

Ask HN: Anyone here on a polyphasic sleep schedule? - garply

I just read a fascinating reddit post on it (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_ubermans_sleep_schedule_for_sixty/) and it's something I've been contemplating doing for years. I'm currently thinking about taking the plunge into the everyman schedule - wondering if people here have any experience / advice.
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mechanical_fish
This crazy idea comes around every few months:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142>

I think it's self-evidently crazy. You don't have to be a genius to tinker
with your sleep pattern. The fact that such a vast majority of the seven
billion contemporary humans nonetheless has a normal sleep pattern (i.e.
monophasic to moderately biphasic) is a pretty big signal that it's part of
the basic design.

And that's without even pointing out that there is actual science on this
topic. Here's Stanford's heroic effort to convince you to get some rest:

<http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/>

<http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/>

I need to read this stuff for inspiration. But not now, because I should
really get to sleep.

~~~
garply
I upvoted you for the link to the old thread, but why is it self-evidently
crazy? Just because most humans do something by default doesn't mean it's an
optimal solution. Many things that people do by default are a result of
environmental training but are not necessarily optimal behavior (here in China
people juggle walnuts between their fingers in an effort to ward of arthritis,
but as far as I can tell that behavior is just as likely to encourage
arthritis as protect against it).

I also attended Dr. Dement's Sleep and Dreams class while I was at Stanford.
His class was basically a propaganda program for students to get more sleep:
He even gave us extra credit for sleeping during class. The man is a true
believer in getting tons of sleep and that does indeed say a lot towards
discrediting people who vouch for polyphasic sleep schedules. I tend to trust
what he says, even if he was rather old and eccentric.

On the other hand, what's going on with all of these people who write such
glowing reviews of the process? Are they just delusional?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes, Dement is hilarious in his single-mindedness. And I didn't even have to
take the class to figure it out: I just listened to one recorded lecture by
the guy.

His _idee fixe_ is understandable. It's a story as old as the Greeks, who
wrote the myth of Cassandra for a reason: You set out to discover something
important, and you _do_ , and the answer is seemingly _obvious_ , especially
to a highly rational person... and yet society just can't seem to act on that
obvious answer, and people's lives just continue being screwed up. It works on
your nerves, over the years.

(I used to work in cancer research, and I get a small pang of this feeling
every time I see a lit cigarette. So far I have been able to control my
impulse to whip out the scale model of the diseased human lung and confront
people with it, like that guy in the movie _Clerks_. But if I spent another
twenty years in the field I'm not sure I'd be so restrained.

Similarly, I met a cardiologist and the guy was pretty animated when selling
me on the advantages of exercise. There's something about watching people die
on a daily basis that makes you a very forceful salesman.)

 _what's going on with all of these people who write such glowing reviews of
the process?_

I also think it's partly the Efficacy Fallacy: When you make a decision to do
something, you have a powerful internal motivation to defend the efficacy of
that action. After all, nobody likes to think of themselves as stupid, and it
actually is a bad idea to second-guess yourself every ten seconds. So your
decisions have a psychological momentum that takes time to wear off.

That would explain why people embark on these life-changing crazy ideas, then
enthuse loudly about them for a certain number of months, and then _quietly_
give them up. I've been there.

It's also worth remembering that, like drunkenness and drug addiction, chronic
sleepiness has a "death spiral" pattern: It impedes your judgement, which
causes you to do stupid things, which may impede your judgement further...

It is also likely that this weird sleep cycle _does_ "work" for some people. A
few people may have really odd biological clocks. Others may find that the ill
effects of messed-up circadian rhythms are canceled out by some _good_ effect,
in their particular circumstance, or for their particular psychology. If you
desperately need to escape a miserable home life, becoming a marine and being
shipped off to war might be a net win, and if you desperately want to hack on
the lab full of million-dollar equipment -- or you desperately need to get out
of sync with the time-wasting meetings that dominate your daytime office life
-- having a crazy sleep schedule might be a net win. Or at least feel like
one.

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evo_9
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_uber...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_ubermans_sleep_schedule_for_sixty/)

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rick888
The problem is that even if you are on the schedule, everyone else is not. It
just doesn't seem practical to me to take mini-naps every 20 minutes.

~~~
garply
You don't nap every 20 minutes, you nap for 20 minutes every 4 hours
(resulting in a total of 2 hours of sleep per day).

But, even as someone who works for himself and thus has more control over his
schedule, napping every 4 hours seems a bit impractical to me. That's why I've
been looking at the everyman sleep schedule
(<http://everything2.com/title/Everyman+Sleep+Schedule>), which entails 3
hours of sleep at night and then 3 20-minute naps during the day. Apparently
the everyman schedule is much more forgiving if you move the naps forward or
backward an hour so than the uberman schedule.

