Sleeping Through the AI Revolution

On biphasic sleep, midnight prompts, and the strange new insomnia of having too many ideas

How are you sleeping these days?

I asked that same question and wrote about this before back in 2020, during the pandemic, when doom-scrolling exponential curve charts at 2 AM was our collective hobby. Back then it was anxiety keeping us up. This time it's more excitement and the impossible task of trying to keep up with all the latest AI news that seems to be dropping at an increased frequency. And honestly, I'm not sure which is unhealthier.

The pandemic gave us panic insomnia. AI has given us possibility insomnia. Both will wreck you just the same.

A year ago the AI news cycle was manageable. A new model would drop every few months. You'd have time to absorb it, play with it, figure out what it meant for your work before the next one landed. Then it became every few weeks. A new release here, a surprise benchmark there, an open-source model out of nowhere that changed the calculus on something you were building. You could still keep up if you were paying attention. Now it's basically daily. Sometimes hourly. Something drops during the day, and for those of us living on European time, by the time we're trying to go to bed the American West Coast is just getting warmed up. California is out there announcing things at what should probably be my bedtime. To Silicon Valley, paradigm shifts are like a surprise litter of kittens; they're just giving them away. It's a bit tough to get any sleep with that kind of FOMO.

This is creating a new set of problems. For many people who build things, the brain just won't turn off, especially late at night when things are quiet. No distractions. No pings from Slack or Teams or emails coming in. You're just lying there in the silence, but at the same time you're absorbing everything you've been seeing throughout the day. The new news that's come out. A new idea. Something you thought about at lunch that's still kicking around in your head. And that's when your brain kicks into overdrive. You start scheming. You start thinking. You roll over on your side and now your face is illuminated by your screen, and you're starting to poke around. Most of these AI tools have really great mobile apps now, so you can start chatting. You can even have full monologue-like discussions as long as you're not disturbing your partner too much. And before you know it, you're creating new ideas right there in the dark, half under the covers, running prompts on your phone at midnight.

The trouble is this creates a cycle. You're up late, brain buzzing, and then the alarm goes off and you have to go to work the next day. You drag yourself through the morning, power through the afternoon, and by the time you get home you're wrecked. You crash on the couch. Maybe you tell yourself it's just a quick nap. Two hours later you wake up and it's 8 PM and you feel oddly refreshed, and now, of course, you can't fall asleep at a normal hour. So the whole thing starts again.

Here's the thing though: this pattern isn't actually new. It's not some dysfunction unique to the AI age. It's how most humans slept for centuries before the Industrial Revolution. It even has a name: biphasic sleep. And the more I read about it, the more I think I'm not breaking my sleep schedule. I'm reverting to one that's older than street lights. I wrote about this back during the pandemic too, but now I see it through a new lens in the age of AI.

For the uninitiated: biphasic sleep is not some biohacker nonsense dreamed up by a guy selling nootropics on a podcast. The historian A. Roger Ekirch documented over 500 references to "first sleep" and "second sleep" in pre-industrial literature. People would go to bed at dusk, sleep for a few hours, wake around midnight for what was called the "waking period," and then return for another round of sleep until morning.

What they did during that waking period was the interesting part. Reading by candlelight. Prayer. Visiting neighbors. Smoking tobacco. Reflecting on their dreams. And, as the doctors of the time enthusiastically recommended, quite a lot of sex. The physicians claimed procreation was more effective during this period and that the experience was more, shall we say, enjoyable in a half-lucid state. I'll leave that to you to verify on your own time.

The whole pattern collapsed when street lights appeared across European cities by the 1700s. Suddenly there were things to do at night. Staying in bed felt wasteful. The consolidated eight-hour sleep block we now treat as gospel is really just a 300-year-old product of artificial lighting and industrialized work schedules. Our bodies never actually agreed to the arrangement. And now we've added artificial intelligence to go with all that artificial light. Our poor circadian rhythms never stood a chance.

My waking period between first and second sleep has become a strange liminal space. Sometimes I build. More often I just think. I lie in bed and let the ideas connect. What could I make with this new capability? What does this mean for my work? For the Shopify apps I'm tinkering with? For e-commerce in general? The thoughts multiply faster than I can organize them, and each one feels urgent even though none of them actually are.

The pre-industrial waking period was filled with contemplation and connection. Ours is filled with half-formed product ideas and the nagging sense that we're already behind.

The 17th century version of this looked different. People used the waking period for reflection. They processed their dreams. They prayed. They sat in the quiet dark and just existed for a while. They connected with other humans, horizontally or otherwise. It was, in its own way, restorative even while awake.

My waking period is not restorative. My brain treats it like a strategy session I didn't schedule. And because the AI space moves so fast, there's always fresh material to chew on. A new paper. A new demo. A new "everything you know is wrong" post from some guy with 200 followers. The input never stops, so the processing never stops, so the sleep never fully comes.

Living in Norway adds a particular flavor to all of this. The Nordics have a relationship with rest that Americans find simultaneously admirable and maddening. The concept of koselig, the cozy evening ritual of candles and calm, is basically the opposite of what's happening in my brain at 11 PM as I mentally redesign an app architecture based on something I read three hours ago. My Norwegian neighbors are probably sipping tea and reading a novel. I'm lying in the dark composing a product brief in my head like it's a competitive sport.

There's a version of this story where the Nordic approach is correct. Where the right response to transformative technology is not to let it colonize your sleep, but to maintain boundaries and trust that the tools will still be there in the morning. The Norwegian in me, the one who has learned after nearly a decade here to appreciate that not everything needs to happen at American speed, knows this.

The Californian in me is already three ideas deep into the next thing.

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So here's where I landed: the biphasic pattern isn't inherently bad. Research suggests it may actually align more closely with our natural circadian rhythms than the rigid eight-hour block we've been sold. A well-timed nap can improve cognitive function, and splitting sleep into two phases has worked for humans across centuries and cultures. The siesta isn't laziness, it's evolutionary wisdom.

The problem isn't the pattern. It's what fills the waking period.

AI hasn't just given us better tools. It's given us an infinite idea generator paired with a news cycle that never sleeps, in a landscape that reshapes itself every 48 hours. The result is a brain that won't power down because it's convinced that something important is happening right now and you're missing it.

So if you find yourself wide awake at 1 AM, not building anything, just thinking about building everything, know that you're not alone. But maybe, and I'm talking to myself here as much as anyone, spend at least some of those midnight hours the way our ancestors did. In the quiet. In the dark. Not processing the latest model release but just letting the stillness be still.

Or enjoy some fun time with your partner. The doctors of 1595 can't all be wrong. We are facing an aging population crisis after all, and that's one thing I'm not sure AI will ever be able to fix.

Originally published on LinkedIn.