Ever wanted to be awake during the wee hours of the night? Ever wanted to be awake for 22 hours a day,instead of 16? Ever wanted to never wake up and feel groggy and tired? Well then, this may be for you.

 

 

 

I recently found an article about something called "polyphasic sleep". Basically Polyphasic sleep is when your sleep pattern is altered so that you sleep in 20 minute naps scheduled around 6 times a day. I realize my description may be somewhat unclear, so... pictures to the rescue.

 

 

 

 

This is a graph of an everyday persons sleep schedule. As you can see it has people sleeping around 1/3 of their day.

 

 

This is a picture of the polyphasic sleep cycle, less commonly known as the "Uberman" sleep schedule.

 

 

 

 

 

Due to my inability to explain things well I will quote Steve Pavlina. I've hidden this due its length.

 

 

 

 

 

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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 youre only sleeping 2-3 hours per day. Id previously heard of polyphasic sleep, but until now I hadnt 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 youd sleep for only 20-30 minutes. This is nice because the times are the same whether AM or PM, and theyre 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 youll 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 youll be sleeping a lot less, apparently its very important to sleep at the required times and not miss naps.

 

 

 

It was interesting to read some of the posts from people whove 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 wasnt strict about the nap schedule and overslept on occasion. A side effect of this sleep schedule is that you need to eat more, since youre spending more time moving around. It appears that the long term health effects of this sleep pattern arent well known. Thats irrelevant to me though because I find that being a long-term vegan, I cant 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 wouldnt be of much use to me personally.

 

 

 

The downside to this sleep schedule is that it can be inflexible. Ive 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

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This just pretty cool system I think, for more info you could read the wikipedia article on the subject, or you could read Steve's report of actually doing this schedule for a few months.

 

 

 

Here's both links:

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

 

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

 

 

 

Discuss.

Kramer would disagree with this sleep cycle.

I think I'll just stick to my regular 8 Hour sleeep then resort to only 2 hours sleep :| I don't think sleep is a waste of time so...

That means my alarm clock will make me jump many times in a day. :XD:

 

 

 

Kinda cool, but going to bed for hours straight is more comfortable and a lot easier. :twss:

 

 

 

Also.. Two hours sleep every day? Not healthy at all. Fail.

Sleeping in 20 minute periods does not allow you to fall into a deep sleep and you will not be getting the rest you need. This is just a big failure.

You'll get my 8 hours when you pry them from my cold, sleeping hands.

I've heard about this before but never thought of trying it, i like my sleep :

Slight problem with the uberman system, a normal person working 9 til 5 would have to have at least 2 seperate naps during their working hours which wouldn't excactly endear them to their employer.

Slight problem with the uberman system, a normal person working 9 til 5 would have to have at least 2 seperate naps during their working hours which wouldn't excactly endear them to their employer.

 

 

 

Considering the amount of time wasted by the average person at work, I don't think a few 20 minutes nap would hurt :P

How would you wake up after 20 minutes without someone roughly shaking you about.. I can go on a week with 2 to 4 hours of sleep per day, although I become a bit more easily bored and get a shorter attention span, it doesn't have that much consequences.. (after a week I get annoyed by every small thing and I'm not a nice person anymore \)

Kramer would disagree with this sleep cycle.

 

 

 

Beat me to it! :P

 

 

 

To be honest, I'm not sure if this will work because during that 8 hour sleep period, your body does plenty of things that are important after you sleep for an hour or two. I heard that somewhere and can't remember where.

The 'scaper's new method of spleying... sleep and playing...

 

 

 

I will try this.. just foor the hell of it

Sounds pretty unhealthy to me. I'll keep my 8-12 hours, thanks.

 

 

 

I think I'll just stick to my regular 8 Hour sleeep then resort to only 2 hours sleep :| I don't think sleep is a waste of time so...

 

I don't think it is either.

 

 

 

I don't see why anyone would want to be awake that much during the night anyway.. unless they had some huge project they wanted to finish and didn't have enough hours in the day to do it, like memorize every book on the planet.

Sleeping in 20 minute periods does not allow you to fall into a deep sleep and you will not be getting the rest you need. This is just a big failure.

 

 

 

 

 

This works, if you read the description in the hide tags you would see why, please read the whole thread.

 

 

 

I don't advise anyone under the age of 25 to try this, and if you are gonna ignore this(I know you will) you are gonna be like a zombie for a week, then you'll start feeling better.

 

 

 

Regarding its health effects, the only sleep you need is rem sleep, this provides rem sleep. you really do not need other sleep cycles such as delta sleep.

I enjoy my waking sleep; it's when delusions are most real.

Do you dream? Because if not i'm not interested. It's an interesting idea though, one I could see myself possibly pursuing when I was older and could get away with being a little more eccentric.

Do you dream? Because if not i'm not interested. It's an interesting idea though, one I could see myself possibly pursuing when I was older and could get away with being a little more eccentric.

 

Yes, this actually makes your dreams far more vivid. These power-naps are only rem sleep, rem sleep is the only time when you dream. The vividness of the dreams borders on lucid dreams.

I do the ~6 hours on weekdays 12-14 hours on weekends method. Works well for me.

I'm interested in at least trying it, I doubt it would work though.

I do the ~6 hours on weekdays 12-14 hours on weekends method. Works well for me.

 

That's bad for you. You basically are relying on sleep debt to get you through your day. You also prolly wake up in a groggy state due to you being in delta sleep at this time.

I'm interested in at least trying it, I doubt it would work though.

 

 

 

It works because you skip the 2-3 hours to get into REM sleep and gets you rested fast.

Naw... I'd rather be lazy for 8 hours. Takes me about half an hour to go to sleep anyway, unless I'm really out of it.

You will be really out of it if you do this. in a good way

Sleeping in 20 minute periods does not allow you to fall into a deep sleep and you will not be getting the rest you need. This is just a big failure.

 

 

 

 

 

This works, if you read the description in the hide tags you would see why, please read the whole thread.

 

 

 

 

I fail to believe you can condition your body to immediately enter REM sleep.

Sleeping in 20 minute periods does not allow you to fall into a deep sleep and you will not be getting the rest you need. This is just a big failure.

 

 

 

 

 

This works, if you read the description in the hide tags you would see why, please read the whole thread.

 

 

 

 

I fail to believe you can condition your body to immediately enter REM sleep.

 

 

 

You may disagree, that's nice, its possible,however.