. Often, I’m doomscrolling. My browser tabs are a constellation of endless distractions that reflect fragments of my attention. Spare me the cries that blue light exposure at this hour is the worst. I’m well aware, but I light up the screens anyway.

4 a.m. I’m back in bed and counting slowly to one hundred and back down to one again. I don’t know if counting sheep actually works, but I’ll try anything to push my thoughts out toward the edges.

And then, finally—but not always—the moment where I’ll feel myself drifting.

If you are a chronic insomniac, you know that the hours between 3 and 4 a.m. is a special kind of hell. I could do a roll call on social media at 3:30 a.m. (and I have, many times) and be met with a chorus of fellow insomniacs—mostly women—wide awake and commiserating through this witching hour of sleeplessness.

But why 3 a.m.? Why is it always this particular hour, with some variances on either end?

On a biological level, this is the time when the body’s circadian low point meets the slow rise in cortisol levels. Sleep fragmentation during REM cycles makes it harder for insomniacs to re-enter into sleep. On a psychological level, it’s prime time for existential worry because there are few external simulators to distract us from emotional spiraling.

None of this is new information to me, but what I learned next blew my mind: in pre-industrial times, waking up in the middle of the night wasn’t unusual or considered a failure of sleep. It was part of the night’s natural rhythm, a lucid state between dreaming and waking.

Historian, Roger Ekirch, wrote a book called “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” that illuminates the distinct culture of pre-industrial nocturnal hours: communal beds, fears of demons and crime, threats of fire, and a world of insects feeding on human skin. Bedtime resembled nothing like our modern image of restful, luxurious sleep.

He uncovered hundreds of historical, medical, and literary evidence that suggests humans used to sleep in two segmented periods. This is called a biphasic sleep pattern—essentially a “first sleep” and a “second sleep.” Between these two sleep cycles was up to three hours of quiet wakefulness called “the watch.” This was a time of reading or journaling by candlelight, intimacy, quiet reflection, or even light chores and farm work. Ekirch calls it “an interval of peace between the two sleeps.”

And then there’s this quote from a Harper’s interview:

I also received emails from patients suffering from “middle of the night” insomnia. Most expressed relief when they learned that their wakefulness was not necessarily abnormal — indeed, viewed from the cosmic perch of history, their slumber appeared quite natural. In the view of David Neubauer, a specialist in sleep medicine at Johns Hopkins, consolidated sleep, as an artificial invention of modern life, may be inherently unstable.1

🤯

It was Thomas Edison’s light bulb and artificial light that began to alter people’s natural circadian rhythms by extending their waking hours. Streets became illuminated for the first time with gas lamps, and socializing at night became more common. With the rise of industrialism, the cultural idea of productivity was introduced. It was only then that sleep became consolidated and collapsed from two segments into one.

What’s intriguing is that experiments conducted by sleep scientists like Thomas Wehr demonstrated that, under prolonged low-light and non-stimulating conditions, participants naturally reverted to biphasic sleep patterns.

It makes sense when you think about the way animals sleep (cat zoomies in the middle of the night) or newborns and their sleep cycles. As parents, we teach our babies how to fall asleep and stay asleep. Mark and I would sit vigilantly by the crib to catch the first signs of stirring, just so we can pat and gently rock our newborns to help them transition into their next REM cycle. Funny to think how much time and mental energy we expended to train our babies on the modern construct of an eight hour sleep schedule when it was entirely possible that it went against our very natural biological rhythms.

But our lives are now ruled by the clock and modern life can’t function without it. We’re forever tethered to time. This is where anxiety around sleeplessness is rooted because we’re conscious of every ticking minute that we spend trying to fall asleep in the middle of the night.

Alicja Kwade “Telos Tales” — **Alicja Kwade** “Telos Tales”

That quiet, lucid space in-between two sleep segments that was once historically known as “the watch” has now become the insomniac’s witching hour.

My struggles with insomnia run long and deep. Giving up caffeine for medical reasons earlier in the year did improve my sleep, but my insomnia came roaring back two months later (so rude). At best I get five hours; at worst I barely sleep at all. But to learn that my own erratic sleep patterns often mimic this historic rhythm of two distinct sleep periods is a mind shift. Maybe my sleep is not so dysfunctional after all and I’m fighting what my body wants to do.

Much like the helpful article on sleep for perfectionists I shared last week, this might help me let go of the vicious cycle of sleep anxiety, that “sleep-effort paradox” where the more you treat sleep as a problem, the harder it becomes to fall asleep.

The witching hour is horrendous; I’ve come to dread bedtime. But knowing now that it might not be pathological but a physiological pattern that was once common, my assumptions about sleep are now challenged.

Maybe it’s perfectly normal to want to rearrange my bookshelf at 3 a.m.

Nocturnally yours,
JP

A roundup of links

To read:

The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (BBC)
Further reading on Roger Ekirch’s discoveries on biphasic sleep, and research from sleep scientists, Thomas Wehr and David Samson.
Gen Z's College Radio Revival (emwhitenoise)
A counter to algorithms, a return to analog nostalgia, and a desire for community. I live with a former college DJ. Mark had a jazz show for years on KAOS 89.3FM in Olympia, WA. Love to hear that college radio is having a revival.
‘What Everyone Gets Wrong About Our Generation’—According to 21 College Kids (GQ)
Boys (and raising them) are a mystery to me, so I’m always interested in hearing what they have to say, in their own words.
‘AI actor’ Tilly Norwood is dividing Hollywood – but real acting requires humanity (The Conversation)
“The story of “Tilly’s” creation has stirred a powerful response among the students I have been working with: a mix of horror, fear and, perhaps most chillingly of all, resignation. Resignation that this may indeed be the direction in which the creative industries are heading.”
This is all so depressing.
For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source (Nieman Lab)
It was just a matter of time. Maybe the finds are nothing surprising, but there’s a treasure trove of data and charts to nerd over.
ICE wants to build a 24/7 social media surveillance team. ICE plans to hire contractors to scan platforms to target people for deportation. (Ars Technica)
I admit that I’ve pulled back from political commentary on social (though I’ve been pulling back in general). Maybe I’m being paranoid, maybe not, but terrible things are happening. This is just…well, the thought police is coming.
Welcome to the entry-level void: what happens when junior design jobs disappear? (It’s Nice That)
“The return of unpaid internships signals a broader deterioration – a desperate market where students accept exploitation just to gain access.”
Two years ago when I spoke to a young UX designer graduate at my alma matter, I assured them that while the job market was crappy, it would probably turn around at some point. I advised them to just hang in there. I was also commiserating with him as I was on the brink of entering the job market again. Well, it never did get better and I’d say it got even worse. I picked a great time to leave this industry. But as doom-ridden as it all sounds, I thought this article offered a glimmer of what’s possible as ladders to employment keep disappearing.

An exhibit to check out if you’re in NYC:

Gabriel Orozco: Partituras (Marian Goodman Gallery, through October 25)
I happened to pop into this exhibit in Tribeca recently and was taken by these large-scale works on paper by Mexican artist, Gabriel Orozco. His new body of work explores the visual to music in the form of marks on musical scores. As a former art major who then became a music major, I was obsessed with graphic scores in college and it reminded me of John Cage, George Crumb, Morton Feldman, Krzysztof Penderecki—all composers who used graphic symbols outside of traditional musical notation.