Polyphasic Sleep

One happy coincidence of finding the 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss was learning about polyphasic sleep. Poly-what you ask? Polyphasic sleep is sleeping several times a day for shorter periods as opposed to Monophasic sleep (once per day) or Biphasic sleep (twice per day). Most of the human population in North America are monophasic sleepers, meaning they sleep for 6-9 hours, usually during the night, per day. Other populations, in Europe and in Mexico, have a largely biphasic sleep pattern in which they sleep for six hours at night and have a 20 minute 'siesta' nap after lunch.

Here is where it gets interesting. Polyphasic sleep can be divided into two types (well three if you consider Dymaxion sleep a viable option, however only Buckminster Fuller was able to successfully do this). The first sleep pattern is commonly defined as Everyman. This is when a "core" sleep at night is dispersed with 20 minute naps during the day. Interestingly more naps and a subsequently smaller core sleep, the less sleep you need. For instance, if you choose two naps, your core sleep will be 4.5 hours long for a total of 5.25 hours. If you choose 4 naps, then your core sleep needs only be 1.5 hours long for a total of 2.5 hours of sleep. Finally, the Uberman sleep pattern is where there are six naps every four hours, giving you an astoundingly small amount of sleep at only 2 hours a day.

Crazy? Impossible?! Wait, let me explain. To understand how this works, lets learn a bit about our brains. A normal sleep cycle is 90 minutes and as a monophasic sleeper, we repeat this cycle several times without waking, or waking briefly and falling back to sleep, each night. Rapid Eye Movement sleep occurs late in this cycle. REM sleep is the critical phase of sleep in which we experience dreams. When deprived of REM for too long, as anyone who has experienced sleep apnea knows, this leads to extreme irritability and hallucinations. REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20-25% of total sleep, about 90-120 minutes per night.

Polyphasic sleep is based on the premise that only REM sleep is biologically needed for humans. Let's take a cue from other mammals. Did you know mature horses sleep an average of just 2.5 hours every 24 hours in short intervals of 15 minutes each? Adult giraffes sleep an average of just 1.9 hours per day. We, as humans, were born polyphasic, as all parents can attest to. Newborns sleep in a two-hour cycle, during which 80% of their total sleep time is in REM. What we have learned is that if we sleep more frequently and for fewer hours, we enter REM stage faster and more efficiently then if we are monophasic sleepers. Thus, polyphasic sleepers are sleeping optimally.

Now you are asking, why is this a happy coincidence and what is the relevance to your life? In reading my previous posts, you can see that I plan to be working full-time, working towards my MBA as fast as possible, writing my book, AND being a parent/partner/daughter/sister. If that isn't too busy for you, what about my French classes or my volunteer work? How about exercise, time to eat, maybe even clean the house, and *gasp* time for myself? I was thinking a little, no a lot, about how I am to fit everything in and gave it to the universe to decide. I had believed that I would have to compromise on my job in order to achieve everything and stay sane. Then this book, this idea, fell into my lap. If I have four to six extra hours in a day, just imagine what I can accomplish!

I checked every link in the book and kept digging. I read Steve Pavlina's Sleep Logs and how Dustin Curtis successfully became a polyphasic sleeper. I found PureDoxyk's Ubersleep book and read through her website. I thought about the pros and cons of this a lot over the last week and here is what I came up with.

Many of us have 'sleep problems' as they are defined by a monophasic paradigm. I personally find I have no problem falling asleep and sleep a solid 4-6 hours upon going to bed at 8 pm. However, I wake up... and I mean fully awake, between midnight and 2 am. In my belief that I needed eight hours of continuous sleep at night, I would then lay in bed for the next three to four hours, finally falling back to sleep. I would almost always experience horrible dreams during this second sleep cycle only to be awakened by my alarm at 5:30. Exhausted, I would stumble through the day and either crash on the couch when I returned home from work for a 20-90 minute nap or push through to bedtime. Fun? Not even a little.
So I looked at my sleep craziness in light of polyphasic sleep. Both of my parents have had siesta naps their entire life, as did my mother's parents before her. My body loves 20 minute naps and I wake easily from them, almost always having experienced REM sleep. What my body has been trying to tell me is that I am not a monophasic sleeper! So I tracked my sleep schedule and here is what I found. It won't be a big reach to move to everyman polyphasic sleeping at all.

Finally, in reading several sleep logs of true uberman polyphasic sleepers, I saw their initial fatigue rates and found many others have quit because of this in the first week. My thought is, why go all or nothing? Why not move towards uberman sleep through becoming an everyman sleeper first? Reduce the fatigue, allow my body to adjust, and see what works best for me? So, here I am, experiencing my own experiment! I too will be tracking my polyphasic sleep logs here.

One last note, I have learned from other Uberman sleepers of some very unique and exciting benefits beyond having an extra six hours of sleep a day. I will blog more on those as my experiment unfolds.

Pre-polyphasic sleep log
Polyphasic sleep log - Day 1
Polyphasic sleep log - Day 2
Polyphasic sleep log - Day 3
Polyphasic sleep log - Day 4-5
Polyphasic sleep log - Day 6-7