Polyphasic Sleeping

f77 · Jun 29, 2006

In the guy's blog he said that in the first week or so, a person should keep a low paced activity lifestyle, because one is going to be much weaker. Wouldn't the person using this method be more prone to sickness as well in the first week?

I may be sounding like a worry wart, but this is some serious stuff. I read somewhere that a week of continous sleep deprivation can lead to death so I am a bit cautious about this. Well, time for my nap!

Nexus · Jun 29, 2006

i have read of polyphasic sleep in a couple of journals before. apparently thats what soldiers use to keep vigil on the border. but it has a small downside. evethough your body's needs are fullfilled the mind needs some non rem sleep too or your mind gets exhausted and like somebody before on this thread you a machine or a zombie doing work mechanically.i am not saying this is a bad thing you just need a proper schedule or it could screw your mind.

f77 · Jun 29, 2006

Oh freaking god! I overslept at my 11:30 nap.

I am going to take a week and eat mostly a fruits and vegetables diet, then I would try again. Maybe the chances of a vegan to achieve polyphasic sleeping is greater than the chances of a meat eater.

Actually your mind is only stressed out during the first few weeks, after that it becomes more clear and sharper. At least that's what I read in Steve's blogs.

Lord Ravenclaw · Jun 29, 2006

Your entire body is stressed when deprived of sleep. Perhaps you shouldn't even try it if you haven't the slightest knowledge of what it could do to you. Aside from that, drinking chocolate milk with chocolate syrup will definitely disrupt your ability to sleep. Retard.

f77 · Jun 30, 2006

Polyphasic sleep for dummies

Some of the biological argument presented in this article may not be entirely suitable and convincing for teenagers, esp. those who slept polyphasically through their biology class. Let's then reword it all in baby language. Experience shows that "for dummies" sections are most popular and most effective in conveying the message. Disclaimer: the models presented below are used for illustration only and are a remote approximation of real processes occurring in sleep

Alarm clock is bad for you

A metaphor that may help you get some sense of what alarm clocks do to sleep is a comparison of NREM-REM cycles to your PC. During the day, while learning and experiencing new things, you store your new data in RAM memory. During the night, while first in NREM, you write the data down to the hard disk. During REM, which follows NREM in the night, you do the disk defragmentation, i.e. you organize data, sort them, build new connections, etc. Overnight, you repeat the write-and-defragment cycle until all RAM data is neatly written to the disk (for long-term use), and your RAM is clear and ready for a new day of learning. At waking up, you reboot the computer. If you reboot early with the use of an alarm clock, you often leave your disk fragmented. Your data access is slow, and your thinking is confused. Even worse, some of the data may not even get written to the disk. It is as if you have never stored it in RAM in the first place. In conclusion, if you use an alarm clock, you endanger your data. If you do not care about your intellectual performance, you may want to know that there are many biological reasons for which using alarm clocks is basically unhealthy. Those run beyond the scope of this article. Many people use alarm clocks and live. Yet this is not much different from smoking, abusing drugs, or indulging in fat-dripping pork. You may abuse your brain with alcohol for years, and still become president. Many of mankind's achievements required interrupted sleep. Many inventions were produced by sleepy brains. But nothing is able to change the future as much as a brain refreshed with a healthy dose of restful sleep.

You cannot sleep polyphasically without an alarm clock

Your whole sleep cycle can be explained with the clock and hourglass model. Deep in your brain, your body clock is running on a 24 hours cycle. Every 24 hours, the clock releases a sleepy potion that puts you to sleep. If you try to sleep at wrong hours, without the sleepy potion, you may find it very hard to fall asleep. All insomniacs suffers from the lack of sleepy potion. If they go to sleep too early, before they get their fix of sleepy potion, they will toss and turn. Often for hours. You need to listen to your body clock to know when it is the right moment to go to sleep.

Yet the sleepy potion produced by the body clock is not enough to put you to sleep. The brain also uses the hourglass of mental energy that gives you some time every day that you can devote to intellectual work. When you wake up, the hourglass is full and starts being emptied. With every waking moment, with everything your brain absorbs, with every mental effort, the hourglass is less and less full. Only when the hourglass of mental energy is empty, will you able to quickly fall asleep.

To get a good night sleep, you need to combine two factors:

* your body clock must be saying "time to sleep"
* your hourglass of power must be saying "no more mental work"

If your sleepy potion tries to put you to sleep but your hourglass is full, you will be very groggy, tired, but you will not fall asleep.

If, on the other hand, you try to sleep without the sleepy potion while the hourglass of power is empty, you may succeed, but you will wake up very fast with your hourglass full again. That will make sleeping again nearly impossible.

Insomniacs go to sleep before the body clock releases the sleepy potion. When you wake up early with an alarm clock, you can hardly get to your feet because your body is full of sleepy potion, which begs you to go back to sleep. When you are drowsy in the afternoon, your hourglass of mental power might be almost empty. A quick nap will then help you fill it up again and be very productive in the evening. If you drink coffee in the morning, it helps you charge the hourglass and add some extra mental energy. But coffee combined with the sleepy potion produce a poisonous mix that engulfs your brain in sickly miasma. If you try to drink coffee to stay up in the night, you will feel like a horse kicked you in the stomach. That's the acme of a criminal attack on your brain's health.

Here is why polyphasic sleep will never work naturally:

* in the morning, if you are fresh and rested, your sleepy potion is cleared and your hourglass is full of mental energy, you are not likely to fall asleep. Trying to take a nap at that time is a waste of time. You will waste time for nap preparations. You will waste time trying to fall asleep
* in the afternoon, if you hourglass is getting empty, you may be able to take a nap. That's ok. Your nap will be short because the sleepy potion is not there
* in the evening, your sleepy potion is still not there. If you took an afternoon nap, your hourglass is almost full of energy. If you try to take another nap, you will be staring at the ceiling. You will waste your time again
* in the night, your sleepy potion is released. Napping should be easy, but if you fall asleep, you will not wake up. Not naturally. You will need an alarm clock. You may manage to recharge your hourglass fast, but the sleepy potion will make you groggy and tired. You may need a double alarm or a loud alarm, or some help from your Mom (if she ever agreed to this polyphasic insanity). You will fight and struggle. You will never wake up naturally. Not while the sleepy potion is in action

If you decide to sleep polyphasically. You will have to use an alarm clock. Otherwise you will not wake up in the night. Once you use the alarm clock, you will be sleep deprived. That will make your hourglass conveniently drained of energy. Empty hourglass will make napping easier indeed. But it is the hourglass that determines your mental powers. With the hourglass empty, you will be nothing more than an empty-headed zombie.

To generate naps at equal intervals, you would have to kill the 24-h circadian component of sleepiness. You would have to kill your body clock, and prevent the release of the sleepy potion. That is not possible. The sleepy potion will be released every 24 hour and make you sleepy; however, much you fight it. The shortest natural night sleep rarely goes beneath 3 hours. Many biphasic sleepers can do well on 4 hours. Yet most adolescents may need 7 or 8 hours of night sleep to function optimally.

In healthy sleep, daytime naps are either impossible or very short. If you track your sleep with SleepChart freeware, you will see it on your own. You will see how naps tend to cluster at night time (which may be midday for you). That's exactly what polyphasic guru Dr Stampi observed with solo sailors. Remember, that for the picture to be true, you should avoid alarm clock, which naturally, is not possible in polyphasic sleep. Yet even on a forced schedule you will see regular patterns of naps being longer and more frequent at nighttime (each time your relax your discipline, oversleep, etc.). The daytime naps will be shorter, esp. at subjective evening hours (which may be midnight for you).

Body clock training has its limits

I hear it again and again that all biological reasoning is of no consequence because the body can always adapt to training and pressure, and that science has not yet studied successful polyphasic sleepers. Here is a reply based on the clock&hourglass model:

* body clock is controlled by genes, and we do not know pharmacological factors that could significantly affect body clock period. Polyphasic sleep would require shortening the body clock period six-fold!
* body clock phase can be shifted with light, activity, melatonin and other factors, but the length of the period in which sleepy potion is released is hard to control. Drugs can reduce the impact of sleepy potion, but this should be avoided, as this affects the sleep stage cycles (i.e. not all your PC data may get written to the hard disk and get defragmented)
* the speed with which the hourglass of energy is emptied can be affected by drugs (e.g. caffeine); however, faster hourglass would produce more sleep (instead of less), while slower hourglass would make multiple naps even less possible
* science have not studied successful polyphasic sleepers because they do not exist (although there are as many claimants to the title as there are UFO spotters)
* polyphasic sleep in laboratory conditions is possible if the alarm clock is used to interrupt natural sleep. Entrained free-running polyphasic sleep is not possible in healthy individuals

Summary

Healthy body clock runs a 24 hour cycle. This cycle will make you sleepy during the subjective night (which can be midday too). This is why you won't be able to wake up from your nap in your subjective night without an alarm clock. Alarm clocks are unhealthy. They prevent sleep from fulfilling its function. The choice is yours: either (1) sleep polyphasically or (2) sleep naturally and let your brain develop its full intellectual potential.

If someone tells you he is doing naps every four hours, and that the naps last 20 min. and that he wakes up naturally, you can safely fire back: "I have seen Loch Ness monster too". That will bring it home.

Disclaimer: before you offend anyone, be sure you are not dealing with someone who is affected by a sleep disorder. For example, narcoleptics fall asleep many times during a day. But that is a result of a damage to their sleep control system. It is a disease and it badly affects their productivity and their life. Narcoleptics are always sleepy.
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From site: http://128.121.137.51/articles/polyphasic.htm

I was searching the net for about two hours trying to find everything I could on polyphase sleeping. Those bloggers who tried it are full of shit, because sceintifically this won't be healthy for you as explained by the above site. It's 1:18 AM right now, and I have wasted a half night's sleep over this crap.

gamma · Jul 1, 2006

I honestly don't give a damn what some other site says, if this can "cure" (read: help better than anything else) insomnia then I'm all for it.

I've heard passing remarks about this subject before and never really looked into it. With my summer vacation going I think I may just try this. Going to read the blog and Google this a bit more, see if there's any recommended techniques to get started.

Thanks for the link Ravenclaw~

Edit: Would just like to ask something; would this be feasible with someone training for the military? Would it be recommended, or potentially harmful starting before I even get in (considering boot camp schedules)?

f77 · Jul 1, 2006

Polyphasic sleeping is feasible, but impractical for daily life. You can have 20 extra hours, but you would only be able to use them for physical tasks, or repitative tasks not mental challenges.

Basically:

Monophasic sleeping = More creativity, better health because when sleeping your body heals faster and more alertness.

Polyphasic sleeping = more time, and will potentialy cure sleep problems like insomnia. This type of sleeping will only rejuvinate the brain, not so much the body. So there are health risks.

Polyphasic sleeping is impractical because in the long run, a person WILL breakdown and start sleeping at random intervals or oversleeping.
Now, Steve Pavelina is either really healthy and special or he is full of bullshit. You decide.

LINKed up · Jul 1, 2006

How do you know that the person will breakdown? It says in the article that you posted that alarm clocks are necessary for polyphasic sleeping. I would think that this would be so you don't oversleep, which is what Steve did so he wouldn't oversleep. Personally, I think that you are acting like this just because you failed at it, but whatever. That doesn't really matter.

Also, its not just Steve that has had success with polyphasic sleeping, because he said in the main article on his site that he had read articles about other people having success with the sleeping pattern.

Lord Ravenclaw · Jul 2, 2006

f77, all your conclusions are completely false. Steve said in his log that he was more productive and more alert in a polyphasic sleep pattern. I'm inclined to believe it. You're basically rebooting every few hours rather than once a day. You're only acting like this because you failed at it. It isn't an easy method to transition into. Considering you have little demonstrated self-control on these forums, it's doubtful you have much in reality.

f77 · Jul 2, 2006

Steve is a special case, because there have been many other people who tried this thing as well. In Steve's case he was a vegan for years, and he said in one of his blog entries that he had high endurance, so I am guessing he was very healthy.

Here is an excerpt from the site I quoted in one of my previous posts:

Sleep and creativity: Less is more

The answer to the question "to sleep or not to sleep polyphasically" will depend on your goals and your chosen criteria. You may want to sleep polyphasically if you want to maximize the frequency of a waking activity (e.g. monitoring the instruments and the horizon in solo yacht racing). Yet you will definitely not want to sleep polyphasically if:

* you want to maximize your creative output
* you want to maximize your peak alertness, your average alertness, or minimize the impact of your worst alertness levels
* you want to maximize the health effects of sleep, etc.

Paradoxically, not even are you likely to choose polyphasic sleep if you want to maximize the time spent in the waking state! Only when approaching substantial sleep deprivation can polyphasic schedule be superior to biphasic schedule in that respect.

Some people like firefighters or emergency surgeons may sacrifice their sleep for the sake of others. Most of the remaining population though will optimize their sleep for best health and best creative performance during the waking time. Polyphasic sleep is definitely not the answer to such optimization goals.

These are not the times of the pyramid of Giza when the genius of a designer had to pair up with a 50,000 drudges reduced to mere back-breaking labor. As we move towards the knowledge economy, it is the alert and creative minds that provide the basis of success in most projects. One minute of insight can be worth a century of shoveling! It might have been a single creative eureka that produced E=mc2. Probably even Einstein himself would not be able to track back the exact moment when his brain produced that formula. Nor would he be able to formulate a sure prescription for others for similar accomplishments. Human creativity is primarily a game of chance. Yet it breeds only on fertile grounds. Top-notch mind in a top-notch shape in conjunction with top-notch sleep is the best formula for more of such insights in the future. Polyphasic sleep is the antithesis of that formula!

If you scan the blogs of polyphasic experimenters you will see them choose an "engaging activity" again and again just to stay awake. Why would they prefer to meet people or go for a jogging over, for example, getting down to a mentally challenging project? Why would learning a difficult subject be a mental drag? Why would incremental reading have a torturing effect on their minds? As sports or social interactions boost the aminergic activity in the brain, these are effective counterweights to the homeostatic drive to sleep. At the same time, learning is a powerful contributor to the homeostatic sleepiness. Soporific power of learning is one of the most visible connections between sleep and memory. If you have problems with falling asleep, nothing serves as a better natural hypnotic than learning! Not just passive reading. Active learning! The best homeostatic sleeping pill I know is incremental reading. Naturally, you need a circadian component of sleepiness for the "pill" to work. Otherwise, learning (incremental reading) is, paradoxically, your best "creativity pill". It is the circadian phase that determines the positive neural feedback of learning that generates the creative enthusiasm, or the negative neural feedback of drowsiness.

There may more at stake though than just alertness, creativity, and long-term health. It is conceivable, that the sleep control centers in the brain become affected by polyphasic experiments. Researchers have noted cases where shift-work or other forced schedule patterns were able put the body clock out of kilter. Some have speculated that Peter Tripp suffered long-term consequences of his Awakeathon [ref: Tripp]. Polyphasic schedule is, naturally, far less drastic. Dr Stampi has put one Francesco Jost through a diet of 3 hours of sleep for 2 months without measurable adverse effects. Yet, looking at other neuropathophysiological processes, we might worry that it might be possible to actually kill cells in nuclei responsible for the SWS switch, REM on switch, REM off switch, etc. We know that disregarding mental hygiene, depression, excessive cell activity, hypoxia, and other neural stresses can lead to cell loss. As long as this area remains gray, playing with once sleep schedule is tantamount to dicing with once long-term ability to effectively control sleep cycles. This might be not much different from dieting, once you put your appetite control centers out of service, you are sentenced to a lifelong struggle with diets and yo-yoing weight.

Why less is more? Because by giving your brain as much sleep as it wants, you can be far more creative and productive in your waking time. Not just far more. In a polyphasic sleeper, the creativity may dip by an order of magnitude. Its like with top performance sports. Wrong timing of a dinner may cost Lance Armstrong his yellow jersey. Do not let yourself be marginalized in the race for intellectual excellence!
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This basically explains much better than I ever could why Polyphase = less creativity.

When you are using polyphasic sleeping, you need to rely on alarm clocks. They are unhealthy for sleep because they distrupt the natural cycles.

Compression of sleep stages

One of the myths of "Uberman sleep schedule" is that it makes it possible to enter REM sleep and skip non-REM sleep stages entirely. That myth is derived from another false claim that implies a non-essential role of deep sleep. I will ignore these claims as standing in total disagreement with laboratory findings and models of sleep. Instead, let us focus on a more plausible claim of the possibility of compressing sleep stages.

It is true that people who are sleep deprived are able to enter deep sleep much faster than normal sleepers. After a period of sleep deprivation, less important stages of sleep are compressed, while the core SWS predominates. Also REM deprivation will result in REM upregulation at recovery time. Indeed, we are more effective at sleeping after we had been sleep deprived. Moreover, it is possible that the homeostatic control of sleep is not very efficient at detecting the true neural sleep need. If you look at our mammal relatives, you may be surprised that a giraffe can do well on 2 hours of sleep, while a bat may need 20. Smart and fast-learning elephants need 4 times less sleep than less brainy felines. Behavioral observations will then quickly lead us to the conclusion that the amount of sleep is not directly correlated with the amount and complexity of memory acquisition and neural computation.

We may then hypothesize that the sleep control may employ auxiliary physiological parameters that are only loosely related to the requirements of neural optimization. It is also possible, that if the night-time was not very useful as an activity time to early hominids, sleep control mechanisms might have attracted a number of additional physiological functions that might improve survival even if sleep lasted longer than what is needed for memory consolidation and optimization. Hence the possibility of all sleep mechanisms proceeding at leisurely rate with lots of added function that would not require loss of conscious awareness in the first place.

If the above thinking is correct, we might indeed be able to execute the same neural job in a shorter time given the favorable circumstances. However, little is known of the true nature of the link between neural optimization and homeostatic sleep control. Our present knowledge still seems to firmly indicate that you can maximize your creativity to sleep cost ratio only with free running sleep. In other words, there is no evidence that by playing with sleep deprivation, you can increase your creativity. The only possible exception might a tiny degree of deprivation resulting from delaying sleep by 30-60 minutes. Longer delays affect alertness beyond what might be considered a "gain". It is simply possible that between the extremes of free-running sleep and a slightly delayed sleep phase, the trade-off between (1) time gain due to sleep compression and (2) an accelerated homeostatic sleepiness might produce an optimum somewhere in between. Naturally, this tiny prod to a sleep cycle has nothing to do with the employment of alarm clocks, shattered schedule and never-ending battle with grogginess typical to those who experiment with polyphasic sleep. Moreover, even that little hypothetical intervention in the sleep cycle will inevitably result in phase shifts that may have numerous negative side effects, including, most obviously, the inability to function effectively in a society that is largely synchronized with daylight. Well-entrained free-running sleep is still your best bet for maximum cognitive performance.
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The first time I tried it I overslept, but the next day I tried it again, and at about 1 am when I was surfing the internet I discovered this. I do not want to damage my health so I quit on the first night.

Maybe I have little self control, but I don't think that is what led me to give this up because I didn't have a problem staying awake, I had a problem with oversleeping.

Besides alarm clocks are bad for your sleep, as explained in the quote above.

I tried to find other bloggers who had success with this, and I am still trying. If anyone knows where please linky.

Giovanni · Jul 2, 2006

And speaking of Linky Love, could you please provide some links to the wonderful articles which you cited?

Gio likes his sources referenced and credible.

Lord Ravenclaw · Jul 2, 2006

The wikipedia article links some other sources, but Steve is the most complete log I believe.

Somewhat related, is that I do my absolute best sleeping 6-8 hours uninterrupted. Under or over and I'm groggy and somewhat lethargic. With my target I'm creative and productive. I'll probably experiment with polyphasic and biphasic sleeping at some time...biphasic could possibly be done during school considering it takes a 8 hour window of time, and I'd only sleep every 12 hours.

f77 · Jul 2, 2006

Gio: did give a link in one of my previous posts on this thread, but here it is again: From site: http://128.121.137.51/articles/polyphasic.htm
The author provided refrences at the end of the article.

Raven: Be sure to tell us about your experiences!

Giovanni · Jul 2, 2006

Usually put link with articles every time you use them... Just a point of reference.

I do my best when I get 8 hours... But Its usually broken up throughout the day. Usually 4 at night, and then two 2 hour naps.

Was a lifesaver during AP Exam season.

Fuegodefuerza · Jul 2, 2006

I usually sleep 8 hours a day, as well. However, I sleep all at one time, 11-7.

f77 · Jul 2, 2006

I sleep from around 12ish to 9ish. So about 9 hours sleep, but I get tired in the afternoons, so I have a nap there.

LINKed up · Jul 2, 2006

I have to get at least 10 hours of sleep or else I am tired when I wake up.

Master Slytherin · Jul 2, 2006

If I do any less than 8hrs during the night, I get tired in the daytime. Even if I do manage to get to sleep in the daytime (which is unlikely since I hate sleeping with a light on), it doesn't have much of an effect on how alert I am.

madeyemoody · Jul 4, 2006

I average 11pm to 4:30am so about 5 1/2 a day and make up for it on weekends by sleeping in till noon. I never have needed much sleep and I have slight case's of insomnia some time

Nexus · Jul 7, 2006

Hey F77 the people you mentioned are probably like you. They too must have consumed a caffeine drink and broke their sleep cycle. People resort to Polyphasic sleep to make the best of their time. If it was harmful why would so many people try again and again?

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