Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths | Hacker News Reader

Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths

supermemo.com

50 pointsetal26 comments

Thanks, there's some good technical knowledge here, and also some FUD.

I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long-term damage. So until better evidence comes along, I believe that maintaining schedules like Uberman is possible for the right person in the right place and time, and not trivially a bad idea. For all I know there are good reasons for most people not to bother with it -- like some gene you need to have to succeed -- but we don't know yet.

As drx points out, the author strays into arguments like "abnormal means unhealthy". Another bizarre argument is "it's not optimal because you're less creative etc". Putting aside my own anecdotal evidence that sleep dep makes you more "creative", look -- if Uberman is actually sustainable and gives you X more waking hours per day, I'll decide for myself if that's outweighed by hypothetical cognitive deficits! Arguments like "lots of people have tried and failed" are also sloppy.

For another anecdote, when I did polyphasic sleep for about 2 weeks, I felt consistently at 80-90% of my creative peak. On a normal schedule, I'll vary from 40-100% throughout the day. So I don't know if I could have done my best work, but I could have done more good work.

Unfortunately kids, wife, and job didn't cooperate with staying on polyphasic sleep.

For yet another one, I just woke up from a 30 minute nap, and have been sleeping polyphasically for the past two weeks. (Did this for a month last summer, too.)

I think the reason it keeps me more creative is that it's always morning. You are never more than 6 hours from waking up. And, when I've been awake for 6 hours, I start getting tired... take 15 minutes to relax... then take a 30 minute nap, and can get back to what I was doing with renewed vigor.

(I don't think it's the sleep deprivation that is the key part of polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep with 8 hours of sleep a day - say, 4 two-hour naps - would still be polyphasic sleep. You do not have to be sleep deprived to sleep polyphasically. People assume that sleep deprivation comes with it, because when you sleep polyphasically, you need less sleep. Messed up cause and effect here.)

"I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long-term damage."

Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't cause obvious, self-evident damage at the time, and it's not always obvious to the person who's experiencing it. But it can cause serious, serious problems over time. That is essentially the effect of sleep apnea. The effects are subtle enough that an enthusiastic confirmation-biased person would easily miss them over a period of "several months or more", but they're real and they get worse over time.

As I said in another one of my comments, sleep deprivation, in my opinion, isn't actually the key part of polyphasic sleep. You can sleep 6 or 7 hours polyphasically, too, and this will increase your productivity and creativity than sleeping the same amount monophasically.

Sleeping biphasically for 7 hours or so works because that's what humans are wired for. Maybe taking two or three naps instead of one is better than taking none at all, but without the sleep dep you might as well just go biphasic. The main selling point of polyphasic is the sleep dep.

Indeed... in a short period of time where you must do X, polyphasic makes a hell of a lot of sense. As a long term strategy, I can't believe it's healthy. I'd rather not meddle with the default operation of a complex system I don't really understand, so usually I sleep until I feel like waking up - there are very few leisure activities that I'd rather do than be consistently well rested.

I have no opinion either way, since the field seems to be dominated by empirical "evidence" and cranks, but this guy's entire argument rests on this sentence:

"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.".

I.e. "I will ignore one of my opponent's arguments and instead focus on another. Since I can rebuff the other argument, my original viewpoint is true". It's a logical fallacy.

He also tends to say "X is unnatural/abnormal" => "X is unhealthy".

I wish someone did serious research into the topic without prejudice.

http://science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih3/sleep/guid...

Let me tell you, as a narcoleptic, I get hours and hours of REM sleep and virtually no deep sleep. It is not pleasant. I started using a drug that facilitated more deep sleep. All of this was monitored and my brain waves were recorded. This is anecdotal but the idea that deep sleep is not absolutely essential is ridiculous to me.

I think that rather than a simple "I will ignore X", his point was more "I will ignore X because experimental evidence indicates X is not true". This seems completely legitimate to me.

Here is a very good reply to the arcitle from Puredoxyk:

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...

Puredoxyk is one of the two (back then) college girls, who lived on the Uberman Sleep Schedule (and gave it its name) back in 2000. She is also author of the original E2 node about Uberman SS. http://everything2.com/node/892542

There is great discussion on the Google Polyphasic Group about this [Dr. Wozniak's] article: http://groups.google.com/group/polyphasic/browse_thread/thre...

Here is my quick summary:

1. There is not enough scientific data to backup either side (for/against polyphasic);

2. Dr. Wozniak has his own agenda - he advocates so called "free-running sleep";

3. Some of the "facts" [mentioned in Dr. Wonziak's article] are in contradiction with experiences of people who tried polyphasic sleep, like Puredoxyk ( http://www.puredoxyk.com ) or Steve Pavlina ( http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/ )

I was going to post Puredoxyk's rebuttal here too, but noprocrast kicked in. Thanks.

The main weakness in Wozniak's argument/rant is that he assumes all people work the same way. For most people, monophasic or biphasic sleep is most comfortable, and normal human biology seems to back that up.

But Puredoxyk says she has always had spectacular sleep disorders, and that prompted her to try Uberman originally. I doubt her brain chemistry follows the usual biphasic pattern, so it makes sense that frequent, regularly timed naps would work better for her than a forced monophasic schedule.

Steve Pavlina seems to have incredible self-control.

Pavlina's ex-wife and business partner is a telephone psychic. Pavlina has extensive blog posts in which he takes her occupation seriously. He's a garden variety crank, frankly.

When looking into this, I've found a lot of people blogging about trying to do this. Usually they talk about how great it and then quietly drop it.

Sleep is weird like that. I've read a lot of articles about people trying modafinil and similar substances in order to sleep less and be more alert and, again, most who blog about it (or even write articles for popular publications) tail off or give up for extremely vague "It was great but it's not going to work for me" type reasons.

Wow, I like this site. Some of the author's analysis seem slightly off to me, but there's a heck of lot of anecdotes and data and quotes. A heck of a lot of anecdotes, data, and quotes makes for good reading.

I particularly liked the part about the sleep habits about the various genius creative people. Cntrl+F "da vinci" to start on that section of the article.

Personally, my best sleeping pattern so far has been a 1-4 hour nap and 4-7 hours of sleep at night. I want to see how low I can go while getting at least a few hours of high level performance and able to function the rest of the day. I don't actually need full speed productivity all of the day and I even prefer cleaning and organizing while I'm a little tired, I get into sort of a zen of it. Anyone else have thoughts on how low you can go while functioning?

Yep, it's a bit of a rant, but an interesting one. Wozniak's an interesting person; I hope you've checked out Supermemo and its open-source counterpart, Mnemosyne.

I've been taking a 20-45 minute nap in the afternoon for close to a year now. I think it was Dustin Curtis's article on polyphasic sleep that prompted me, and I went with the "siesta" schedule because it seemed the most sustainable -- a lot of people do live that way, and getting work done in the mid-afternoon is hopeless for me anyway.

Ever since high school stop forever, I been sleeping whenever I want, without the use of an alarm clock.

I find that I naturally wake up at 9 PM on a normal day. Sometime, I only sleep 3 or 4 hours a night. However, that is compensated by another 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

But the best thing is that I am no longer sleep tortured by the school system.

What do you do for a living?

I am a "freelancer" with only one client and with an income that doesn't actually make me a living. I still live with my parents. It's only a month since the end of high school though.

I aspire to become an entrepreneur and an independent person and is trying to work toward that goal.

I do, however, predict an early death if I am forced to work with a rigid schedule, especially if I have to drive a car to work everyday.

A "rigid" schedule might be necessary to communicate with your clients.

Wasnt there a thing on here a few months ago about a "guy and a girl" who were going to attempt polyphasic and blog as they do it? Would like to find that and see how it went.

They were very tired. Then they stopped. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225122

The best part is the Comic Relief section. Read that, and you'll know what to expect every time you read a blogger experimenting with polyphasic sleep.

The phrase "Facts and Myths" needs to die a messy painful death. It's the fodder of sex education brochures and corporate training camps.

Any topic away from the main stream should avoid the nasty tactic of labeling different opinions "myths". Wait till your stupid idea is endorse by every sheep-like general practitioner in North America - then you can get away with taring your opponents that way.

"Facts and Myths concerning why 'supermemo.com' is a font of mis-information..." See?

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