Polyphasic Sleep
Piquant shared this link in response to my post about sleep troubles. It’s an old classic by Steve Pavlina that I remember having seen a long time ago, but had completely forgotten.
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.
Sounds very interesting if you have the liberty to arrange your time around that schedule. Pavlina decided to try it and blogged about the process. He adjusted pretty quickly, and kept at it for five and a half months. When he eventually returned to monophasic sleep, it was because polyphasic sleep was too inconvenient: society is built around having people sleep in one big lump of time at night, and be awake the rest of the time. Also, having to plan everything so as to fit within the four-hour blocks between naps proved too rigid, understandably.
Piquant also linked to another one of Pavlina’s old hits, How to become an early riser. The basic idea is to go to sleep only when you’re so tired you’ll fall asleep quickly, but to rise at a set time, no matter when you fell asleep. Maybe it really works, but fuck, getting into that schedule must be hell. I’m not very motivated to put myself through a week of sleeping a couple of hours each night just to try.
