Poly-phasic sleeping experiment
A few months ago I read about an interesting idea on the Internet called Polyphasic Sleep. The idea that rather than getting all of your sleep in one big chunk usually at night you sleep in small chunks throughout a 24-hour period. The recommended format for this is 6 times a day at 4 hour increments for a half-hour. So you might sleep at Midnight, 4am, 8am, Noon, 4pm, 8pm. If you do the quick math this only adds up to 3 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. But wait - scientists say people need 8 hours of sleep a night. This sounds pretty crazy.
And that is exactly what I thought, but often when I hear something crazy like that I just can't stop myself from trying it. So I did. The theory behind it is that as you adapt to this sleep schedule your brain is not able to enter the REM phase of sleep that it very much needs. So over a period of 1-2 days your system figures out that if it wants REM sleep it better get it at the very next opportunity which is the next time you fall asleep. So at your next half-hour nap your body drops right into REM sleep and so each 30 minutes sleep session yields 20-30 minutes of REM sleep. Normally it's thought that it takes about 90 minutes to get into REM and if you are interrupted during your sleep during the night you can easily miss out entirely. I have no idea if this is really true or not, but this is how I understand the theory.
Clearly sleeping 6 times a day has certain downsides for people who are not homebound, but the upside is that you get about 4 hours/day extra assuming you sleep 7-8 hours a day. In a single week this yields 28 hours of extra waking time to do whatever you want.
I tried this for a 3 week period. So how did it go? It depends. When I followed the rules strictly that I list below it went fantastically. I had an extra 4-5 hours/day and felt fully rested. I would even go so far as to say better than normal. It certainly seems counter-intuitive to think you could feel great on 3 hours a day, but I did. It's also very enjoyable way to sleep because you usually have wonderful dreams and it feels like you get more "personal time" to think and be creative.
It was going so well, that I decided I could probably afford a little bit of caffeine. This began to create major problems which ultimately wrecked my experiment. The other challenge was just life, most things happen during the day, and ducking out for a quick nap is not easy to do.
So like I said I tried it and I found that it's pretty accurate. If you follow the following basic rules:
- Sleep every 4 hours for 30 minutes. You can slide the nap about 15-30 minutes without too much impact, more than that and you'll really pay.
- Do NOT oversleep. If you find yourself exceptionally tired I would recommend inserting a few extra naps. I sometimes will insert a nap between the midnight and 2am nap.
- NO CAFFEINE! - Now I love caffeine, but I'm convinced that not only does it keep you from falling asleep quickly it seems to prevent REM sleep. So if you are sleeping polyphasically and drinking caffeine you are basically just doing sleep deprivation - definitely not healthy
I'll write a bit more about this tomorrow.