Polyphasic Sleep

Lostthoughts · Jun 16, 2011

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

A couple days ago, I saw a post about polyphasic sleep on LifeHack.org. Since then I’ve been emailed about this topic as well, probably because I’ve written previously about becoming an early riser.

Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular form of polyphasic sleep, the Uberman sleep schedule, suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you’re only sleeping 2-3 hours per day. I’d previously heard of polyphasic sleep, but until now I hadn’t come across practical schedules that people seem to be reporting interesting results with.

Under this sleep schedule, your sleep times might be at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and 10pm. And each time you’d sleep for only 20-30 minutes. This is nice because the times are the same whether AM or PM, and they’re consistent from day to day as well, so you can still maintain a regular daily schedule, albeit a very different one.

How can this sleep schedule work? Supposedly it takes about a week to adjust to it. A normal sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and REM sleep occurs late in this cycle. REM is the most important phase of sleep, the one in which you experience dreams, and when deprived of REM for too long, you suffer serious negative consequences. Polyphasic sleep conditions your body to learn to enter REM sleep immediately when you begin sleeping instead of much later in the sleep cycle. So during the first week you experience sleep deprivation as your body learns to adapt to shorter sleep cycles, but after the adaptation you’ll feel fine, maybe even better than before.

It requires some discipline to successfully transition to this cycle, as well as a flexible schedule that allows it. While you’ll be sleeping a lot less, apparently it’s very important to sleep at the required times and not miss naps.

It was interesting to read some of the posts from people who’ve tried this sleep cycle. They reported higher alertness and energy, more vivid dreams and more lucid dreams, and of course lots of extra free time. I also read of failures, but in each case the person wasn’t strict about the nap schedule and overslept on occasion. A side effect of this sleep schedule is that you need to eat more, since you’re spending more time moving around. It appears that the long term health effects of this sleep pattern aren’t well known. That’s irrelevant to me though because I find that being a long-term vegan, I can’t rely much on long-term studies done on non-vegans anyway. Some say that hormones in animal products negatively affect sleep patterns, and more restful sleep is commonly reported after making dietary improvements. So long-term studies on people eating average diets wouldn’t be of much use to me personally.

The downside to this sleep schedule is that it can be inflexible. I’ve read that you can delay naps by an hour if necessary, but missing a nap can cause a rapid crash that takes a while to recover from. This means you only have about 3.5 hours of waking time between naps, 4.5 hours if you push it. So this can restrict your options a bit. Of course, you have to balance that sacrifice against the gain of many extra hours per day, every day. Interesting trade off…. It reminds me of something you’d find in The Book of Questions.

Plus it’s just plain weird. So naturally I want to try it.

Since I work from home and have control over my schedule, I’ve decided to test polyphasic sleep to see what it’s like. I’m already good at falling asleep fast (within a few minutes), and I often have dreams during 15-20 minute naps, so I wonder if I’ve partially conditioned myself to enter REM rapidly. This test obviously requires a bit of adjustment, but I’ve managed to work things out with my wife to make it practical enough. Since I’ve read that energy and alertness plummet during the first week, I’ve kept next week’s schedule very light mentally (no meetings, speeches, or major projects). Depending on how functional and coherent I am during the adjustment period, I’ll be doing mostly domestic projects like organizing the garage — nothing involving power tools.

I’m starting this polyphasic sleep schedule today, so last night was my last night of “normal” sleep for a while. I still got up at 5am this morning, and then I’ll begin doing the naps every 4 hours starting this afternoon. I’ll use a countdown timer alarm set for 30 minutes, so I won’t oversleep. I’ve decided that my sleep times will be 1am, 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, and 9pm. I aim to continue at least until Halloween… or death, whichever comes first. If it seems to be going well and I retain basic functionality, then I’ll decide whether I want to continue with it.

My main motivation for trying this is curiosity, and it seems like it would be a fun test of self-discipline. Plus it meshes nicely with my own general weirdness. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, it should be an interesting learning experience.

Of course I’ll be sure to blog about this experience, but if I start making posts about seeing dead people, then you’ll know I’ve become delusional due to sleep deprivation.

What would you do with an extra 30-40 hours of free time per week?

Read more about polyphasic sleep at Wikipedia.

Edit 4/14/06: For your convenience, here are links to all of my polyphasic sleep log entries in order (each link will open in a new window). This is a treasure trove of free information for anyone interested in learning about my trial of polyphasic sleep. To my knowledge these are the most detailed polyphasic sleep logs you’ll be able to find anywhere on the web.
Click to expand...

Has anyone heard of this? I've read several of his blog entries, (he did this shit for a full 5 and a half months) and I think I'm going to try it. I've always loved staying up late, because I love the quietness, and the several hours of peaceful, uninterrupted time to myself. Whenever I do this however, it always totally fucks the next day up, and I always have to choose between interacting with people and staying up late. I'm gonna wait a week or so, until my life becomes a little less busy, and Ill be on vacation the next couple months, so I wont have to think about school in the initial weeks of my new sleeping schedule.

Volupta · Jun 16, 2011

sounds interesting for sure....and its great that youll be on vacation so you can sleep whenever you want...but careful you dont end up loving it and then have reality come knocking on your door! Unfortunetly in todays world, sleeping every 4 hours isnt possible Hell, I cant even eat lunch at the proper time anymore

Mother's Love · Jun 16, 2011

this is kind of what i did when i was (briefly) in the navy. in between classes, or before/ after watch, i would cat-nap. 15 minutes is not enough time to nap/ reenergize UNLESS you are capable of dropping off right away and waking up fully as soon as your alarm goes off. i didnt train myself to do it on purpose, it was just a good way to get extra rest after working out in the morning before class. i did sleep longer periods at night, but i also offered to do overnight watches and often got them because not everyone does well being awake at night or having interrupted sleep. so i did not have a full nights sleep every night plus cat naps, more "i have 30 minutes to sleep! /unconscious"

Popularity · Jun 17, 2011

Yeah I've heard of this before. If you're thinking of doing it realize you can't commit to anything for more than 4 hours at a time.

philywilly · Jun 17, 2011

Yeah, I've tried this a few years back..

I think I was 15 or something, it was summer and I didn't have a job or much to do during the week. And this was before I was taking any drugs or even drinking that much.

So anyways.. I lasted 4 days with that schedule and then I went out at a friend's house for a night and that kind of fucked things up since I missed one of my naps. When I came back home I decided to just continue as if nothing happened, but I slept for 15 hours straight through my alarm.

Anyways anyways.. I sure as hell wouldn't see myself trying this again these days. First of all, with the weed it would probably fuck up your naps, and I got things to do and places to be.

By the way, it fucks you up. For sure the first week isn't exactly representative, but it gives you an idea of the kind of schedule you'd be living. It's just really weird to practically always be awake. I was mega productive for those 4 days, though. Worked on this website constantly and did a lot of photoshoping.

Oh yeah, and your immune system gets way weaker when you do that.. you're just so sleep deprived for the first week. I remember it was really warm out, but I caught a cold that week 'cause my body was just so sensitive.

KevinH · Jun 17, 2011

I did it about 20 years ago in college for a few weeks. It works. Real nice. But you are ALWAYS awake. Everyone else is asleep-you're awake.

Edison used to do it-I did it based on his writings. He would sit in a rocking chair with a pencil held in his fingers-holding it between his thumb and two fingers. He would sit in the chair and sleep until the pencil fell out of his fingers-about 20 minutes.

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Polyphasic Sleep

Lostthoughts Thostloughts

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Polyphasic Sleep

Lostthoughts Thostloughts

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Mother's Love Generalist

Popularity Senior Member

philywilly Member

KevinH Just Floating Here

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