Polyphasic Sleep

Unlike the others, this project isn’t a money maker, but it has the potential to make me more productive and hence help me make money. If it works, I’ll have about 6 extra hours a day to crank out crazy money making ideas!

The Plan: To follow polyphasic sleep schedule, consisting of 20-30 minute naps every 4 hours, for 30 days.

What I did:

Polyphasic sleep has enjoyed limited public exposure. The most popular example I can think of is Kramer, the lovable goofball neighbor in Seinfield, trying it out in one episode. Needless to say it didn’t quite work out the way he had planned. As I recall, his experiment ended with him getting thrown into the Hudson River by a scared girlfriend who thought he was dead. The only other exposure I’d received was author Niel Strauss’s brief description of his attempt in his book, The Game.

I consider myself a skeptic, and until a few weeks ago, I had polyphasic sleep filed away in the “bogus” section of my mind with all the various conspiracy theories and urban legends. That is, until I found a post about it on Steve Pavlina’s personal development blog. Steve is a very intelligent guy and for me, his post was the first positive review of this sleep schedule that came from what I considered a respectable source. I decided to give it some honest consideration.

Internet Research

Although there is not a whole lot of scientific peer-reviewed papers on polyphasic sleeping, this thing has taken on a life of it’s own on the internet. I can imagine why it would be so popular among programmers and tech oriented individuals, who are always looking for a way to squeeze more productivity out of their time. One of the reasons I decided to nix my first major, computer animation, was all the horror stories I’d read about guys staying up for days and camping out underneath their desks at work in order to finish a project. For many geeks, sleep is the enemy. Searching for “polyphasic sleep” on Google returns over 500,000 hits.

While the huge downside to this is the lack of solid scientific data to back up the claims of the polyphasic promoters, there’s a plethora of anecdotal evidence that suggests that polyphasic sleeping not only works, but it actually increases energy, focus, and boosts mood in it’s practitioners.

So what is it?

Breaking up the word into it’s two components makes it fairly obvious what it means, poly-phasic = multiple-phases. A polyphasic sleep schedule splits up one’s sleep into several “chunks” throughout the day; as opposed to the monophasic sleep system that most of us westerners follow. The theory behind this is not so wacky when you understand what is known about sleep.

The first notion we must understand is that science still doesn’t know a whole hell of a lot about how sleep works and what it does. Surprised? So was I!

Although we’re told we need 8 hours of solid sleep a night, an entire sleep cycle from start to finish lasts, at most, only 90 minutes. This means that for the average 8 hours of sleep we get a night, our bodies are actually splitting up this up into roughly 5 separate chunks anyway. There’s no solid evidence that getting all of our sleep at once is actually better than splitting it up into chunks throughout the day. In fact, many cultures in the past had a biphasic sleep system, splitting their sleep periods between a night time “core” chunk, and a 30-90 minute nap during the daylight hours. The traditional spanish siesta is a prime example of a biphasic system.

It seems the key factor in feeling rested and energetic each day isn’t so much how long we sleep each day, but how consistently we sleep. This is supported by the polyphasic sleep crowd, as well as scientific literature. Oversleeping is just as bad as undersleeping, and the key is to go to bed and wake up the same time every day. This explains why jet lag wreaks so much havoc on our bodies, and why us college kids seem to always have a hard time staying awake. Every college kid knows what it’s like to have to reset their internal every Monday morning. Partying till 3 am Saturday night and then getting up for school at 7 am on Monday makes feels like someone snuck into your room in the middle of the night and smashed your brains out with a bat; even if you got 8 hours of sleep both nights.

Uberman Sleep Schedule

The name of the polyphasic sleep schedule I’m following called the Uberman sleep schedule. It seems to be the most popular and most successful version; from what I’ve read on various forums and blogs at least.

It involves taking 20-30 minute naps every four hours. This adds up to only 2-3 cumulative hours of sleep every 24 hours.

From what I’ve read, key is to stick with it for at least a week, don’t skip naps and definitely don’t oversleep. It looks like you have to go through a period of pretty hardcore sleep deprivation before you get used to it. After a week or so your brain will learn to go straight into REM sleep after just a few minutes. Since REM sleep occurs at the tail end of the typical sleep cycle, the average person only gets about 1.5 hours of REM sleep a day. This schedule is supposed to provide more of the good, mentally refreshing sleep that we need, and in fact, the users who make it through the first week do report feeling much better.

It should be pretty cool if it works. Only sleeping 2 hours a day? Sweet! Now I’ll have more time to update this damn blog.