A Nocturnal Life

By: Erica Bouska

On average, college students sleep fewer than seven hours a night, which is under the 7-9 hours recommended by the Sleep Foundation. During finals, it drops to 6.36 hours, and 47% of students report daytime sleepiness.  

A nocturnal life, then, seems like a possible solution. It wasn’t until the American Industrial Revolution from 1820-1880 when the idea of one full period of sleep became the norm, said Dr. Matthew Wolf-Meyer, an associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. 

“Before industrialization, many Americans worked on family farms or in small trades wherein they knew—if were not related to—their employers,” Wolf-Meyer wrote in 2013. “It was once normal for people to retire to bed around sundown, sleep for a few hours, wake up for an hour or more in the middle of the night, and then return to bed for a few more hours—or, alternatively, to sleep for only a few hours at night and to supplement it with a significant nap during the day.”

Wolf-Meyer also noted that in hunter-gatherer societies in Africa, Asia, and Central America, a similar system is employed to stay out of the hottest part of the day. He said these are proof that humans function well with sleep patterns different from the one-sleep-a-day common in the West. 

So if humans did switch to a dusk till dawn schedule, what would it look like? In an episode of the podcast “Flash Forward” asking if humans could become nocturnal, host and science journalist Rose Eveleth noted that background nightly occurrences would have to be moved around.

“If we did try to all collectively switch over to a nighttime society, it would be a huge logistical lift,” she said. “All the freight that gets shipped at night, all the garbage that gets collected, all the stuff that most of us never really see happening in the world would have to move into the daytime.”

Additionally, we’d have to change how we thought about nighttime. Before humans became the super predator, they had to look out for predators at night, which created an innate fear or anxiety of the dark and night. It’s the reason why many children have an “irrational” fear of the dark. 

However, Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor, a researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, said that before dinosaurs went extinct, the mammals that preceded humans were nocturnal to avoid predators who hunted during the day. As a result, many mammals still possess some nocturnal habits and abilities. 

On a systematic level, infrastructure would have to be reevaluated. Lights—streetlights, headlights, lamps, etc.—would be needed round the clock and would have to be everywhere to keep things illuminated, which would put more pressure on the electric grid. Even little adjustments, like black out curtains, would become a necessity (because humans need darkness to sleep well).

However, parts of society wouldn’t be able to make the switch. Agricultural sectors would still operate during the day even if it was later in the afternoon or earlier in the morning. Remote places like National Parks would be nearly impossible to cover with light especially because many animals in those areas are diurnal.

It could also exacerbate inequalities. If poorer countries or regions are unable to build a light-heavy infrastructure, they would be quite literally left in the dark. And forgetting to pay your electricity bill would have an even higher price. 

However, climate change could create a world in which it is necessary for humans to be nocturnal, said Kelton Minor, a Ph.D. student at the Center for Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. If global temperatures continue to rise, the entire world, not just the hot areas that Wolf-Meyer mentioned, would have to operate during the night to avoid the heat.

Becoming nocturnal would also have impacts on diurnal and nocturnal animals, said Gaynor, who studies how humans affect animals. In a paper she published in 2018, Gaynor found that diurnal animals like deer have already changed their schedules to be more nocturnal to avoid humans. 

Wolf-Meyer told Eveleth that birds—and many other animals—would probably enjoy the change as they are diurnal. But if humans became nocturnal, for climate reasons or otherwise, nocturnal animals would also become more nocturnal, Gaynor said. 

“It made me think; if we invade the nighttime with our human technologies, are we going to be just super efficient hunters at night?” she told Eveleth. “And might there be another wave of extinction because we start hunting nighttime animals that have absolutely no idea how to avoid us?”

The only positive for animals Gaynor could think of would be for nocturnal predators which would have access to humans who can’t see well in the dark. Humans would then have to develop new ways to see at night or keep predators out of populated areas.

Furthermore, humans could never be fully kept in the dark, Wolf-Meyer pointed out. The sun has multiple health benefits and either the sun or sunlamps would be necessary for humans to gain the same benefits in a nocturnal society. 

“You could kind of imagine this, like, intense café society where people wake up, they leave the house to go eat breakfast, and then come home and get ready for work, or school, or whatever,” Wolf-Meyer told Eveleth, “and then spend their day indoors in the dark and then at the end of the day, go back outside again.”