As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
> And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it?
This is a big part of the problem with the modern interpretation in Spain and nearby countries. It used to be that most folks lived close to their work, and could go home for lunch+siesta in-between split shifts. As commutes are increasingly common, this doesn't work at all.
Given generally low employment numbers and the widespread desire for a shorter, more productive workweek, one could hope we start being able to pay folks enough to just work one each of the split shifts, but we're obviously a ways away from that.
Similarly, the school day seems to have grown longer to keep kids busy during their parents workshifts. Where previously many kids could attend a local school in their own village, and walk home for lunch (as kids in rural France were still doing when I was a kid).
You nailed it, commute is the killer. I'm also Spanish, from a very small and rural town.
My father is a farmer and does a siesta every day of the year. He comes back at home of working in the farm every day around 1PM, then we have lunch together and he goes on to take a nap (siesta).
In winter they are shorter, 30 minutes, as the day is short.
In summer, they can go over 1 hour easily, as the day is longer and is hot between 2 and 5 PM.
Of course, my father is it's own boss and old school farmer, young farmers don't do that, and try to work on an schedule.
And is the same about school, when I was a kid no one was driving me to the school or taking me back, I walked there on my own, went home at mid day for lunch, played some football after it, and then went back to school for a couple of hours at 3PM.
I feel we are slowly drifting away from natural times and actions to forced on schedule behaviour to fit within the cogs of a late-stage capitalism productive machine.
My native language in turn doesn't have articles, so people frequently put "a" when there should be "the" and vice versa, or put it where it is normally omitted.
Some features of languages are hard and unless one acquired an intuition early in life, they'll keep making mistakes.
Also a huge difference between summer temperatures in, say, Galicia and Andalucía. Siestas make some sense in somewhere like Sevilla when temperatures top 40 degrees and it's hard to do anything anywhere that's not air conditioned, and particularly manual labour outside, but in Coruña when it's high 20s to mid 30s at most it's just not the same. (Although climate change is dragging both of those top temperatures up, so perhaps the siesta will start making its way north out of necessity...)
I know, I'm Spanish and was just joking. But anyway, part time working is more common in Germany, which counts in this statistic, but a lot of Spanish people that don't (retirees, unemployed), so I won't be so sure.
I'm not sure "average hours worked" is really a useful stat. At least I have trouble deriving any insight from it, it just mashes too many things into the same value. How much of the change is from the length of the typical work week (40h, 38h and 36h are all somewhat common work weeks for fulltime workers), how much is from part time work, and how much is from the mismatch between official work week and actual time worked (goes in either direction, some have 60h jobs on 40h pay)
What I'd really want to see is a histogram of weekly hours worked per worker for each country
This particular data doesn't show this. Just in case: I'm neither German nor Southern European, and I declare my neutrality.
For starters, it shows time spent at work. Meanwhile employees can do varying amount of work in the same amount of time. And I suppose that's what those Germans you referring to mean.
Second as the document notes: "The results are affected by the varying proportions of part-time workers across countries, in addition to differences in legal frameworks and in country-specific usual length of the workweek".
I read an article many years ago, by a man who was working 80 hour weeks. He analyzed his work and tried to optimize it.
Eventually he cut his working hours in half, while actually doubling his output, because the shorter work hours required him to actually focus.
He was, of course, self-employed, and could design his work week how he liked.
I guess that's important for another reason: if someone else had been paying him by the hour, he would have experienced a 50% pay cut. Instead, his income doubled, because it was based on the actual results.
I'm Spanish and was just kidding. Anyway, I don't think that those statistics you're mentioning are that relevant. They mix part-time (which are very common in Germany and the Netherlands) and full-time workers, while ignores retirees and unemployed people, which are more common in Spain.
I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented.
By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
Not a historian of work, but my understanding is that one point where 9-5 started was Henry Ford when he realised that longer working days led to a higher turnover of workers in a tight labour market. There's an interesting podcast that touches on it here: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-...
The push for the 8 hour working day started many decades before Ford. He was the first major employer to argue it benefited employers too, but many smaller employers had accepted it before that.
May 1st as an international day for Labour demonstrations, for example, started in 1889 after a proposal from what is now the AFL-CIO to resume the fight for the 8 hour day in commemmoration of the Chicago Haymarket massacre.
The vast majority of the population were farmers of some sort living in tiny villages. The market was open only rarely: perhaps every two weeks, but there is no reason to assume a regular schedule! Market days where what made sense for the village - no market when everyone is harvesting, or when the weather is bad. Everyone knew when that day was and he whole family went to market on together.
Markets were not "craftsmen" with their stalls. There were some traveling traders who worked like that. Often you just knew what you had at home to trade and were just making arrangements.
A set workday/shift is required for several jobs where one person cannot work unless someone else is working too. Assembly lines are an obvious example, which the British seem to have started development on first (though they didn't look anything like Henry Fords assembly line you can see the start of this "The Wealth of the Nations"). Shift work is also required when you all depend on a steam engine - miners can be paid by the ton and thus leave at any time, but as soon as the man running the pump leaves the mine floods and everyone else is forced to stop.
Two cabinet makers in a shop (this implies a large cities to need two cabinet makers in a shop as opposed to journeymen who travel between villages doing work) by contrast only rarely are doing something that needs two people (and often when they do they have an apprentice). They can each leave to go buy something whenever they feel like it. Most jobs would be this style, there is a deadline of when the job needs to be done (sometimes flexible sometimes not), but so long as it is done on time nobody cares when you do it.
>I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did.
This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?
Either you lived with parents or maybe other relatives. Or in case of agricultural labour the living space and food was part of compensation and thus someone else cooked. Same goes for lot of seasonal work cooking was shared or someone did it for larger group. Then you had boarding houses that included well board meaning food and possibly laundry. Or you simply ate in communal ways with food from vendors.
Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already.
Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
Okay, maybe partly my fault for using too broad strokes. The fridge example already suggests Midcentury prosperity and civilized employment contracts.
If we're talking deep 1800s, this becomes more complex. As a factory worker, you may not have time and money to buy or own much of anything substantial. But you do have to buy clothes and such. Putting aside extreme examples like isolated company towns, you probably aren't on any long term contract. Why would they give you that, you live in a big city with dozens of factories and tens of thousands of people desperate for work. I'd say this is midway between Uber and how we imagine industrial employment today. If you don't come, they just don't pay you, and if they get mildly annoyed, they can fire you for any reason any time. From what I gather, you would negotiate with the floormaster some very much unpaid time to do a very specific thing, being very careful not to appear "lazy" or disobedient. People did become sick and sometimes returned to work afterwards.
This is based on from I remember from reading contemporary fiction and historiography on the period. But if you think an unmarried worker bought their clothing by some other means, please enlighten us.
I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.
If you weren't that wealthy, you might have part-time servants. If you were wealthy, your servants would eat in their own little dining room in your manor, and shop for food for you and the servants in the same shopping trip
In many cases the correct term is slave. Servants are different and generally treated better. Although slave also comes with a very large spectrum of treatment (it mostly wasn't as bad as your high school history makes it out - bad yes, but not quite that bad)
Is it not? The whole idea that young single people should live alone in apartments that have dedicated kitchens, and cook food for themselves would be considered pretty absurd in most prior eras.
Cooking was commonly a male activity. Every culture had things a little different, but in nearly every culture there is some point where males are separate from the females for long enough that someone in each group needs to cook. Just hunting for the day means the men need to cook their own lunch. Armies rarely had separate cooks, you generally had some solider at each campfire that would cook.
Mens and Women's work was a thing in most culture, but it was never around cooking. (except possibly there very richest where the men would cook while hunting, but the girls would have servants do it)
One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5).
Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…
For me, sleep before midnight is the most important factor. If I need my brain working well the next day, all I need to do is go to bed by 10PM. Even if I wake at 5:30, it will be fine.
BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
Same, and most of the times it’s when I sleep longer. Perhaps because there’s a lot of REM sleep towards the end of the night (as my Garmin watch tells me) and/or because I’m kind of half awake at that time.
So maybe dream recall indicates I slept a whole night
Interesting. I've found that nightmares are strongly influenced by what I've eaten. Cabbage gives me nightmares almost certainly, for instance. Generally for me dream content seems heavily related to sensations in general : sounds, smells, bowel movements, cold, heat, weird limb positions...
Slept just 2:50h today according to the fitness tracker. Not my top form.
Many days like that are actually exceptionally nice (given expectations of the contrary).
I look at it as a low energy situation, where the regular ego train of thought gets extinguished.
Had one long, rare moment, where I genuinely enjoyed just being at work, tired. People around, things happening - just enjoying being there.
Wonder how much it had to do with me getting a couple therapy session the day before, having mum flying over to visit for 17th may festivities and listening to a good part of Ram Dass podcast where post-stroke Ram Dass was discussing sth with the host on Skype.
> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule
> An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.
I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
But that's pretty much exactly what the OP mentioned. An academic was intrigued by the idea that some texts mentioned the idea of "second sleep" in passing and devised a theory of everybody's sleep every night being neatly broken into two halves with an hour of wakefulness in the middle because people go to bed up early and get up late in the absence of artificial light.
But all the evidence from cultures which have little or no access to artificial light even today contradicts the idea of that being a natural, universal response to lack of daylight, and it arguably makes even less sense as a universal approach to daylight patterns in the relatively northern UK, where darkness ranges from 6 hours in the summer to 16 in the winter. The textual evidence is congruent with sleeping patterns being not much different to the modern day, where people also often wake in the middle of the night and go back to sleep (sometimes even getting up to make a drink and twiddle their phone in between) but just don't refer to them as numbered "sleeps" very often
I thought that biphasic sleep was a fact, since there is plenty of evidence of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in doctors’ prescriptions from the pre-industrial era.
I have a theory about this, with no data to back it up.
People woke up in the middle of the night a lot in the past because they were so malnourished compared to modern humans. (Excluding people in very poor countries)
Not sure I get the point of the author. I really like the Mediterranean schedule but it's far from "solar based" we stay up until midnight normally.
I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc.
It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...
The two I like close at 5pm. I live in a rural-ish area. I don't really take time off, I just start working earlier and finish earlier that day. But still, in Spain, even the store in the tiniest town opens at least until 8-9
The article is ignoring the effects of latitude completely. Solar days are very different in southern europe like greece or spain compared to e.g. nordics (norway/sweden/finland).
Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic
This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store.
I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
It’s not discrimination man. People (including bank and post office workers) work during 9-5 working hours, so it makes sense that these services are only open during working hours.
You're right. Why do their customers insist on working the same hours they do? You'd think they'd work different hours so they could run their errands when things are open.
No one presumes you 'should' work 9-5, but that is the way it is, and the bank/postal office/whatever employees don't have the option to work evenings. It is the way it is.
Now whether we could have a better system -- Sure! I'm all for a better society. I'm just saying it's not the way it is because of discrimination or some other conspiracy.
Many customer facing rolls either are dealing with dedicated buyers who are paid to work 9-5 as well and so there is no issue (false - but I'll ignore that you customers are often on a different continent)
If the customer is a retail customer in the majority of cases you are open extended hours. Your employees either work a 6-2 shift and so have the evening, or they work 2-10 and have all morning. (often they are working a shorter shift).
The final group are doctors/dentists. Every boss knows you need to take an hour off to see them every few months and makes provision. They have to have this anyway because sometimes people are sick, or die over night. Thus if it is critical for the job that you have people you have extra people around to make up slack.
And businesses like that could create their schedules such that all employees would have some time for errands during normal working hours, but they usually don’t because it’s easier not to.
I see these claims pop up occasionally and I have found them both very overstated but potentially insightful.
With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not.
However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible.
There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1]
But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility.
Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep.
My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired.
References
* [1] Hunter Gather Sleep study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01157-4
* Why We Nap
* The Old Way
* Keep the River on Your Right
It's actually the rest of the world that makes this difficult, in my experience. Working graveyard is fine, it's the hardware stores, the grocery stores, social life, and acceptable hours to do, say, laundry in an apartment, or mow ones lawn, that can make life hard
With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.
I really hate modern time schedule. It's nightmare to be forced to get up 6am or 7am every workday since childhood. The only relief is natural wakeup on weekend.
When I first started working as a teenager and later in my 20s, I found it shockingly cruel that I am somehow not supposed to have any work slowdown at all in the early afternoon, and especially not supposed to take even a short rest around 2pm when myself and everyone else's bodies slow down to finish digesting lunch. It's a human rhythm that most of us have, along with the second wind around 3 or 4pm, but we have to pretend every single day that it isn't happening, leading to huge caffeine consumption. Just let me lay my head down for 15 min on my desk ffs!
> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon".
Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night.
This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by.
By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead.
I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night.
I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
What I’m curious about is what lead to larks ‘winning’ in the sense that there’s this massive prejudice against night owls.
Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?
1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am.
2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise.
3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.
I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible.
If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30.
If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day.
Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.
If it doesn't come naturally don't worry about it. Not everyone is the same. It sounds like the most beneficial thing for you is probably what you're already doing.
For myself my attentiveness and energy tend to slump later in the day if I don't so obviously I'm better off the other way around from you.
> I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible.
You just need to get used to it, then you will feel horrible if you miss the nap. :)
"norms", ha!
anyone who thinks there are norms, isn't normal.
in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff,
shift worker(which shift?, split shift)
et fucking cetera.
As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.
When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).
And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.
Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.
> And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it?
This is a big part of the problem with the modern interpretation in Spain and nearby countries. It used to be that most folks lived close to their work, and could go home for lunch+siesta in-between split shifts. As commutes are increasingly common, this doesn't work at all.
Given generally low employment numbers and the widespread desire for a shorter, more productive workweek, one could hope we start being able to pay folks enough to just work one each of the split shifts, but we're obviously a ways away from that.
Similarly, the school day seems to have grown longer to keep kids busy during their parents workshifts. Where previously many kids could attend a local school in their own village, and walk home for lunch (as kids in rural France were still doing when I was a kid).
You nailed it, commute is the killer. I'm also Spanish, from a very small and rural town.
My father is a farmer and does a siesta every day of the year. He comes back at home of working in the farm every day around 1PM, then we have lunch together and he goes on to take a nap (siesta).
In winter they are shorter, 30 minutes, as the day is short.
In summer, they can go over 1 hour easily, as the day is longer and is hot between 2 and 5 PM.
Of course, my father is it's own boss and old school farmer, young farmers don't do that, and try to work on an schedule.
And is the same about school, when I was a kid no one was driving me to the school or taking me back, I walked there on my own, went home at mid day for lunch, played some football after it, and then went back to school for a couple of hours at 3PM.
I feel we are slowly drifting away from natural times and actions to forced on schedule behaviour to fit within the cogs of a late-stage capitalism productive machine.
> is it's own boss
Is his own boss.
(And it would be “its” anyway - “it’s” is a contraction for “it is” and is wrong in this context)
My brain translates it from: "su propio" -> "it's own".
Don't ask me why, thanks for the correction
Spanish only has two genders, masculine and feminine, so these sorts of mistakes are an interesting revelation of how language works.
My native language in turn doesn't have articles, so people frequently put "a" when there should be "the" and vice versa, or put it where it is normally omitted.
Some features of languages are hard and unless one acquired an intuition early in life, they'll keep making mistakes.
I know. I’m a native Spanish speaker.
Also a huge difference between summer temperatures in, say, Galicia and Andalucía. Siestas make some sense in somewhere like Sevilla when temperatures top 40 degrees and it's hard to do anything anywhere that's not air conditioned, and particularly manual labour outside, but in Coruña when it's high 20s to mid 30s at most it's just not the same. (Although climate change is dragging both of those top temperatures up, so perhaps the siesta will start making its way north out of necessity...)
Ourense's ~40 C summer temps would like a word. North to south even just within Galicia makes quite a difference
True, depends very much on where you are. The humidity in Ourense can be a killer - at least in Sevilla it's generally a dry heat.
We should just work less. Problem solved!
That's the true South European spirit! So many problems in life would become easier reducing the working hours .
In Germany it's a common prejudice that people in southern Europe work less. Data shows otherwise: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
I know, I'm Spanish and was just joking. But anyway, part time working is more common in Germany, which counts in this statistic, but a lot of Spanish people that don't (retirees, unemployed), so I won't be so sure.
I'm not sure "average hours worked" is really a useful stat. At least I have trouble deriving any insight from it, it just mashes too many things into the same value. How much of the change is from the length of the typical work week (40h, 38h and 36h are all somewhat common work weeks for fulltime workers), how much is from part time work, and how much is from the mismatch between official work week and actual time worked (goes in either direction, some have 60h jobs on 40h pay)
What I'd really want to see is a histogram of weekly hours worked per worker for each country
This particular data doesn't show this. Just in case: I'm neither German nor Southern European, and I declare my neutrality.
For starters, it shows time spent at work. Meanwhile employees can do varying amount of work in the same amount of time. And I suppose that's what those Germans you referring to mean.
Second as the document notes: "The results are affected by the varying proportions of part-time workers across countries, in addition to differences in legal frameworks and in country-specific usual length of the workweek".
I read an article many years ago, by a man who was working 80 hour weeks. He analyzed his work and tried to optimize it.
Eventually he cut his working hours in half, while actually doubling his output, because the shorter work hours required him to actually focus.
He was, of course, self-employed, and could design his work week how he liked.
I guess that's important for another reason: if someone else had been paying him by the hour, he would have experienced a 50% pay cut. Instead, his income doubled, because it was based on the actual results.
Well, I am totally for it, but I would argue that this is only reasonable for certain types of work.
Funny you say that when Spain, Portugal, and Greece work more hours than Germany or the Netherlands.
I'm Spanish and was just kidding. Anyway, I don't think that those statistics you're mentioning are that relevant. They mix part-time (which are very common in Germany and the Netherlands) and full-time workers, while ignores retirees and unemployed people, which are more common in Spain.
Spaniard here. The 'siesta' is just to combat - avoid - midday heat, specially in southern regions.
I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did. I don't know when 9-5 started, but it kinds of smacks of the British being that regimented.
By contrast, my observation is that MOST of the world's population still works from about an hour after dawn until early afternoon, or sometimes until dusk, depending on their age, job, station in life and the general level of resources they have versus what they need. And they probably always did.
Not a historian of work, but my understanding is that one point where 9-5 started was Henry Ford when he realised that longer working days led to a higher turnover of workers in a tight labour market. There's an interesting podcast that touches on it here: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/where-are-we-going%3F-the-...
The push for the 8 hour working day started many decades before Ford. He was the first major employer to argue it benefited employers too, but many smaller employers had accepted it before that.
May 1st as an international day for Labour demonstrations, for example, started in 1889 after a proposal from what is now the AFL-CIO to resume the fight for the 8 hour day in commemmoration of the Chicago Haymarket massacre.
Like I say, not a historian, so thanks for the pointer.
That is not how it worked for most.
The vast majority of the population were farmers of some sort living in tiny villages. The market was open only rarely: perhaps every two weeks, but there is no reason to assume a regular schedule! Market days where what made sense for the village - no market when everyone is harvesting, or when the weather is bad. Everyone knew when that day was and he whole family went to market on together.
Markets were not "craftsmen" with their stalls. There were some traveling traders who worked like that. Often you just knew what you had at home to trade and were just making arrangements.
A set workday/shift is required for several jobs where one person cannot work unless someone else is working too. Assembly lines are an obvious example, which the British seem to have started development on first (though they didn't look anything like Henry Fords assembly line you can see the start of this "The Wealth of the Nations"). Shift work is also required when you all depend on a steam engine - miners can be paid by the ton and thus leave at any time, but as soon as the man running the pump leaves the mine floods and everyone else is forced to stop.
Two cabinet makers in a shop (this implies a large cities to need two cabinet makers in a shop as opposed to journeymen who travel between villages doing work) by contrast only rarely are doing something that needs two people (and often when they do they have an apprentice). They can each leave to go buy something whenever they feel like it. Most jobs would be this style, there is a deadline of when the job needs to be done (sometimes flexible sometimes not), but so long as it is done on time nobody cares when you do it.
>I think you, the breadwinner, did NOT go to the shops. Your wife did.
This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?
Either you lived with parents or maybe other relatives. Or in case of agricultural labour the living space and food was part of compensation and thus someone else cooked. Same goes for lot of seasonal work cooking was shared or someone did it for larger group. Then you had boarding houses that included well board meaning food and possibly laundry. Or you simply ate in communal ways with food from vendors.
Actually single person living alone in place solely being their use is rather new development.
You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already.
Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.
> you would get a day off
A day off? Are you mad! During the industrial revolution as a factory worker? Only on Sundays, if you are lucky.
Okay, maybe partly my fault for using too broad strokes. The fridge example already suggests Midcentury prosperity and civilized employment contracts.
If we're talking deep 1800s, this becomes more complex. As a factory worker, you may not have time and money to buy or own much of anything substantial. But you do have to buy clothes and such. Putting aside extreme examples like isolated company towns, you probably aren't on any long term contract. Why would they give you that, you live in a big city with dozens of factories and tens of thousands of people desperate for work. I'd say this is midway between Uber and how we imagine industrial employment today. If you don't come, they just don't pay you, and if they get mildly annoyed, they can fire you for any reason any time. From what I gather, you would negotiate with the floormaster some very much unpaid time to do a very specific thing, being very careful not to appear "lazy" or disobedient. People did become sick and sometimes returned to work afterwards.
This is based on from I remember from reading contemporary fiction and historiography on the period. But if you think an unmarried worker bought their clothing by some other means, please enlighten us.
Good thing the servants didn't need food or fridges.
I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.
If you weren't that wealthy, you might have part-time servants. If you were wealthy, your servants would eat in their own little dining room in your manor, and shop for food for you and the servants in the same shopping trip
In many cases the correct term is slave. Servants are different and generally treated better. Although slave also comes with a very large spectrum of treatment (it mostly wasn't as bad as your high school history makes it out - bad yes, but not quite that bad)
This is not how any class of people lived during any age of history.
Is it not? The whole idea that young single people should live alone in apartments that have dedicated kitchens, and cook food for themselves would be considered pretty absurd in most prior eras.
Nuclear families are another modern invention.
we both work 9-5, and I the main bread winner and male am the one that does the shopping and cooking.
Cooking was commonly a male activity. Every culture had things a little different, but in nearly every culture there is some point where males are separate from the females for long enough that someone in each group needs to cook. Just hunting for the day means the men need to cook their own lunch. Armies rarely had separate cooks, you generally had some solider at each campfire that would cook.
Mens and Women's work was a thing in most culture, but it was never around cooking. (except possibly there very richest where the men would cook while hunting, but the girls would have servants do it)
One additional quirk of the modern world is that we now sleep on average one hour less than a century ago (median of 7,5 instead of 8,5). Sleep science says this is probably ok ish but really actually not. If you’re constantly tired just remember 8 hours of sleep was invented 60 years ago…
For me, sleep before midnight is the most important factor. If I need my brain working well the next day, all I need to do is go to bed by 10PM. Even if I wake at 5:30, it will be fine.
BTW, nights were I have dream recall afterwards, are the best. Anyone else have made the same observation?
Same, and most of the times it’s when I sleep longer. Perhaps because there’s a lot of REM sleep towards the end of the night (as my Garmin watch tells me) and/or because I’m kind of half awake at that time. So maybe dream recall indicates I slept a whole night
Building on this, I’ve observed nightmares (I.e., particularly intense, terrifying, or otherwise challenging dreams) guarantee a good next day.
Interesting. I've found that nightmares are strongly influenced by what I've eaten. Cabbage gives me nightmares almost certainly, for instance. Generally for me dream content seems heavily related to sensations in general : sounds, smells, bowel movements, cold, heat, weird limb positions...
same. but, mostly no recall lately. as I go to bed at 2:00 and sleep 6 hours max
Ouch that’s rough. A few nights like that and life just feels hard for me. Gloomy outlook, bad memory etc
Ha !
Slept just 2:50h today according to the fitness tracker. Not my top form.
Many days like that are actually exceptionally nice (given expectations of the contrary).
I look at it as a low energy situation, where the regular ego train of thought gets extinguished.
Had one long, rare moment, where I genuinely enjoyed just being at work, tired. People around, things happening - just enjoying being there.
Wonder how much it had to do with me getting a couple therapy session the day before, having mum flying over to visit for 17th may festivities and listening to a good part of Ram Dass podcast where post-stroke Ram Dass was discussing sth with the host on Skype.
Tons of people get so much less than 7.5h. It’s really bad.
> unbroken and uninterrupted eight hour sleep schedule didn't exist and is in fact, a totally modern invention and a consequence of the rigid 9-5 work schedule
> An unbroken eight hours of sleep did not always fit with the cycles of the sky above and sleep was therefore rhythmically polyphasic.
I tend to disagree. There is serious literature suggesting this, but to my knowledge no concrete evidence confirms it. In fact the industrial age did not arrive uniformly to all societies on Earth. We should have seen polyphasic sleep practice long ago in non-industrialized nations. Anyone aware of anything like this?
Apparently it was common in pre industrial Britain https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
But that's pretty much exactly what the OP mentioned. An academic was intrigued by the idea that some texts mentioned the idea of "second sleep" in passing and devised a theory of everybody's sleep every night being neatly broken into two halves with an hour of wakefulness in the middle because people go to bed up early and get up late in the absence of artificial light.
But all the evidence from cultures which have little or no access to artificial light even today contradicts the idea of that being a natural, universal response to lack of daylight, and it arguably makes even less sense as a universal approach to daylight patterns in the relatively northern UK, where darkness ranges from 6 hours in the summer to 16 in the winter. The textual evidence is congruent with sleeping patterns being not much different to the modern day, where people also often wake in the middle of the night and go back to sleep (sometimes even getting up to make a drink and twiddle their phone in between) but just don't refer to them as numbered "sleeps" very often
I thought that biphasic sleep was a fact, since there is plenty of evidence of ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in doctors’ prescriptions from the pre-industrial era.
Source?
I have a theory about this, with no data to back it up.
People woke up in the middle of the night a lot in the past because they were so malnourished compared to modern humans. (Excluding people in very poor countries)
Not sure I get the point of the author. I really like the Mediterranean schedule but it's far from "solar based" we stay up until midnight normally.
I like it from a different point of view, which is that stores are opened after I finish working. The average worker doesn't have time for a siesta in the middle of the day. But once you finish working at 5, things are still open. You can go to the dentist, you can go shopping, restaurants close at midnight, etc.
It's way more flexible for me (way less flexible for service workers though). I moved to the US and I have to take time off of work to even get a haircut...
Time off of work to get a haircut is insane. Aren't there barbershops open in the evening?
The two I like close at 5pm. I live in a rural-ish area. I don't really take time off, I just start working earlier and finish earlier that day. But still, in Spain, even the store in the tiniest town opens at least until 8-9
He's saying it was solar-based up until a hundred years ago or so, no?
It's an odd article, because it claims that shops being open until 10pm (after a siesta break) is the solar-based schedule
The article is ignoring the effects of latitude completely. Solar days are very different in southern europe like greece or spain compared to e.g. nordics (norway/sweden/finland).
Of course one could argue that living in such high latitudes is unnatural and unhealthy but that would be much bigger topic
You don't even need to go back that far. The biphasic sleep regime was still happening a few hundred years ago https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medie...
If you're interested in poly phasic sleep, the book "Life Time" by Professor (of circadian neuroscience) Russell Foster goes further.
This resonated with me especially since the 9-5 maxxing of modern society constantly discriminates against working members of society. My post office is open so sparingly that I have to find an unemployed friend or my grandmother to pick up my packages sometimes. Same story with health services, banking or any store that isn't a huge grocery store.
I could get inflammatory and say that functional members of society are being discriminated against in this way, or flip it around, stating that any disadvantage that requires you interacting with public services is systemically pushing you away from meaningful employment.
It’s not discrimination man. People (including bank and post office workers) work during 9-5 working hours, so it makes sense that these services are only open during working hours.
You’re reasoning from a presumption that ‘people’ _should_ all work 9-5. Why should they, and their customers, have the same working hours?
You're right. Why do their customers insist on working the same hours they do? You'd think they'd work different hours so they could run their errands when things are open.
No one presumes you 'should' work 9-5, but that is the way it is, and the bank/postal office/whatever employees don't have the option to work evenings. It is the way it is.
Now whether we could have a better system -- Sure! I'm all for a better society. I'm just saying it's not the way it is because of discrimination or some other conspiracy.
People working night shifts or other odd hours are not functional members of society? WTF?
Get mad at your employer. My 9-5 office jobs always allowed me to take an hour or so to run errands that could only be done during work hours.
This flexibility can exist for office jobs, but customer-facing roles typically need somebody present for the whole shift.
Many customer facing rolls either are dealing with dedicated buyers who are paid to work 9-5 as well and so there is no issue (false - but I'll ignore that you customers are often on a different continent)
If the customer is a retail customer in the majority of cases you are open extended hours. Your employees either work a 6-2 shift and so have the evening, or they work 2-10 and have all morning. (often they are working a shorter shift).
The final group are doctors/dentists. Every boss knows you need to take an hour off to see them every few months and makes provision. They have to have this anyway because sometimes people are sick, or die over night. Thus if it is critical for the job that you have people you have extra people around to make up slack.
And businesses like that could create their schedules such that all employees would have some time for errands during normal working hours, but they usually don’t because it’s easier not to.
Blame your boss
I see these claims pop up occasionally and I have found them both very overstated but potentially insightful.
With a perspective that goes farther back in time and a wider geography the sleep patterns promoted here as universal simply stated are not.
However, humans have always been flexible in their sleep patterns, and a lot of modern sleep pattern promotion is overly inflexible.
There are studies of hunter gatherers that lived close to the equator. Most of them did not nap most of the time, but in the summer they might nap during the day 20% of the time. They usually slept 6-7 hours in one stretch. [1]
But sleep was very flexible. In some cultures people would go to sleep at different times so there was always someone around the campfire. Mothers would nurse babies. Some cultures might for example once a month during a full moon stay up and party at night and then nap a lot the next day. And the sleep patterns mentioned in the submitted article show further flexibility.
Your sleep quality is likely a lot lower than a hunter gather due to modern light pollution, ability to use devices and have entertainment at night, and a lot of other factors. Unless you are monitoring your sleep with tracking devices there is a good chance you are probably getting a lot less (like an hour) than you might think. So committing to a 9 hour sleep window is still a good idea even if it might be natural in ideal settings to sleep for just 7 hours. Ultimately though you want to feel well rested with energy for your day rather than satisfying a belief system about sleep.
My approach with young children is to go to bed early so that if I get woken up I can deal with that and have time to go back to sleep. I might end up in the biphasic pattern of northern Europe sometimes with that. There was a time where I more intentionally tried to take a short nap during the day. But now I just take a nap if I feel tired.
References
it's not really on topic but it seems the author has an account here as well.
I really like this website's design. It is functional and easy to parse, more websites should be like this.
It'd be cool to see more people experiment witg different sleep schedules to find what works best for them
It's actually the rest of the world that makes this difficult, in my experience. Working graveyard is fine, it's the hardware stores, the grocery stores, social life, and acceptable hours to do, say, laundry in an apartment, or mow ones lawn, that can make life hard
With upcoming mediterranean summer scorch, the idea doesn't sounds that bad at all: go to bed even later, still wake up at dawn, nap at lunch. The only problem is that businesses are closed early morning and late evening.
I really hate modern time schedule. It's nightmare to be forced to get up 6am or 7am every workday since childhood. The only relief is natural wakeup on weekend.
When I first started working as a teenager and later in my 20s, I found it shockingly cruel that I am somehow not supposed to have any work slowdown at all in the early afternoon, and especially not supposed to take even a short rest around 2pm when myself and everyone else's bodies slow down to finish digesting lunch. It's a human rhythm that most of us have, along with the second wind around 3 or 4pm, but we have to pretend every single day that it isn't happening, leading to huge caffeine consumption. Just let me lay my head down for 15 min on my desk ffs!
You learn something new every day damn
> In Greece remnants of these old ways of rest can still be found in the Summer siesta and "quiet hours" where the workday is split in two by a few hours of rest. Practiced religiously and an unshakeable part of its culture, it is the norm for businesses to open at 9AM, close at 2PM, reopen again at 5PM and close again around 10PM. This second work period is what the Greeks call the "afternoon".
Researchers who lived in African tribes that are _really_ following the "old ways" found that tribespeople followed all kinds of sleep schedules. Somebody was up at almost _all_ times, including the middle of the night.
This makes total sense: you want at least somebody to be awake at all times to raise the alarm if a pride of lions happens to wander close by.
By doing the "split day" you just switch to another fixed pattern.
It's interesting to compare this with non-solar based pattern as in the Siffre cave experiment where they ended up falling into 48 hour sleep cycles instead.
I also fall into the camp where I believe that there are probably a variety of different sleep cycles that people are just predisposed to. I haven't seen any studies definitively indicating that there are a common sleep cycle. Even anecdotally, I know several people that are just more alert at night.
I've always wondered if there was a way to structure society so that there could be more time variety in socially needed functions. Perhaps one bank could be open 9-5 but another bank could be open 5-12. Or at the very least, improved flexibility for jobs where constant communication is not needed and can be done asynchronously. A set of core hours where communications could happen and then allow workers to work on their own cycles, taking naps as needed so that they can operate when they are most productive.
What I’m curious about is what lead to larks ‘winning’ in the sense that there’s this massive prejudice against night owls.
Though I have heard that there are natural biological functions that depend on the sun such that night owls who are sleeping their natural pattern are STILL predisposed more towards certain physical/mental conditions. Though who knows?
There are three aspects of solar sleep:
1. Going to bed early and rising early, closer to 8 pm to 4:30 am.
2. An afternoon nap is extremely beneficial to having an attentive and productive evening. The nap makes quick work of clearing accumulated waste from the brain. Employers would do well to have nap pods for a 30 minute nap as a default, although longer is useful if you don't have a 9-5 job. A nap doesn't negate the need for exercise.
3. Biphasic sleep at night as needed, taking care that excessive caffeine intake isn't harming nighttime sleep.
I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible.
If I have light to anchor my circadian rhythm, I’m happiest waking up around 5:30-6:00 and going straight through, starting to wind down at 8:30.
If I sleep later, I’ll end up shifting more towards naturally waking up around 10:30, going to bed at 11:30 PM and generally feeling not terrible but not great and slightly tired during the entire day.
Luckily the light can be artificial that wakes me up — I use smart bulbs as an alarm.
If it doesn't come naturally don't worry about it. Not everyone is the same. It sounds like the most beneficial thing for you is probably what you're already doing.
For myself my attentiveness and energy tend to slump later in the day if I don't so obviously I'm better off the other way around from you.
> I _wish_ I could nap after hearing all the benefits, but for me it’s either doze off for five minutes and wake up feeling blah, or lie there for 10 minutes, MAYBE go to sleep for a bit and wake up feeling horrible.
You just need to get used to it, then you will feel horrible if you miss the nap. :)
"Here's the nap room. Don't be seen using it."
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"norms", ha! anyone who thinks there are norms, isn't normal.
in groups of people who share very specific life styles, where the givens are different than other groups indivuals will adapt or suffer, farmers, long haul truckers, commercial pilots, emergency doctors/staff, shift worker(which shift?, split shift) et fucking cetera.