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?
Hmmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sleeping in cities around the 1900's (Score:5, Interesting)
If I recall correctly, they would go to bed early, wake up about midnight, play around and eat for a few hours, and then go back to sleep. Then they would wake up early in the morning.
You could find vendors who would go down the street offering apples and such for sale in the middle of the night at that time.
Pretty weird.
Our habit of sleeping all in one chunk is probably a result of World War II, where the military enforced that sleep habit. Other than that, rural people live like this (sun up-sun down) for obvious reasons. They couldn't miss a moment of daylight.
I wouldn't be surprised if various patterns of sleep were highly effective. I know my children like the naps during the day, even if it means they only get 8 hours of sleep at night instead of 10.
Sleep is for the weak (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Create a self-test first. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
All things considered, I'll stick with ol' Ben Franklin's advice.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always been skeptical of studies that claim the body does something best between certain numbered hours. How does the body know that it is 12 AM? What if you suddenly cross a time zone; would that throw off this process? Perhaps melatonin is best processed a certain number of hours after awakening, but how would a certain time have anything to do with it?
Re:Sleeping in cities around the 1900's (Score:5, Interesting)
Actaully, my boss is EXACTLY like this. And frankly, as someone with a normal sleep cycle, it's annoying as hell.
Imagine coming in to work on a Tuesday and have 15 e-mails from your boss timestamped 9pm, 9:10pm, 1:13am, 2::20am, then a few more in the morning.
I first thought that he never slept and never stopped working. As it turns out, only the latter is true. But that must go hand-in-hand with being the owner and manager of a company.
Either way, he comes across to his employees that he's insane. But perhaps that is what he needs to run a business.
Re:Tried this once, would like to try again... (Score:1, Interesting)
I did this for a while, last year (Score:5, Interesting)
It was REALLY great for me. I definitely got more accomplished. On the other hand, it was driving those around me bonkers. I was either sleeping or going 100 miles an hour at various, and always changing, times of the day/night; so, they could not rely on me for help/conversation/etc unless they could fit it in a certain period.
Had to go to Europe and a "regular" sleeping pattern for a few months, so I changed back to "night" sleeping.
When circumstances allow it I will DEFINITELY go back to what I now know to be poliphasic sleep.
a pharmaceutical rather than behavioral approach (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two remarkable qualities to the drug. First, you can use it for days at a time, and it only loses effectiveness after about 120 waking hours. At that point you need to sleep - but you never crash; you just sleep a normal 8 hours, wake up refreshed, and swallow the next pill.
One of the problems with a polyphasic sleep schedule is that it doesn't jive well with the normal structure of society. But with Provigil, you can still be fairly well synced-up with everybody else.
Besides, why change your behavior when you can just use drugs?
Re:More info on Uberman (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem was that friday night, I sat down on the edge of the bed, and slept straight through for 15 hours. (the first several in an upright position, until my roomie came home and tipped me over) Maybe spacing out cat-naps would work better, but I'd be careful of confusing euphoria from sleep deprivation with actual improvements.
On the other hand, sleeping for six hours, hitting a class, then taking an hour nap before lunch did used to work.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm under doctors orders to be in bed by midnight and to get up when I wake up and not use an alarm clock (& I usually ready to get out of bed about 9.30am).
Life gets in the way of this sometimes and if I have a few late nights or early mornings then I get pain in my intestines.
It's not so much of a hardship and I don't complain but I know that whenever I ever have to catch a flight in the wee hours of the morning then I pay with more than feeling sleepy.
yeah idiocy alright (Score:5, Interesting)
the whole point of polyphasic sleep is to get to a point where your body can instantly go to sleep. the first week is the problem because you arent trained for that yet, it takes forever to go to sleep after you slept four hours ago. the trick with polyphasic sleep, the way to learn how to do it is, you only put your head down on the pillow for the alloted time. sleep or no. by the end of day three a 15 minute nap is instant and divine. there is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
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.
like most things in nature, growth is bounded. if you dont sleep for four days straight, you dont need 24 hours of consecutive sleep. polyphasic sleep simply finds that upper bound of sleep debt very quickly and forces your body to adjust to recieving and maximizing the short duration payments it recieves. That restlessness before sleep you spoke of, the inability to get to sleep... the point of polyphasic is to overcome that.
REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep
indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through.
"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."
As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will.
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In summation;
You list a number of barriers to starting polyphasic sleep; trying to get to sleep in the middle of the day, trying to sleep during the light, &c &c. Its true taht these all can be barriers to entry but the point of the exercise is to overcome these barriers, to adjust your system, maximize sleep value and reap enormous temporal rewards. the question is "can we go to the moon?" and you start talking about how gravity's keeping us down... well great, the question wasnt "is it easy", the question is, is it possible.
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time.
Yes and no. Polyphasic sleep is an exceedingly effective way to get the magic 26 hour day. Yes, it really is. It works great, you feel fine (after you get adjusted & break through the problems establishing the cycle) and you're sleeping one third the time.
What makes your statement right is the terms "long-term":
Actually living a polyphasic sleep cycle, once you've started it, is extremely difficult. The cycle continues itself fine, without problems, but it is extremely inflexible to the callings of real normal life. It is an unstable equilibrium, waiting for the first moment of deviation to go spiralling out of control. Accidentally oversleeping can have devestating effects, missing a regular rest interval will crush you. When its working, it works fine, there are really no self evident mental defects, no externally discernable oddities (besides the disappearing every four hours)... but keeping it up is exceedingly hard to manage in a relatively busy world. Thats the biggest problem with polyphasic sleep, with normal sleep you can skip nights here&there,
Re:More info on Uberman (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been a while since I've posted, but this one brought me back. Many years ago, I did the same thing.
When I was in high school, as an inquisitive young lad I had heard about alternative sleep patterns. Upset at the wasteful 8.5 hours I was used to sleeping, I decided to try one. School forced to be awake from 7:30am - 2:45pm, so I decided to adopt a pattern of sleeping 3-6, both am and pm. I would get to stay up later, and get a whole 2.5 hours extra. I kept this up for nearly a year, as I recall. There was one major drawback, though, that forced me to stop.
It wasn't fatigue, weight loss, narcolepsy, or a steady erosion of mental faculties that forced me to stop though. In fact, I felt better than I had previosly. No it had nothing to do with the how much I was sleeping, but when.
See, the problem was I was sleeping through some of the more important hours of the day. That time after school was a prime time for socializing, running errands, keeping appointments, in short doing anything that involved interacting with the outside world. The time I got in return, roughly 10pm to 3 am, was next to useless. Due to curfew laws, it wasn't even technically legal for a 16 year old to be out for most of that time. If I did go out, who was I going to see? Who the hell is up at 2am on a Tuesday? Nobody I knew. So I had really nothing to do besides read and watch late night television. I was trading the prime hours of my day for late night infomercials. (Back then, there were no MMPOGs, and the internet was not much to look at, but the point remains salient today. Perhaps even more so.) That's why I stopped.
As a side note, after I stopped, it took a long time for me to completely shake the habit. Even in college, if I wasn't careful, I would fall asleep around 3 in the afternoon, whether I was tired or not.
the many phases of sleep (Score:5, Interesting)
I did doubledays (48-hour day cycles) extensively when I was working as a sysadmin and got stranded by Boston's subway (the "T") shutting down for the night. At first I took naps, but soon started working through the night and all of the next day, being awake for 36 hours of 48, and at my desk working for 30 of those. For reference, this is when I was about 27-30 years old.
You're all probably familiar with this one, so what's to tell? The 24 works far better with the rest of the world, but 28 is more natural and probably a bit more productive, if you function in near-total isolation, anyway.
I did this one for most of my sophomore year in college. Two 9-hour periods of awakeness, each followed by 3 hours of sleep.
I was on this schedule for only 2 weeks (when I was somewhat over 30 years old), but it felt great. It took me no getting used to, I never needed an alarm clock, and I felt invigorated. I spent 4.5 hours awake, then 1.5 hours asleep. Every meal was breakfast.
Long before I learned of REM cycles, back before the information age (in the 1970s), I plotted my waking times and learned that I woke easily at multiples of 90 minutes after I fell asleep. I would typically wake after 7.5 hours, but also woke easily after 6 or 4.5 hours. With effort, I could wake up after 3 hours. These are the 90-minute cycles of natural sleep. I think it unwise to go for a long time without getting 90-minute periods of sleep, and I've heard of research studies that back me up on that.
The more 90-minute sleep cycles you have in a row, the more "watered-down" the later ones become. The first hours of sleep are the deepest and most important, while the later ones are just a few steps down
Re:Be careful. (Score:1, Interesting)
Hey, I'm a hacker. I usually don't get enough sleep, and I'll have a coffee (or two...) if I'm feeling zonked in the morning. But dropping down to very-little sleep? That's scary shit
Eh. Being half-asleep is weird. (Score:3, Interesting)
The truly odd part was that I retained voluntary control over my fingertips and toes, and I could eventually wake myself up by twitching around until it moved my hand, then use that to move my arm, and so on. Also, math tended to make more sense when I couldn't move...
Uberman sleep is a bad idea. (Score:1, Interesting)
A complete sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes and includes four stages of non-REM sleep and a stage of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep [sleepfoundation.org]. I read a comment saying some people do not experience REM sleep. The fact of the matter is, if you are sleeping normally, part of your sleep cycle does include REM sleep, in which dreams are most realistic and the brains creativity peaks. Do not think that if you can't remember having any dreams, that you did not have any. Everyone has dreams, every sleep cycle, but the brain tends to erase the dreams you have after each one, if you don't wake up after each cycle.
Anyways, it's late, so I'm going to bed... Hopefully I'll have some cool dreams :P.
Re:25 Hour day is most natural (Score:3, Interesting)
It turns out that I naturally fall into a 28-hour day, with 20 hours waking, followed by eight hours of sleep. Conveniently enough, the number of hours in a week is evenly divisible by 28, so I also ended up with six-day weeks, with 120 total waking hours per week. A normal, sleep-8-hours, wake-16-hours week produces only 112 waking hours, so I eked out a 7.143% efficiency increase. Sadly, this optimization was offset by the difficulties of having my schedule wander around the clock and having to interface with fixed-schedule humans, so it was something of a relief to get back on a 24-hour clock.