
Polyphasic Sleep: One Man's 6-Month Experiment (2005) - thinkzig
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
======
harry
I've been sleeping bi-phasitcally since I saw that article on lifehacker.com
in 2005. Sleep cycle is 2:30AM - 7:00AM and another at 5:30PM - 7:00PM. Times
are typically rough around the edges by 15 or so minutes.

I'm a self diagnosed hypersomniac (I can sleep ALOT) it helps me feel very
rested from a total of 6 hours as opposed to the 11-14 hours it typically
takes for me to wake up naturally.

"The downside to this sleep schedule is that it can be inflexible. I’ve 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 is very true. If I skip a nap one day after work, I typically pay for it
by sleeping 2-3 times as long the next short cycle.

It's definitely beneficial to me. Sleeping 10-12 hours a night and not being
rested wastes alot of my not-at-work time and cuts into social obligations.
Bi-phastic works for me!

~~~
harry
Oh, I forgot to mention, the use of alcohol extends my 90 minute cycles to a
maximum of about 120 minutes. I typically adjust my schedule to this if I am
capable of doing so at the time. (I drink 3+ nights a week)

~~~
TrevorJ
So you have gone to the trouble of employing an extremely rigid sleep
structure that requires a lot of self-control to maintain in order to gain
back some productive time, but you reduce it's efficiency by 1.5 to 2 hours
each week so that you can drink 3-4 nights a week? :)

~~~
harry
You'd better believe it!

I feel I should mention that the time I am awake with this schedule I
typically am 'rested' and very alert. I had issues adjusting to the 8-5 life
because my body demands so much sleep natively. When I was getting 8-9 hours
of continued sleep in one night I was waking up groggy and not really getting
started until 1-2 in the afternoon. This cycle corrected it.

It's also not as rigid as you'd expect. I can move the start and end times of
the nap/bedtime around approximately +/- 2 hours and still feel alright. Altho
a nap starting at >7pm just feels 'weird.' It's the full skippage of a nap
that wrecks shop.

~~~
smokinn
I have more or less that exact problem. I get "8-9 hours" of sleep every night
but I tend to wake up several times. I'm pretty much always tired no matter
what I do before bed. I've tried tea, milk, no computer, reading, exercise, no
dice. That's until the weekend though when I sleep bizarrely, sometimes
skipping the first night of sleep entirely, sleeping a big chunk of the next
days and radically correcting on Sunday night. It makes Mondays suck but at
least I'm not tired all weekend like during a big chunk of the week.

I'll try your way, maybe it'll help. Thanks!

~~~
Aximilation
Even short of polyphasic sleep, try getting between 6 and 7 hours of sleep,
make yourself get up and see how that does. Often we get "sleep inertia" where
your body keeps just pumping the melatonin into your system when it really
doesn't need the rest. I know that aside from a polyphasic schedule, I _can_
sleep for 8-10 hours, but anytime I do it I feel groggy all day - melatonin in
the bloodstream - this has nothing to do with having enough sleep or sleep
debt.

------
dmm
Be sure to check out Piotr Wozniak's thoughts on polyphasic sleep:

<http://www.supermemo.com/help/faq/polyphasic.htm>

~~~
crocowhile
The article linked by OP is just plain wrong on so many aspects. The one
linked here, OTHO, seems to get things quite right.

I am a neuroscientist and I study sleep (genetics of sleep, to be precise); I
am amused and intrigued by the amount of threads concerning sleep I found on
HN. Only in the last week I think I could find 4 or so.

May I suggest few hints on the matter? As a general rule:

\- there is no a common "minimum amount of sleep". Sleeping time, sleeping
needs and ability to cope with sleep deprivation are different in different
people. By the age of 30 you should definitely be able to know what your needs
are.

\- the accepted rule is: if you need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning,
then you are sleep deprived. sleep deprivation is detrimental for your
performance

\- if you cannot achieve a night of resting sleep you might be experiencing a
sleep problem. sleep apnea is very frequent and very likely if you are
overweight.

\- don't believe of self-reported sleeping patterns, especially if they come
from eccentric people or even worse if they date back centuries. Italian
dictator Mussolini used to have one person staging in his office at night: he
would leave the lights on and move around occasionally so that people looking
at the window would believe the Duce never slept. The idea that sleep is for
weak and superhero don't need sleep is just BS, of course.

\- Let me conclude with a thought. I like to hear your opinions about this. I
do research for living and I have learned that putting way too much effort in
a very risky business can be very dangerous for your motivation. If you work
80/90 hours a week on something that will fail (and startups, like research,
have a high risk of failure) you may end up being so demotivated that you will
likely not give yourself a second chance. What I want to say is: if you work
so much that it gets to the point when is not fun any more, maybe you should
consider slowing down.

~~~
randallsquared
_By the age of 30 you should definitely be able to know what your needs are._

Well, except that it was around 30 that my needs started changing. Until then
I often needed 8-9 hours a day of sleep, but sometime after 30 I noticed that
I wasn't sleeping as long (and I'd long been out of the habit of using an
alarm clock until last year, because I worked for myself and never scheduled
anything in the early morning). Now my average is more like 7 hours a day, and
it's not uncommon for me to wake up after 5 or 6 hours feeling just as rested
as I used to after 9.

Talking about sleep schedules with my father led to the interesting revelation
that this happened to him about my age, and it continued decreasing right
along, so that now, in his 80s, he's only sleeping about 4 hours a night, and
doesn't feel that he needs more. So, I guess I've got that to look forward to.
:)

~~~
crocowhile
You are absolutely right that sleep pattern (and in fact sleep architecture as
well) changes with age. Sleep needs tends to decrease with age.

30y is pretty much the time when you enter into your "adult phase" that will
last for the next 30 years or so.

~~~
encoderer
Do you have any insight on the role that sleep plays in the aging process?

If we're able to get less good sleep as we age, and sleep is essential for
mental acuity (forming memories, etc) and for physical health (growth hormone,
etc), i've long wondered if the two are related.

~~~
crocowhile
The truth is that we still have no whatsoever idea of what sleep is for, to
start with. There are hypothesis out there but none of them is even close to
be considered scientifically plausible.

Some of them say sleep has something to do with maintaining a plausible number
of neuronal connections (synapses) in your brain: the more you learn and do
during the day, the more synapses you build, the more sleep you need to clean
up for the next day. As you age, your brain plasticity decreases, i.e. the
ability for your brain to change the number of synapses is not as good. This
is why you _might_ need less sleep than when you were a young kid.

If you are interested in the topic, I'd suggest to have a look here:
<http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/waking-up-to-sleep> Some of the talks
can be of interest to the general reader. The Science Network is a very good
source of good-quality easy to access scientific material.

~~~
Retric
_no whatsoever idea of what sleep is for_

I thought it was clear from looking at other animals that a large part of the
value of sleep relates to saving energy. Animals that do something like sleep
while staying awake burn more energy but don't drown / get eaten as much which
makes up for that. Granted, there is other things that happen as part of
sleep, but saying we have no idea when some things are fairly well known seems
to be over the top.

~~~
crocowhile
The "saving energy" idea was out in the 80's, mainly put forward by
Rechtschaffen and colleagues but it was abandoned the moment people realized
that a sleeping brain does not consume much less energy than the awake brain.
In fact the energy consumption during REM is identical to during wakefulness
(REM sleep is called also paradoxical sleep because the EEG looks very very
similar to a fully working brain), and energy consumption during NREM is about
10% less than awake - absolutely not enough to justify evolutionary the need
for sleep. The amount of energy that you save with one night of sleep is
estimated to be bit less than one frankfurter bun.

After centuries of interest we still don't know why we sleep. We have no idea,
really. We know rats die if you sleep deprive them for long enough (between
10-30 days) but we don't know what they die of. I work with fruitflies myself
and investigating sleep function is what I am trying to do.

~~~
Retric
I did not mean to suggest that the only reason for sleep was saving energy.
But, the duration of sleep relates to the option to sleep that long while
getting enough food, and not being eaten.

The human body saves a lot more energy than one frankfurter bun though sleep
by simply not moving all that much. Clearly the brain and body are doing
something useful while you sleep, but if it needs to do that stuff and walk
around / be awake at the same time it would use even more energy.

Bats, sleep 18-20 hours per day vs. giraffes which sleep 3-4 hours per day
etc.

PS: REM sleep is another issue, but the differences in human sleep cycles
suggest that sleeping less is not the only goal.

~~~
crocowhile
_The human body saves a lot more energy than one frankfurter bun though sleep
by simply not moving all that much [...] Bats, sleep 18-20 hours per day vs.
giraffes which sleep 3-4 hours per day etc._

I see. I think what you are talking about is not even energy expenditure but
what we call "the null hypothesis". Basically says that there might be no
other active function than sleep other than resting as a mean to escape
predators and not using energy. This is far from being the accepted hypothesis
on sleep function: in fact there is basically only one guy who still talks
about this (Jerome Siegel, UCLA); the rest of the community is pretty much
convinced that this is not the case. I'd suggest you reading this on the
matter:
[http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal....](http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060216)
(it is open access).

~~~
Retric
I think we are talking past each other. I suspect sleep does a lot of useful
things. Just as humans lost the ability to produce vitamin C we may have
become dependent on sleep for things that are not required in theory. So there
may be layers of dependence that show up over time. My suggestion is talking
about what sleep does can be separated from the fact that sleep is so common
and needed.

PS: Your liver does many things necessary for you to live. It also does many
things that help you live a better life. Talking about what your liver or
sleep does, without including the useful side effects is not the full story.
Sleep deprivation hinders memory formation in humans and hinders reaction
times. Are those related to the core function of sleep or just a codependence
developed due to other useful features of sleep? I don’t think there is a
clear separation between the two.

Edit: I can't read that link.

~~~
encoderer
As an observer, I appreciate the debate, and I'll add that it doesn't seem to
me like you're talking past each other. Giving the other gentlemen the benefit
of the doubt that he's something of an expert on this subject, it seems he's
very clearly understanding your point and offering his opinion to the
contrary.

I, myself, have nothing much to add in the way of hard facts, but using logic,
I think that sleep-as-an-energy-saver seems off. Sleep seems like a highly
vulnerable state for early animals. If the only initial benefit of sleep was
energy conservation, it seems like animals that simply chose to rest would
have an edge upon those that slept. By resting, they'd conserve the same
energy, but would stay alert and responsive.

And it interests me that animals that cannot rest (sharks, for example) still
sleep.

------
pchristensen
Notes from my experience:

[http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/polyphasic-
sleep-e...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/polyphasic-sleep-
experiment-background/)

[http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/category/polyphasi...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/category/polyphasic/)

------
msluyter
I was really intrigued by polyphasic sleep for a while, and used to fantasize
about how much I could get done if I tried it. But realistically, I can barely
tolerate typing 8 hrs a day as it is, and I have enough distractions and
obsessions that it'd be rather unlikely that I'd spend that extra time doing
much that was productive -- certainly, I wouldn't be programming.

------
CGamesPlay
I tried this two years ago with a friend. We weren't able to do it for very
long, and we had a lot of trouble staying to the schedule (and not
oversleeping).

Eventually, you reach this sort of zombie lucidity where you're awake and
conscious, but you're not 100% there, in my opinion. I'm not sure if that
affected my critical thinking skills, but certainly some part of me was always
asleep on that schedule.

Hey, maybe this would have gone away if we'd been able to stick to it for
longer. It was absolutely one of the funnest experiments I have tried and I
want to do it again sometime.

~~~
proee
How long did you try this for?

~~~
CGamesPlay
We were on the schedule for a total of about 2 weeks (widely regarded as not
enough time).

------
trickjarrett
This is perhaps the post / experiment I most enjoyed with Pavlina. He wrote a
lot of good stuff, I fell out of love with his stuff a year or so ago but this
is one that I really enjoyed reading about.

~~~
thinkzig
OP here and I agree with your assessment of the Pavlina blog's change over the
past year. His earlier stuff was great but I've had a hard time digesting some
of his newer topics.

I posted this because there was a lot of interesting discussion on the Matt
Mullenweg post in regards to his sleeping patterns.

My lifestyle would make it hard for me to try polyphasic sleep, but I could
see where it would help my productivity if I could pull it off.

~~~
trickjarrett
Polyphasic sleep is something I consider the ultimate lifehack and something I
see society moving towards in a cyberpunk / dystopia future as timezones
become more and more irrelevant. BTW: I appreciate you putting the year of the
post in the title.

~~~
maclifer
I meant to add kudos for that as well, thanks for mentioning that
trickjarrett.

------
icey
It's certainly fascinating, but I'm not convinced it's sustainable. I'd like
to see someone who has held this schedule up for a period of years.

~~~
Aximilation
I'm coming up on three years now, for the one with the most experience, check
out the pioneer, <http://puredoxyk.com> I found her articles on everything2
years ago and was intrigued. I recently started a blog about my polyphasic
lifestyle, I may not be the best example as I don't follow a strict schedule,
but I've stuck at it and it's worked well. My latest post was talking about if
it really works, if you're interested, you can read it here:
[http://blog.aximilation.com/blog.php?p=68&more=1&c=1...](http://blog.aximilation.com/blog.php?p=68&more=1&c=1&tw=hn&tb=1&pb=1)
For those not wanting to read it, my consensus is that yes it works, but not
for everyone with every lifestyle.

~~~
icey
I've read parts of her blog, but I recall it seeming like it required a lot of
regular effort to maintain that schedule; almost as though she was still
fighting polyphasic sleep every day.

Do you feel that it requires regular effort on your part to maintain that
schedule?

Do you feel any differences mentally?

~~~
pchristensen
My experience was that is wasn't a physical struggle to stay on the schedule -
it was a social one. The world does not do polyphasic and you have to defend
your time. I eventually crashed out when I was supposed to come home ad sleep
after work but my wife took me to dinner instead. Being up for 7 hours
straight wiped me out for a day and it was too socially challenging to keep it
up.

------
dave_au
Kind of related - I tried the 28 hour day / 6 day week when I started my PhD.

I could still code but I couldn't do theory - turned that part of my brain off
like a switch.

And even though I only did it for 1 or 2 weeks it took more than month for me
to get back to feeling normal.

It turns out a lot of systems in the body like that 24 hour thing. I'm glad I
stopped before my digestive system got angry :)

Still kind of glad that I tried it because a) I know I won't try anything like
it when stakes are higher and b) the amount of discipline it took was roughly
equivalent to the amount of discipline it takes to time manage myself to peak
productivity on a regular sleep cycle.

------
maclifer
I thought that Steve Pavlina ended up writing some additional follow-up
articles to his polyphasic experiment - make sure to read those, too. It
didn't sound like something that would work for most people IMHO.

~~~
Aximilation
Correct on both points. Steve called it quits quite a while ago, it's funny
how his posts keep getting called up years after the fact. If you want more up
to date info, google puredoxyk (founder) or jorel314 (collects links to
current polyphasic sleepers)

------
sfphotoarts
This seems like in our diurnal world to be living against the natural rhythm
of things, but for space travelers, this seems like perfect prep for a trip.
Maybe Steve should consult with NASA.

