If you’ve been noticing people around the internet talking a bit more about how they’re constantly waking up at 3 AM no matter what they do, no matter what sleep aids they take, no matter what time they get to bed, know that it’s a conversation topic that humanity has been having with itself for thousands of years. Suddenly waking up when you desperately need your sleep is nothing new, yet modern researchers might finally have come up with a good explanation, and it’s rooted in our ancient past.Historian Roger Ekirch traced over 2,000 historical references to “segmented sleep,” the pre-industrial sleep routine in which people naturally crashed for a few hours after sunset, hung out until around midnight to chat or tend the fire, and then drifted off into a “second sleep.”As ScienceAlert pointed out, early 1990s NIMH research and a 2017 study of Madagascan communities without electricity showed folks organically reverting to this exact cycle. People weren’t sleeping a solid eight hours until the Industrial Revolution introduced artificial light into our lives.Your 3 AM Wake-Ups Might Be a Relic of an Ancient Human Sleep HabitBiologically speaking, your body’s sleep processes don’t really kick into high gear until the second half of the night, as previous studies by the CDC and NIH show that deep slow-wave sleep dominates early on in the night. Then, in the predawn hours, when your body temperature drops a bit and REM really settles in, you start to become a little easier to wake. That’s all the natural process happening inside of you. And then there are a variety of factors influencing your sleep from there, like a drop in progesterone if you’re going through menopause, or you could be experiencing blood sugar dips in the night if your dinner from hours earlier was a little light.Whatever the exact reason you have four waking up in the dead of night, the thing to be more concerned about is the ensuing dread that keeps you up after that. All that staring at your clock and panicking about being awake when you really should be sleeping is really what’s fueling your sleepless nights.The commonly recommended fix is to avoid light as much as you can. Don’t look at your phone; don’t turn on the lights if you stumble into the bathroom to pee. If you’re going to be up, do something boring, preferably in the dark.The post Why You Keep Waking Up at 3 AM, According to Science appeared first on VICE.