The Cave Theory: Ancient Roots of Sleeplessness

At a party last week with a group of middle-aged ladies having a good time, I was surprised to have a friend telling me, that she spread my Cave Theory (not at all related to Plato’s) to other friends. Naturally I was pleased to hear this and so today, I decided to blog about it!

If you talk to ladies of a certain age, you are likely to find more than a few who report involuntarily waking up in the middle of the night between two and four am. Whenever this has happened to you, you will agree that after a few nights of this forced wakefulness, you find yourself horribly tired, frustrated and frankly exhausted.

As this en vogue, I have read „Why we can’t sleep“ and all sorts of menopausal guidance books. Instead of alleviating the symptoms, they added to my anger. While the current administration, climate change or patriarchy can certainly rightfully be blamed for many things, I believe this particular conundrum might be outside their modern reach and is in fact far more ancient.

Duty calls

That is when I came up with my own „Cave Theory“. This is pretty simple and might be all wrong, but it helps me to shed my anger and return faster to sleep. So, here I share:

In very old times, humans lived together in smaller groups and they would rest together at night. Possibly in a cave (for the sake of my little tale.) Tigers and mammoths roam outside. A cozy fire flickers to keep us warm and be ready for cooking the next day.

We all know: sleep patterns shift. Humans are „nocturnally mating animals“. This is a cue: when people want to find new mates they mostly to go nightly gatherings and less to early breakfast meetings. Anyone observing teenagers at close quarters can confirm, that they get a sudden burst of energy when one’s older self might already get ready for bed.

Mothers of young children are bound to be woken early by their lot. Hunters and warriors might need to get up early, too, to get their jobs done in daylight. The very elderly often retire early and get up early.

Ladies get the job done!

So, who is going to do the red-eye shift of guarding the cave? Who checks between 2 and 4 am if the fire is still smoldering, if potential invaders are loitering or threats on the prowl?

How about we find a group of people who no longer have very young children, who can still hear and see well enough and who are not on the hunting team and so can be a bit slow in the morning? Maybe over thousands of years, it turned out that tribes who had sleepless women in their menopause do the job had the best rates of overall survival?

Then, it would make sense to carve this design into the DNA of people. Give them a circadian cycle that shifts with hormones and age to make them fit for their respective serving hours.

Who could have known that one funny day, office starts for all humans at the same time? Could they have foreseen that we have lighters to restart the fire? No one is to blame, Mother Nature is just slow to catch up with our times.

How does this help?

So, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I tell my little cave women alarm that my night time duty is no longer required. I understand that there are ancient forces at play that are stronger than my modern self. It is nothing I did wrong, problems I failed to solve, drinks I should not have consumed. It is those hormones that are doing their jobs as they want to help me to do mine. It’s like hair growing on legs. No one needs it, but we do not blame ourselves for it. It just happens.

I hope you enjoy this idea: do not blame the system, your unresolved problems, or least of all yourself for your disrupted sleep. Just hang in there, it is going to change again one day – or night.

Until then: when you cannot sleep, think about brave women on their nighttime guards who helped to protect your ancestors through countless sleeps to help bring your genes into the 21st century! And if still sleepless: write me a message.

And who knows? Maybe one night, I will in fact be the one to spot the saber-tooth tiger standing in our yard? If so, I will post about it here without delay!