It's 1.47am and my bedroom is crowded with ghosts of the past, demons of the present and several monsters from the future.

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They convene here most nights, uninvited but always arriving with impeccable punctuality. Regrets from 20 years ago assume their usual place at the end of the bed. Past humiliations shuffle awkwardly near the window.

Concerns about looming deadlines squeeze in gently beside me, careful not to wake my wife. In moments of rare silence the spectre of unpaid bills paces the hallway like an impatient debt collector.

Sleep, that lifelong disloyal companion, has fled the room.

It's been like this for decades. The first act - falling asleep - happens quickly. But some time in the early hours - always the early hours - intermission arrives. The brain decides the past requires another performance review before pondering present and future catastrophes. Finally, an hour or two later, sleep's second act thankfully arrives.

Sleep disorder? Until recently I thought the same. Isn't the entire modern world, convulsed by nighttime anxieties, experiencing a catastrophic sleep deprivation epidemic?

It's certainly what wellness influencers and that multibillion-dollar sleep industry preach while peddling their drugs, magnesium herbal remedies, high-tech mattresses, lavender-infused pillows, ambient lighting and sleep clinics.

But new research is suggesting that the uninterrupted eight-hour slab of slumber we're supposed to strive for is largely a myth. Our dozing patterns, it turns out, are as different as our personalities.

For much of human history my tendency to wake in the middle of the night was standard. Historians say our ancestors often snoozed in two distinct shifts. The first sleep began soon after dark. Several hours later people woke, read if they could, talked, lit candles and shuffled about before settling into what literature and diaries of the time describe as "the second sleep".

We romanticise life before the Industrial Revolution ushered in its world of electric light to confuse our body clocks and suppress the release of melatonin, the hormone that prepares the body for sleep. But conditions centuries ago were just as chaotic. People slept in crowded beds, were beset by filth and burdened by hungry bellies. Thin walls could not muffle the screams and sighs of nightlife or the bellowing of nightwatchmen announcing each hour's passing.

Early hunter-gatherer societies had an even tougher time, managing between five and seven hours a night, barely different to what most of us experience now.

So if you're losing sleep over losing sleep,........

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