Polyphasic Sleep Experiment
Several times I already blogged about my unusual sleeping behavior. Since using some NLP techniques during my student time I became a 4 hour sleeper. Which meant in practice I slept for around 4,5-6 hours every night.
Still the problem existed that I couldn’t make use of the two most productive moments of the day for me. I’m very productive at work between 22:00 until 2:00 in the morning. But that meant I had to become an evening person, which I successfully was for the last 5 years or so.
But then again, the 5 years before that I was an early riser and got out of bed around5 am to start running or swimming and do some early work and get a head-start to the rest of the normal workers.
Some years back I already heard about polyphasic sleeping, where you sleep several times a day for a shorter period of time. There are all kind of different schedules to bring back the total hours of sleep per day and still be fresh and energized.
As I’m working from home in the month November and after discussing this with my girlfriend, I decided to do some sleep experiments on my own to see what I could do.
First an overview of some different sleep cycles, so that you get an idea of what I’m talking about.
The monophasic sleep cycle is what most people do when they sleep. They go to bed in the evening and sleep until the morning. 1 sleep cycle per 24 hours.
Biphasic sleep is the sleep where the night sleep is somewhat shorter then normal and you do a ‘siesta’ in the afternoon, or start of the evening. For example 4,5 hours at night and 1,5 hours in the afternoon.
The Everyman cycle is were the real hacking starts. You do 1 core sleep in the night for 3 hours and fill this up with 3 times a 20 minute nap during the day. As 1 REM cycle takes 90 minutes to complete and your first 2 REM cycles at night are the deepest and take you through 80% of your needed rest, you should be able to fill that up with the 3 naps. The trick of the 20 minute nap is that you learn to make full use of its time and skip all the unnessary sleep phases and go straight into one heavy REM sleep. All in all you’re on a 4 hour sleep cycle.
The Uberman schedule consists of doing doing 6 naps of 20 minutes a day, so that’s 2 hours of sleep. Sleeping 6 times per day is very demanding and will mess with your personal schedule pretty bad. But the time you have in return is big.
The Dymaxion version is probably the most extreme known variant. Buckminster Fuller was reportedly using this one for over 2 years. It consists of doing 4 naps of 30 minutes, for a total of 2 hours. Imagine the time you have left each day!
Jorg’s Personal Sleep Cycle
After reading many personal stories, medical reports and other scientific studies I’ve decided to go for the Everyman cycle. After some planning with the naps and seeing what works best with my current schedule I came up with the following:
- Core sleep: 2:00-5:00
- Nap: 9:00-9:20
- Nap: 15:00-15:20
- Nap: 21:00-21:20
The great thing about the Everyman schedule is that it appears to be somewhat flexible. The different sleeps can be moved an hour earlier or later and that makes a whole lot of difference with the other sleep cycles like the Uberman and the Dymaxion. And to be honest, those last two seem just a bit to extreme for at the moment.
I’m now at day 3 of the experiment and just finished my second 3 hour core sleep. Didn’t have any problem until now. I already had some small dreams during my 20 minute naps which is a good sign and after my core sleep this morning I could get out of bed pretty easily.
The biggest problem at the moment is the fact that I miss lying in bed and feeling lazy! But then again, I’ve committed myself to try this out for at least 7 days and see how I will feel after that. It apperantly takes 7 to 14 days to get used to the new schedule, so I’m curious to how I will do.
I will update the blog when necessary and keep it very open so that other may find it useful for their own experiments with polyphasic sleeping. Until now it’s very strange that I suddenly have so much time at hand.
