Are Alternative Sleeping Patterns Effective? 260
shmookey asks: "Some people have adopted some unusual sleeping habits, which they believed help them work. The concept is simple: be active for a few hours, sleep for half an hour, wake up and then repeat. This supposedly maximized your effective REM sleeping time and cut back on wasted hours of idleness. Hack-a-day has a nice article and some links on this, which re-ignited my interest. Does anyone on Slashdot actually do this? How do you make it fit in with earning a living? What sacrifices do you have to make to live this kind of lifestyle?" Called polyphasic sleep, or "The Uberman's sleep schedule", this is not something to dive into lightly, as it requires rigid scheduling, and there may be unexpected complications and other issues. Has anyone tried this? What were your experiences?
Re:More info on Uberman (Score:3, Informative)
No wonder that you get ill with so little sleep for prolonged periods. It's not without reason that sleep deprivation is a torture method.
Create a self-test first. (Score:5, Informative)
Before embarking on this, I'd get and baseline some cognitive tests (memory, reaction time, logic) to ensure that the new schedule isn't adversing affecting your brain.
polyphasic sleep (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:5, Informative)
Be careful. (Score:3, Informative)
If you forcibly deprive someone of sleep, they end up with physical brain damage and then die. You're unlikely to be able to do that to yourself, but... take care, okay?
Idiocy! (Score:5, Informative)
As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt.
You don't WANT to maximise your REM sleep at the expense of slow-wave sleep. While it's true that REM sleep tends to happen in 90 minute cycles mostly unrelated to the sleep/wake cycle, REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep. In normal people, it tends to happen most towards the end of the sleep period. It's also interesting to note that people suffering from clinical depression tend to have a greater ratio of REM sleep to non-REM sleep.
It would be much more effective in my opinion to gradually decrease the amount of sleep you get each night by something like 15 minutes. Once you get down to around the 5-6 hour mark, you're likely to start to suffer for it, but if you break the rigid routine, you're likely to require less sleep than you did before decreasing sleep time. The theory goes that people who do this sleep more efficiently - they also tend to get greater periods of slow-wave sleep early in the sleep period.
And of course, the so-called 'Uberman' cycle completely ignores the effects that light and dark have on people. Try looking up the research of Dr. Leon Lack into bright light therapy. If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any. Even if your sleep/wake cycle becomes uncoupled with the time of day - which is unlikely considering that people with different sleep patterns like this STILL find it more difficult to get to sleep at certain times of day - bright light and darkness will probably have a big impact.
Solo Circumnavigators (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More info on Uberman (Score:5, Informative)
My solution was to sleep in a 12 hour cycle rather than the normal 24. For 2.5 months I was fully rested, never cranky, and hangovers didn't seem to phase me. I would sleep from 3-6 am and pm every day. After the first two weeks I started to keep the cycle for weekends and I did feel that my body had adjusted to it. I fell asleep fast, but wasn't tired until just about time to go to sleep.
I guess part of the quation should be that you can sleep for short periods of time as long as you only need to stay awake for short periods of time. Maybe alcohol was the catlyst that made it all come together. Anyone who wants to fund a study on this idea should contact me ASAP.
P.S. - I like Vodka and Rum.
My own sleep "experiments" (Score:5, Informative)
I have, in the past, maintained sleep schedules where I averaged just under 3 hours of sleep a night for well over a month at a time. I know precisely how much I was sleeping because I kept precise logs, as per my doctor's request. This wasn't by choice--I simply couldn't sleep.
You see, I've always struggled with insomnia, and twice in my life it's gotten this bad. As such, I've come to be aquainted with what affect sleep patterns can have on a person. I can say that a lot of what I'm reading in the "Uberman's Sleep Schedule" seems plausible, except the bit about not being tired. You're tired, damn tired, but you can't tell after a while.
Naturally, the circumstances for me were a bit... different, but I can't really recommend a schedule like this. When you don't get enough sleep, you're never really awake. Worse, you can't really tell how much it's affecting you while you're still suffering from sleep deprevation--it's a lot like being drunk in that regard. Only the incredibly foolish (or incredibly experienced) think they can tell how drunk they are.
What's the point of spending more time awake if you're only sort of awake?
On the other hand, it's only fair to mention that my curiosity is in fact piqued. I'm tempted to try it myself, and see what happens. Worst comes to worst, it could trigger another long-term disruption in my sleep schedule, but hey, at least that's a known evil!
Tried this once, would like to try again... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been working up a plan to get a schedule like this going again, but it's really tricky due to the various circumstances of real life... separate weekend activities/schedules from the rest of the week, parties or dates might last more than three hours... it's almost a catch-22 scenario for everyone past the age of four or so.
But the 'thirty minutes every four hours' schedule isn't the only alternative... as another poster mentioned, sleeping in a couple separate blocks also works -- e.g., a 3-1-2-2 schedule (a total of eight hours sleep with one block of 3 hours, a block of 1 hour, and so on), or similar. I've heard rumors from some psychology friends that the most effective sleep schedule is different for each person; perhaps experimenting with a few representative schedules is worth trying.
There is some good discussion on this very topic on everything2, just follow the wikipedia link through (e2 probably doesn't have quite as much server power): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uberman_sleep_schedu
Steve Pavlina on polyphasic sleep (Score:5, Informative)
Steve Pavlina, apparently a man with a huge amount of people following his blog about various ways of self-improvement, has rather nice coverage on his experiment with polyphasic sleep [stevepavlina.com]. Long story short, he's been doing it for over 90 days now and claims to have improved his quality of life tremendously. It's a nice read, go check it out. Here's an excerpt from his entry on day 90:
Personally, I do think polyphasic sleep can have a positive effect. It just takes a lot of character and a suitable life situation to make it work. Not for everybody, but not bogus either.
25 Hour day is most natural (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I tried this, but..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Informative)
Some assembly line thing or another.
I would argue thatchances are that the folks who work graveyard have higher exposure to potentially cancerous materials than your average 9 to fiver.
They compared them directly to their daytime counterparts. They also found that exposure to light prevents melatonin release (or manufacture - I don't remember), and confirmed that the night shift workers had much lower blood levels with no peak during the day when they would be sleeping. They also ran lab tests on rats (I think) and saw that cancerous tumors grew at a rate inversely proportional to the melatonin blood levels. Finally, they saw that the night works had higher cancer rates.
If I seem hesitant, it's because I don't have the article nearby and don't know any more about the study than what was in the article, but they made the gist of it very clear: being awake at night increased some people's chance of getting certain types of cancers.
Oops, I take that back. The full article, along with references is available at Science News [sciencenews.org]. It's much clearer than I could hope to be.
Modafinil (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More info on Uberman (Score:4, Informative)
There were some exceptions, but not all that many.
At first, I'd get about 2-3 hours of sleep a night and then crash for a few hours about every 10 days. After doing that for few months, I got to the point where I didn't need to crash very often.
About two years ago, I had some kind of infection that seemed to be more of a nuiscance than anything else. A couple of weeks later, I had a relapse that lasted a couple of weeks. During that time, I spent more time asleep. Since then, I haven't been able to get by on so little sleep.
Now I'm back up to 6-8 hours a night.
I miss all that extra time I had.
Good Idea / Follow-up Info (Score:3, Informative)
I think you make a good point--and I think the advice to do some initial, during and post-testing is a great idea; somebody should totally do that. Um, I can't at the time being, so it'll have to be somebody else.
Anyway, I wrote a follow-up to the original article that discusses more of the long-term physical effects I noticed, if you care. http://pure-doxyk.livejournal.com/229675.html [livejournal.com]
-K*
E2 Article: Thanks; I wrote a follow-up too (Score:2, Informative)
'Tis here: http://pure-doxyk.livejournal.com/229675.html [livejournal.com]
-K*
Re:a pharmaceutical rather than behavioral approac (Score:3, Informative)
There's another major benefit of modafinil over amphetamine-type stimulants: you can go to sleep if you want to. It doesn't stop you from sleeping, just remove the fatigue. And apparently, you spend more time in deep sleep and less time in shallower stages. It's also much easier to get up in the morning. Overall, if you can find someplace to get it, I highly recommend it. One word of caution, however: while it doesn't seem to have too many adverse effects when combined with alcohol, experiences with other substances are mixed.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Informative)
The idea is that you take a very small dose (0.05-0.5mg) of melatonin a certain number of hours before your natural melatonin release would occur, and this acts to cause your body to think that your natural melatonin release has already begun, meaning that the next night, the natural release will start earlier. You can shift your time schedule in this fashion. Similarly, you can delay your sleep by taking a very small dose after you wake up, so that your body thinks that your natural melatonin release occurred later. Once you get your sleep schedule in the right place, a well-timed very small dose is effective at preventing your natural tendency to advance or delay the onset of sleep.
This method has proven clinically effective even in blind patients, whose retinas release melatonin on a completely free-running schedule because they never receive the light stimulus to suppress melatonin release which synchronizes them with the 24-hour day.
However, a large dose of melatonin (5-10mg) will still be present in the bloodstream well beyond the onset of sleep (if you're trying to advance it), which can cause the melatonin to be present not only during the advancement phase but also during the delay phase, which can cause the effects on your natural sleep schedule to be unpredictable (it advances the natural onset of sleep in some people, delays it in some, and has varying or no effects in others).
See http://www.dialogues-cns.org/brochures/19/htm/19_
By the way, please note that I'm not denying that large doses are effective for use as a sedative for a one-shot get-me-to-sleep-now treatment - I'm just saying that small doses can be effective for manipulating one's sleep schedule in a more delicate manner.
Re:25 Hour day is most natural (Score:2, Informative)