Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme | Hacker News Reader

Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

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Having recently experienced raising an infant, let me tell you, getting all my sleep in <2 hour chunks is HORRIBLE, even if I'm getting a pretty reasonable total amount of sleep.

I was getting what this article suggests would be a viable polyphasic sleep schedule (total of 8 hours per 24 hour period, in chunks of 1-2 hours throughout the day and night whenever the baby slept), but I started hallucinating, got deeply depressed, and felt like I was losing touch with reality. All the symptoms vanished as soon as I started getting longer chunks of sleep at night.

Although I don't have any belief in polyphasic sleep being true or not unless you were getting that sleep in extremely regular intervals - that is to say with exactly the same amount of time between each interval and with the time you slept during each sleep period also rigorously timed what you had would not be a viable polyphasic sleep schedule.

Since the polyphasic idea is to decrease the actual amount slept getting 8 hours also is going against the whole purpose of doing it.

I've raised two children, one of them with real sleep irregularities, and neither time did I have anything resembling what the adherents of polyphasic sleep would consider a reasonable schedule.

Oh man, raising an infant and sleep deprivation hit me too. For about a week, I had to just chart if I was awake or not and just sleep when the chart said to sleep...

Other than the couple of times where I ended up not sleeping for 24 hours, I thought the wake up/eat/sleep cycles around 2 hours were ok, but 3 hours was torture, the wakeup would always happen in the middle of deep sleep and really mess things up. Once it got over four hours, it all seemed fineish. Not a lot of memory retention from that period though. Pretty happy we had a good sleeper or I would have been wrecked.

> getting all my sleep in <2 hour chunks is HORRIBLE

I can sympathise with this. My son spent about 18 months (from 4 months old onwards) only sleeping 45 -50 minutes at a time, before waking up crying. It felt like every aspect of our lives at that point was outside of our control and any attempt to organise ourselves or to co-ordinate outside assistance (in the form of family, friends, medical intervention) was an ordeal beyond our mental capabilities.

Things improved just before his 2nd birthday. He went from 45 minute sleep to 6 hour sleep in the course of two days.

> He went from 45 minute sleep to 6 hour sleep in the course of two days.

That must have been the happiest days of your life!

> That must have been the happiest days of your life!

We woke up and thought he had died. 10 minutes later everything was awesome.

I admit, I misinterpreted the sentence in the first read and was pretty shocked.

If you swap the conclusions of the two sentences it is pretty shocking indeed.

We had the same thought after the first night when my daughter slept through the night. We woke up at around 6AM thinking: "She's dead... She'll be just as dead in another hour, so let's get another hour of sleep."

This is verbatim what I told my wife and mother when my son slept 3 times its normal sleep length for the first time.

It took him 3 years to have a complete night.

Now a teenager, it takes me 20 minutes to drag him out ofbhis bed at 10 in the morning.

Had that exact same experience.

I’ll never forget that morning. Waking up with the sun up and immediately thinking the worst, then exuberant joy when figuring out he was fine, just sleeping well for the first time ever.

That is one reason, why I tell people raising a child is a whole day job. However, often people will tell me something like: "Oh it cannot be that bad!" or "Nah, it's more like you can sleep 3-4h."

Well, I warned them.

I think every parent relates to that at various degrees.

To future parents: congratulations. Also, take every possible opportunity to sleep. When baby sleeps, you sleep.

What I read, real polyphasic sleep is extremely sensitive to delays — if you go to sleep 10 mins late or early that could already break the rhythm. The more sleep phases your polyphasic sleep has, the more important this gets.

I can't really imagine one would be able to keep that schedule accurately with an infant in the house.

Yea, I experienced that too with a new kid. I think I aged 5 years in that one year.

Everybody's situation is different but in our case we did sleep training around 4 months and we had whole night sleep from then on - with a few minor regressions and a bit more training.

My wife found letting the baby cry out very difficult so I did have to be quite firm about it...

But my daughter is 8 now and doesn't seem the worse for it ... As far as I can tell.

Edit: only mentioning this in case anyone is in despair and wants to try something different.

Sleep training, so that's what they call it now.

My mom tells me it was standard practice back when I was born, they used to say it was good for their lungs as well, but she couldn't do it either.

They will eventually shut down in self-defense to escape the terror of being abandoned by their parents.

All I can say is it doesn't sound like a very good idea to me, no matter how convenient.

We've attempted this with our daughter several times from 6 to almost 10 months now.

Just can't do it, it feels wrong. Obviously not science-based, but we haven't been able to do it for more than a few days at a time.

We used the methods in this book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345497791/donhosek (there's a non-twin version as well) with good results. We didn't just let the kids cry it out, and we had kids sleeping through the night by three months and a regular sleep schedule at four months. It's worth noting that most young kids are sleep deprived and making sure that they get enough sleep makes a big difference in their overall behavior.

It's also worth noting with kids that once you figure out how to deal with them, they enter a new developmental phase and all the rules change.

I used the non-twin version, and recommend it to all my friends when they become parents. It changed our lives. Having a well-rested child makes a world of difference.

That's awesome.

What sorts of techniques did you try? Sort of a gradual letting them soothe themselves for longer and longer periods of time?

Yeah, I respect other people's decisions in this kind of subjects because not enough is known to be very sure.

But my feeling is that if nature makes babies cry (and do so in such a way that arises feelings of urgency, as every parent will know from experience) it's because it wants us to attend to them.

Of course, sometimes overriding nature's defaults can be a good idea, especially if one knows what they're doing. But it's not the case, so I'd rather err on the side of caution.

I think "convenient" may be a mild understatement. Many parents are enduring serious mental health issues because of their inability to sleep. I should say that was not our case.

> They will eventually shut down in self-defense to escape the terror of being abandoned by their parents

Perhaps. I don't think we actually know what's going on in a baby's mind. Children appear to be amazingly resilient and also quite logical.

But as with all such advice you have to respect your own instincts as a parent and take cognizance of what the child's temperament is like. It's always different.

I have two children, I get it. But no one ever promised it was going to be easy.

Lack of sleep wouldn't be as big of a problem if we didn't force parents to work as well as raising children. Children are our future, messing them up to fit our messed up society is not a long term solution.

I agree about trusting your instincts, but that's not what I'm seeing. When a child cries the typical parental instinct would be to hold them.

Nothing about this is convenient. Letting a baby cry and not providing comfort is emotionally shattering. Spending hours trying get a baby to sleep without abandoning them is exhausting. Caring for a sleep deprived baby is exhausting, physically and emotionally. Doing any of this without having enough sleep yourself makes it 10x worse.

The fact is, parents and babies both need to sleep to be healthy and happy. Most parents are trying to achieve that, and have to try a bunch of things before they figure out what works for their situation. Try not to judge.

How much crying without being tended to do you think is terrifying?

Most sleep training I have seen says to let them cry for up to 15 minutes before getting them.

We usually let ours cry for up to 5 minutes before picking her up. She would rarely cry for more than a minute or two before just falling asleep.

My 2yr old cries/screams so loud i'm starting to get hearing issues. And can do so for 1 whole hour until i give up first.

We had all kind of theories too, up to the moment we said fuck it and took our son with us into our bed.

We slept, oh sweet sleep. Zero guilt.

The second one was sleeping in his bed 3 seconds after putting him in. He still does at 14 yo.

Might be that your sleep was just short of a single cycle (1~2 hours usually) which, from what I understand, could feel the same as no sleep at all. Sleeping short chunks is probably only viable if you can be sure to fully complete a cycle every time.

You probably weren't getting much "good" sleep time. I know the anxiety of anticipating when the next wake up is going to be, it's like trying to sleep with one eye open.

I've heard more than one woman observe something to the effect of: "oh, so this is why I was able to party 48 hours straight in college without sleep!"

I tried polyphasic sleep a month for fun, and this was my experience as well: feeling a bit out of touch with reality.

I've never done drugs, alcohol or tobacco, but I've been a messy sleeper most of my life. Night owl as long as I could get away with it, pulling all-nighters, sleeping a whole day, staying awake for a few days to set a personal record, etc. Even for me, polyphasic sleep was too disorienting, as if I wasn't fully awake when awake, and not fully asleep when asleep.

One unintended consequence of Covid19 related lockdown/work from home has been less commute and more hours to sleep.

This is the most regular/high quality sleep i've had in years and I'm only now seeing how badly my normal sleep habits have been effecting me. Experimenting with any non-monophasic sleep pattern sounds exhausting and I'm afraid could have serious health impacts...would love to see the science/literature evolve to a point of consensus though.

> Experimenting with any non-monophasic sleep pattern sounds exhausting and I'm afraid could have serious health impacts

I assume you speak for yourself. Biphasic sleep is not an abnormal occurrence and actually quite embedded in some non-anglo cultures (e.g. late afternoon opening times). Even when occurring naturally, it isn't extravagant to be aware of provisions so that nap time doesn't cause a naturally avoidable interference.[1]

[1]: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Best_time_for_napping

I would guess that biphasic sleep was killed by the common consumption of stimulant drugs like tea or coffee in western culture.

I would guess electric lights.

That doesn't make sense to me, siesta wastes precious daylight. If anything, the availability of light at night should have promoted daytime sleep, if there was any influence.

Growing up somewhere with a Mediterranean climate that has hot summers, I’ve always assumed it was to sleep through the heat before a/c was invented.

There is almost certainly something to this. Sun exposure is dangerous.

How can people sleep during the hottest part of the day? I've never been able to manage that.

You can doze off. And falling asleep is a skill you can train.

(I can nap in hotter and brighter conditions during the day than I can tolerate at night.)

Lights help extend the evening. Such that you sort of barrel through a time that would make you tired by just cranking up the light.

That's an interesting guess -- I had read that biphasic sleep was common in the West prior to the industrial revolution, when work for long days away from home was common, and light began to be more available at night.

Maybe the right kind of historian is around to answer: Was biphasic sleep also the norm in preindustral societies that had tea or coffee cultures relatively early?

Depends which kind of biphasic you’re talking about.

Afternoon naps were probably killed by stimulants. But the “first” and “second” sleep historically common were probably killed off by the electric light.

> I assume you speak for yourself. Biphasic sleep is not an abnormal occurrence and actually quite embedded in some non-anglo cultures

I think you misunderstood the parent, and your reaction seems a bit confrontational. Surely the parent wasn't suggesting that a good night's sleep plus an afternoon nap "sounds exhausting" and "could have serious health impacts". They were talking about patterns that do not include a good night's sleep.

Ah, that's an understandable interpretation, but my response was not meant to be unnecessarily confrontational. If anything, the closing sentence was an admission that, while we seem wired to sleep mono or biphasically and maintain good health, a poorly executed second sleep block had the potential to compromise it, and that there were provisions that in my judgment were worth knowing.

Biphasic and triphasic are actually pretty normal, historically. Modern humans go to bed super late compared to our pre-electricity brethren; most people the world over would go to bed super early and have a “first” and “second” sleep, plus maybe an afternoon nap.

You’ll notice this effect if you go camping. The moment the sun goes down you’ll crash much sooner than you would at home, and you might find yourself fully awake at 2am or so.

> Biphasic and triphasic are actually pretty normal, historically.

Is there evidence of this? I'm not doubting - I think I've seen this suggested before. I just don't know how people figured this out?

Oh, there’s tons of evidence for this, largely in the writings of pre-electricity figures who clearly treated the subject as common knowledge. Advice manuals from the time even indicate that this was the best time for couples to conceive.

Modern tribes without access to continuous light actually still sleep like this too, which is fascinating.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783

Maybe check the references in this article?

https://theconversation.com/did-we-used-to-have-two-sleeps-r...

Anecdotally I remember reading that in Britain it used to be more common for some to wake up in the middle of the night and do light reading, but you’ll probably want to do some more research as I don’t recall the source.

Biphasic sleep is pretty common in Asian cultures. An afternoon nap is common in pre-schools and elementary schools, less common but still not non-existent in higher education and the workplace.

Compare also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta

Midnight used to be the middle of the night, hence the name. Now it's when you think "Oh, I'll just check twitter one more time"

Try telling a modern person you go to bed at 8 and wake up 4. They'll look at you like you're insane.

Speak for yourself. I try and sleep by 10 every night, unless I'm socialising, then get up at 6am.

That’s still far from the middle of the night for you.

I have adopted this type of strategy, though I've had to adjust it for city life.

Because of round-the-clock lights, I do not get the same signals from the sun and the darkness as before.

So I stay up as long as I will until I feel tired. Then, I sleep for as long as I want to until I want to get up.

If I only want to take a nap, I lie down on the carpet without taking my clothes off. If I want to sleep longer, I go to bed.

This is similar to when I am outdoors. If I only want to take a nap, I just lie down wherever, as long as it's out of the way. If I want to sleep longer, I put everything away, get in my sleeping bag or blanket, etc.

The way I feel now compared to how I felt when I was working office jobs, coming in at the same time every day, working the same hours, and then going home, and having to force myself to sleep in order to get up in the morning, is night and day. I feel fully rested, clear-minded, like I've run a full defrag, charged my battery to 100%.

This is despite the office work being in my 20s, and me now being in late 30s.

I can take a nap if I feel tired. Usually in the afternoon, which would have been impossible when in the office.

I maintained a pseudo-polyphasic schedule for two years during high school. I think it went like this:

2:00 or 3:00 AM - 6:00 AM (three to four hours)

6:20 AM - 7:20 AM transit (one hour)

At least three 10- to 20-minute naps throughout the school day. I negotiated with my teachers to make this acceptable. One pre-lunch nap, one around lunch hours, and one after.

2:20 PM - 3:20 PM transit (one hour)

8:30 PM - 9:30 PM transit or at home (one hour)

I was dual-enrolling at the local college at the time for night classes. I was productive, but it was awful, and I wouldn't recommend it. It became a (benign) running joke at my school that I was more likely to be asleep than awake.

I got 7-8 hours of sleep, but it's nothing compared to sleeping like normal. Any disruption to my schedule was absolutely fatal for my productivity.

What made you do this? Was it to gain an academic advantage?

I don’t mean to sound judgmental; I honestly find this fascinating.

I had to transit anyways, and I found it hard to work in transit. In hindsight, I had terrible sleeping habits, and eventually, it forced me to start taking naps wherever I could. A schedule materialized organically and became the norm when I gained the trust of my instructors.

And yeah, it was for a competitive advantage. Not within my school, but for college. I didn't understand how college or scholarships worked until my 10th year, which meant that I had to become competitive much quicker than other applicants.

On a side note, the worst periods were phasing in-and-out of schedule during winter and summer break (I worked a 9-to-5 on breaks), which I did three or four times.

You really put yourself through a wringer at a tender age. Not to sound flippant, but I doubt many people would be capable of that. Congratulations on surviving what you put yourself through. I hope your habits are more ordinary these days.

I can't make any recommendations (because it's anecdotal) but I did have some good experience with biphasic sleep when studying mathematics for the university exams. Roughly the schedule was:

- Wake up at around 9 am, study till around 3 pm.

- Sleep till around 7 pm.

- Study some more, till 2-3 am.

- Sleep again.

I think there is something about the sleep that organizes your thoughts and therefore it might very beneficial to sleep more often (but not necessarily less) if you are either learning something very quickly or trying to solve a difficult mental problem.

I thought that the recomendation was to sleep REM cycles multiples (45-60min)

I was on a polyphasic sleep schedule for two weeks when I was in high school. I had an econ class where the teacher didn't mind if I fell asleep. It worked fairly well for about two weeks. Towards the end, I was very sleep deprived, but I didn't realize it: I had forgotten what it felt like to be fully rested.

While the increased hours in a day we're incredible, mentally intensive tasks were difficult. Homework was easy, but working through AMC practice questions did not go as well.

It's a clear quantity vs quality trade-off.

I stopped the experiment early when I started having trouble falling asleep in that econ class.

Also, I felt perpetual in this somewhat giddy state: that feeling when you just catch a second wind and everything seems funny. Mild delirium. In retrospect, it seems like hypomania.

I could see a case for polyphasic sleep for a few weeks at a time if you're in a crunch to do a lot of work that doesn't require too much thinking. Recharge for a week and repeat if necessary. Otherwise, it's a really, really bad idea.

Can dang change the title. The actual title is "Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme." Moreover, the article never claims that polyphasic sleep is unsustainable, just that many people who tried it abandon it due to social pressure.

Having tried doing a polyphasic sleep cycle around four years ago, the one thing that I really missed was the clear delineation between days. On a normal sleep schedule, you wrap up your day with an evening routine and begin the next day with another routine. Each day is a single discrete unit you can look back on and remember easily. On a polyphasic schedule each day blends into the next. It’s like one long neverending day. You can’t really do most normal social activities because you need to adhere to a strict napping schedule. At first it’s cool to be awake at 3am when the rest of your world is asleep. But eventually it’s just a pain to not be able to go to stores or the gym or whatever until after your next nap. Looking back, it’s harder to remember any specific details about the experience. I know I did it to get a ton of work done on a project I was deep into at the time, but outside of the late nights and extreme tiredness from the beginning of it, I can’t remember much. The value of a long night’s rest for solidifying memories, at least anecdotally for me, can’t be understated. Other things like scheduling meals, managing sunlight and your obligations to others when you need to sleep, require a bit of forethought. Life’s just much easier on a “normal” sleep schedule. Polyphasic will drive you nuts.

Love the insight about the days blending together.

I know there's lots of science supporting what you say about sleep being essential for consolidating memory.

Years ago I tried this, after having read a lot about it, trying multiple times, hard, as I was determined to get more done on things that were important to me. I can be very self-disciplined and almost fell asleep dropping to the floor while standing at one point. For a while I thought it helped me get more done. Today I have health problems (CFS), and these attempts at the polyphasic or "uberman" sleep cycle (~28 min of sleep per 4-hour period) is one of the two leading possible causes I think of (don't bother asking me the other one).

Out of general experiences and lessons learned over the years I have tried to write things at my simple, hopefully-skimmable web site to hopefully help someone else avoid learning some things the hard way: http://lukecall.net . (Anyway, I get things off my chest there.)

ps: prior HN discussions (which I have not reviewed): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=polyphasic+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fne...

I think alternative sleep schedules are like alternative medicine. If they were actually feasible and beneficial, they would be commonplace, and even recommended. Especially considering how often posts like this come up here, there is obviously a high level of interest.

I think what normally happens is people see the unbelievable claim of "6 20-minute naps" and think "wow that's incredible." Then they try it, fail horribly and never try a less extreme schedule. In my experience, Uberman requires a superhuman constitution, but some of the less-extreme schedules are perfectly viable.

I figured social distancing would be a great opportunity to give some polyphasic sleep schedules a try. I started with Uberman (6x20-minute naps), but that was awful. It was just a long slow crash, and it was totally unsustainable.

I recovered my lost sleep and then started Everyman 2 (4.5 hours at night + 2x20-minute naps) at the start of May, and I've really been enjoying it. I feel just as awake as I did before, but I'm waking up at 3:30am now. Only time will tell if my 2pm nap survives the end of social distancing, but for the moment it's going great.

Under normal circumstances, the failure of my first attempt would have totally ended the experiment, because I can't normally afford to tamper with my sleep for months on end ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But once I swallowed my pride and set some reasonable goals, I managed to have a really good experience with the whole thing. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot if you're curious, with the caveat that anyone interested should start with a moderate plan like Everyman 2 rather than gambling on one of the extreme schedules.

https://polyphasic.net/ is a good resource for prospective polyphasic sleepers.

I attempted uberman on two separate occasions and had to stop in fear that lack of sleep would permanently damage my brain. I was able to hit rem every nap after 2-3 weeks but never recovered on sleep within the 30 day transition period. I'm pretty sure it is because it is much easier if you are a vegetarian since eating meat is so heavy and messes with your sleep.

It was a neat experience though. I had the most vivid lucid dreams, flying and doing whatever I could imagine. The rem naps would seemingly last 90 minutes even though my alarm would wake me after 20. The days meshed together and felt surreal. I enjoyed it but I feel like I'd have to give up meat to realistically achieve uberman.

Tried it as well with similar experience. Concluded that it sort of works but I didn't feel my concentration was superior on it. Socially it's terrible. If you miss your scheduled 20 minute nap every four hours it's devastating.

Yeah, it was always weird gaming with friends and then being like "be back in 20..."

I'd always return with them asking how the nap was and I'd always say it wasn't enough...haha

I also tried uberman some years ago, I don't remember how many days I lasted but I'd guess between 5 and 10. It was amazing that I was able to fall asleep, have a dream and wake up before an alarm, and feel refreshed. But still, I was severely sleep-deprived, I was starting to hallucinate, and I gave up. I was sensing some presence in the room, I knew it wasn't real, but I got scared as shit and decided to fall asleep.

In hindsight, that was stupid as hell. The shit kids read on the internet.

Haha, yeah 10 days is when it is the hardest, actually, and it gets slightly easier once the body adjusts after that. But hallucinating sounds no good!

Isn't human sleep naturally biphasic rather than monophasic? https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shi...

I've thought for at least 15 years that my natural sleep pattern was 3AM->8AM with another "nap" from PM6->9PM. But this COV19 work from home thing, and my weekend sleeping patterns for a few years now, has been PM3-6PM.

So, whether this reflects some deep sleep dysfunction or what, I don't know. What I do know is that i'm a lot more productive/etc when I sleep when I feel tired.

Given how hot it gets in TX I don't really mind missing the 3-4 hours during the hottest part of the day.

More than that, hunter gatherers pretty much just sleep whenever they want. It's only since the shift towards pastoralism and then agriculture that necessitated a regular sleep/wake cycle.

If you count an early afternoon nap as the second phase, then yes. Otherwise, no. The whole medieval "second sleep" thing was probably a cultural thing and not a biological thing and it seems to have been limited to Europe during that time period.

Jared Diamond in "The World Until Yesterday" says that when he was on expeditions with natives in New Guinea, they would all go to sleep when the sun went down (near the equator so usually pretty close to 7pm), then wake up around midnight and chat for an hour or two around the fire, before going back to sleep again and waking up at sunrise (again around 5 or 6).

That's 10 hours of sleep at night? Or are you being euphemistically and are you including time spent on sex?

7-12 (5 hours sleep) 12-2 (2 hours chatting around fire) 2-5 (3 hours sleep)

How are you doing the math here? I count 8 hours of sleep.

I'd look at studies like [0], which indicate that the answer is "no". When given no indication of time, humans tend towards a ~24h sleep period.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1330995/

I tried polyphasic sleep and exactly what the text said, I stopped because social pressure of a monophasic world. It worked, but some other things like meeting friends more than four hours was more important for me. So, I read three screen sites of text with only one argument: Polyphasic animals are sleeping longer.

I don't think thats a really good argument compared with reports from people that are doing polyphasic sleep for months.

Used to work on a cement tugboat, 12 hour days 28 days a time. Unfortunately, it wasn't 12 on 12 off, it was 6 x 6 x 6 x 6. Meaning you could rarely get more than 4.5 hours of sleep at one time for the whole hitch. Depending on if the Captain had it out for you or what your route demanded, your sleep schedule could be even more irregular.

It felt unsustainable to me. You'd come off the boat a zombie, and in just 12 days of drinking and disrupted sleep later, you'd get to do it again.

A tugboat made out of cement? A tugboat that delivers cement?

Yeah a tug and barge that hauls around cement.

Why couldn't you just work 12 hour shifts instead of 6 hour ones? Honestly, 6 hours on, 6 off sounds like complete hell to me.

Yeah why anything? Many of the policies on the boat seemed solely to punish the employee. Some boats had it 12 x 12, some boats even had 4 x 8 x 4 x 8, which is just a normal 8 hour day. But not my boat.

I lasted less than a year, it was also hell to me.

It sounds like a variation on a six-hour shift system. Any seagoing vessel with a crew complement of 2 or more sailors is going to try to have one portion of the crew at work at all times. Skimming [1] I didn't see a 6-on/6-off system, but I believe, the skipper has the last word even when asleep.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchkeeping#Six_Hour_Shift

I think the article points out a useful fallacy: that polyphasic sleep means you can get away with less sleep. We should probably move away from trying to get less sleep, and move toward getting better sleep. This may reduce our waking hours, but would make those hours more productive. Having 18 hours a day available isn't much help if you're a tired confused angry mess.

> Polyphasic sleep purportedly had famous practitioners such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Edison, but there is scant evidence to prove such claims. Buckminster Fuller appears to be one of the first documented polyphasic sleepers

Roger Ekirch did some work around historical accounts of sleep and found "the second sleep" referred to biphasic sleep, and that this was common and well known.

https://www.history.vt.edu/Ekirch/sleepcommentary.html

And some reporting of his work:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shi...

> isn't much help if you're a tired confused angry mess.

Depends. I can go through a lot of email like this.

My experience agrees that sleeping less through alternative sleep patterns is possible. However, the benefits of sleeping less are spurious: While I can improve motivation and concentration in my observation, work results when inspected later do not agree, at least for the concentration. It is easier to get stuff done, but the overall quality of work and thought is diminished. I would equate the state to being intoxicated: Certain inhibitions to motivation are removed, but so is a part of your intelligence and concentration as well as the ability for self-observation and self-judgement. Therefore I would suppose that many who report improvements while sleep-deprived are just inadvertently fooling themselves. However, all this is just based on my observation, ymmv.

Good point! I actually mention Ekirch in a separate post. I'd call what he's talking about "biphasic," because people in that time slept in two phases. I personally prefer biphasic to involve an afternoon nap.

https://trickle.app/drip/23814-sleep-of-pre-industrial-commu...

Ever since I read Why We Sleep, I've been extremely reticent to go anywhere near sleep reduction. We don't know much about the lifetime-long-term effects of this type of sleep reduction, but what we do know about sleep deprivation in general puts the bar quite high for demonstrating this won't really mess you up if extended out to interesting timescales.

For any content marketers out there reading this:

If you want your SEO’ed content to get upvoted on HN it must be about a controversial approach to nutrition, wellness, mental health, or exercise.

Ideally, your thesis will be that the approach you’re writing about is a terrible idea and doomed to fail. Be prepared for the “well actually” from anyone who has had even moderate fleeting success. If possible, get a small detail slightly wrong so commenters will rush to correct you.

I am a long-term polyphasic sleeper. I've just always been this way. I have been told stories that as an infant I drove my family nuts with my lack of a need to sleep.

Now, I am 43 (in a few days), and polyphasic sleep has become a bit harder on me. Now, I am averaging between 2.5-3.5 hours each day but the real issue is if I get woken up. Example: a smoke detector goes off in the middle of the night. I can't go back to sleep because I will oversleep now. I am somewhat foggy for several hours after something like this.

Also, the opposite has been happening. I am on HRT and taking estrogen injections. On the day of my injection until about 2 days after I can not sleep. My body just won't allow it. Estrogen dominance has taken over. I am routinely up for 42-46 hours before my body gives in and demands sleep. I sleep 2-3 hours and I am awake. Not feeling replenished as I should and sometimes I feel like I need to be left alone for a long period of time so I don't inadvertently snap at my wife or children.

I'm happy to talk about whatever, AMA.

wow. maybe there are basic bio differences, and one shouldn't try to force oneself into this pattern... (WRT my comment elsewhere here.)

I sleep about 2 hours (say 2:30am - 4:30am) and I want a 1 hour nap when my kids go down for a nap. It's not a standard pattern that you might read about, IIRC.

I fully agree that common sense and biology would certainly suggest that trying to stick to a regimented schedule of very specific sleep in small segments for a total of far below 8 hours is probably not as healthy as just getting a good nights sleep regularly.

That said the content of this piece doesn’t actually make any meaningful, substantiated argument to that effect. It kind of just lightly suggests that it’s probably not healthy and that social demands ruin the viability of polyphasic sleep anyways.

Everyone is different and I don’t think 8 hours is perfect but I would be interested to see a data-driven analysis of sleep patterns/length and long-term effects.

I have serious doubts that anyone getting less than 4 hours a sleep for a long period of time (weeks or more) is going to be firing on all cylinders, no matter the creative schedule they construct around it. But I’d be open to seeing meaningful data about it.

Everyman sleep schedule is much more sustainable than the uberman schedule.

It basically involves doing 3 hour core sleep and three roughly equidistant 25 minute naps. It's fairly easy to move the naps around as needed, once you're used to this.

There's also a variant of sleeping 4.5 hours, and then having two 25 minute naps.

The idea here is that each 25 minutes nap is essentially "replacing" the ~1.5 hour sleep you're giving up. There's roughly 70-110 minutes per sleep cycle, you're giving up a normal sleep cycle and then making up for it with a power nap. Your body is forced to get more efficient on grabbing the necessary deep sleep during the core sleep period.

It's supposed to take about 1 month to adapt.

I personally did this schedule for 10 days straight, without even using an alarm clock. But I started getting sick so I stopped.

Did you become sick from adapting to the new sleep schedule or was it just a coincidence?

I mean, my immune system was down due to lack of sleep. I'd have to be healthier or luckier to make it through the adaptation period without getting sick perhaps.

I am not convinced you can force your body to get more efficient at sleeping.

Not sure about entering deep sleep more quickly, but you definitely get faster at falling asleep when you make napping a habit.

I would highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker to get academic insight to latest research related to sleep and basic understanding what sleep is. There is a good touch on how other species sleep; and why having a nap during a day is beneficial in improving intellectual and physical capacities!

Sleep health benefits are definitely underrated in modern society..

Based on my understanding of the topic I sympathise the research narrative to move to polyphasic sleep cycle to COPE with sleep disorders I do not believe it is adequate sleeping routine to any healthy individual and doing so can be harmful to health!

And from personal note as a parent raising second infant I can confirm that having segmented night sleep over long periods of time is most de-humanizing experience with real mental threads.

I did tried my best to keep to the dymaxion schedule (thirty minute nap every six hours) in college for about two months for a blogging assignment. The first two weeks were pretty terrible but it got better after that. I can confirm what was written in the article, that oversleeping or missing one of those naps would be disastrous for continuing to keep the schedule. On a positive note, I was more productive during that term than I ever had been before. I was working out, cooking my own meals, and finished all of my assignments long before they were due.

I wonder if that productivity effect is part of what enabled Fuller's gift of gab. I noticed that when I really need to bust through a lot of outward-facing sensory or communicative tasks, a sleep deficit is very helpful. For example I posted a personal-record number of blog posts while working on little sleep--to the point that some blog readers emailed me and asked how I did it. I found it hard to recommend the procedure because there were big tradeoffs in other ways, like a deep sense of inner resilience and confidence that only returned in strength when I was rested up again.

Steve Pavlina did a series of experiments on this: https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

Googling it I was surprised to find that he did it 15 years ago. Times go by fast...

This "article" doesn't actually have any substantive evidence for the claim in the title.

I did a month of polyphasic sleep about 15 years ago. It's doable and was an interesting experiment but is not sustainable.

Mentally I felt 80-90%. I couldn't concentrate or think as well. I felt cold all the time as if my hormones were out of wack.

Towards the end of the month I was very sleep deprived. I would fall asleep and go into REM almost instantly. I slept through alarms, something I otherwise never do. A few times I shut the alarm off and went back to sleep with no memory of doing so.

An interesting side effect was that after going back to a normal schedule I needed less sleep. For months afterwards I only slept 7-7.5h a night instead of 8h.

Is there any research done on either (1) the net productivity difference between extreme polysleep (e.g. Uberman) or (2) the long-term health effects of sustained extreme polysleep?

Also, it seems like Uberman gives you an increase in available time at the cost of a significant amount of cognitive ability. If you subscribe to the Deep Work hypothesis (which I do), such a trade is extremely undesirable, even ignoring any potential health issues.

I'll echo the same sentiment as many others in this thread: tried polyphasic sleep in college (2 hour block at night and 3-4 20 min naps during day) and found it to be horrible. Any inconsistencies in my schedule and I was a wreck. Was _slightly_ better than just getting the 2 hour block like I had originally been doing, but wasn't anything like getting a healthy 6-8 hours.

I tried this in college. I was doing 6 hours sleep per day (3 hours and 2 90 min segments with 6 hours awake time between them) Worked great while taking 12 credit hours over summer semester. But you end up being up when everyone else is asleep and sleeping when others are awake. Not great for social life but I did get 4.0 that semester.

This website(trickle.app) looks really interesting. Can anyone who weigh in on the overall quality of the content?

20 minute naps? That seems like barely enough time to lose consciousness let alone get any kind of REM sleep.

20 minute power naps are awesome if you can get the timing right. I usually use an alarm, because if I nap much longer than 20 minutes then coming out of deep sleep leaves me feeling super disoriented.

20 minute power naps are a lifesaver for me. If I only got around <= 5-6 hours sleep the night before, getting a solid 20 minutes in in the afternoon is enough to make me feel alert and awake until my regular bedtime. Anything over 25 minutes and I feel groggy and lethargic until the next day. Do not go beyond 20-25 minutes in one nap.

It’s unsustainable but you don’t need to sustain it forever, you only sustain it during a time of your life where it can have the most impact, then phase it out when you get diminishing returns.

Agreed it can be effective short term. But you'll feel the effects of sleep deprivation over time and that comes with certain health risks.

I've tried this a few times - mostly in my twenties.

Back then I generally only slept 4-6 hours per night and when I wasn't trying to set a schedule, my sleep schedule would shift at least an hour a day. I was also drinking quite often and sometimes would stay awake for 24 - 36 hours at a time (coffee and booze only). All that is to say my sleep schedule in my twenties was a roller-coaster.

I got lots of work done. I got lots of partying in. Sometimes (many times) I mixed the two.

I say all that to say that I had a lot of freedom to play with my sleep schedules, and I tried quite a few.

I was able to do the two hours of sleep with four hours awake schedule for 2-3 weeks at a time and it generally worked pretty well as long as I adhered strictly. Getting less sleep than that at a time didn't feel right at all. If I pushed either the awake or sleep time, my body would automatically try to escape the schedule and it would be hard for me to get it back. The hardest part was fitting things into 4-hour blocks. If it was a stretch with nothing but work - like during some nasty winter weather - then it was easy, but as it's been said elsewhere, that gets hard to do when you have a social life.

When my son was born, I decided to finally lock in my sleep schedule - for the first time since I was a teenager. I was sleeping from 4am until noon, which allowed me to care for my son at night while my wife slept. This was key to a happy marriage, by the way. We were both getting 6-8 hours of uninterruped sleep a night with a newborn!

Once he was sleeping through the night (4-months-old, sleeping 12 hours a night!), I shifted to a "normal" schedule of 11pm-7am. While switching, I became so completely stuck into a 2x4-hour sleep schedule that it took about 3 weeks for me to get past and shift my sleep. It seems my body got so used to 7-8 full hour stretches, that it fought me from changing it. I suddenly understood why people have such a hard time with sleep! In my 40+ years of life, that was the hardest sleep schedule change I've ever made!

These days I do everything I can to get 7-8 hours and because of my boy I try to make sure that sleep is at night. I miss my revolving sleep schedule. I miss working at night. But my memory is far better. My caffeine intake is almost non-existent except for pleasure. My relationship with my wife is _probably_ better. And I get to spend time with my son every day, so it's a huge win.

As a side note, this sort of sleep schedule can be hell with a significant other, as I've dealt with plenty of times over the years. I'm very fortunate that my wife doesn't mind me shifting my schedule however I want, whenever I want, as long as I make time for her in my "day".

Regarding alternative sleep schedules, I tend to believe xkcd:

“Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.”

— https://xkcd.com/320/

Incidentally, I've been sleeping polyphasically for some time now. Of course, there have been no real studies done on polyphasic sleep and it must be taken on anecdotal evidence alone. However, I don't feel any ill effects after a year. My schedule is tamer than others, however; the Everyman 2 consists of a 4.5 hour core sleep and two 20 minute naps [0]. Schedules like Uberman (six 20 minute naps equidistant in time, every 4 hours), Dymaxion, Tesla, and other nap-only sleeps do not seem to be stable, at least for most people who are not genetically mutated to sleep less [1].

There are quite some pros as well, such as more time for one; instantly falling asleep (got rid of my insomnia); removal of substances such as alcohol, marijuana, and caffeinated drinks like coffee; and lucid dreams with nearly every sleep. The latter is very useful for me as I can test out ideas in dreams and see how they could fare, a sort of omnipotent virtual reality.

The fact that many think polyphasic sleep is only Uberman or other nap-based schedules with ~2 hour total sleep time is disappointing to see. There are other schedules on that site that are far tamer, such as Everyman 1: sleep 6 hours at night, one 20-min nap during the day, which you could do on a lunch break. There are whole gradations from 9 hours (two 4.5 hour sleeps, not necessarily reduction of total sleep time, but it gives better sleep for some) to Uberman or Tesla (~2 hour total sleep time), which by the way is not known to be stable over a longer time period, a fact that the polyphasic community willingly accepts.

It is particularly disappointing to see because, as another commenter said, I'd like to see more research on sleep and perhaps synthesizing its effects into a compound, but if people dismiss these alternate sleep schedules, we may not fully understand what the brain is doing during sleep, as fewer researchers are incentivized to study it, thinking it's just BS, which hurts the field overall.

I do wonder though if the main advantages of polyphasic sleep are that it enforces a more rigid structure than monophasic sleep; if you miss a nap, or you oversleep, you're done for. If one could enforce the same level of scheduling in monophasic sleep, I wonder if they wouldn't have the same advantage of increased time. It's too easy to make excuses with monophasic sleep however, saying that you'll just sleep after one more drink / turn of a game / line of code, so polyphasic sleep acts as an enforcer of such a schedule, and here is where its true strength lies.

Communities I've found helpful are r/polyphasic, and its related Discord server. There are many examples there of successful polyphasic sleepers who've maintained their (non Uberman or Dymaxion) schedules for years at a time. In particular, the user GeneralNguyen is a great resource.

[0] https://polyphasic.net/schedules/everyman/

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...

Does biphasic sleep count as polyphasic? I've been doing it for years following the 6 hr core and 20 minute nap. (Basically this https://efficiencyiseverything.com/sleep/)

It's been extremely doable for over a year. Sure I sleep in when I'm hungover or on a lazy Saturday, but it's closer to a regular 8 hour sleep rather than 10 hours.

I'm not in agreement of this overly simple article.

How do you keep your nap to just 20 minutes though? I literally can’t sleep for that short amount of time. I’ll either stay awake for the full 20 minutes or I’ll fall so dead asleep that I don’t wake up again until morning.

For me, I tense all of my muscles for 5 seconds, then relax, close my eyes and let my mind go blank. I don't "try" to sleep, I just try to enjoy relaxing. 9/10 times, I'm waking up to the 21 minute alarm I set before I even notice I had fallen asleep. Every once in awhile, I don't fall asleep, and then I assume that my body didn't need it. Very rarely, my alarm goes off and I decide that I'm going to nap longer. In those cases, I lose the rest of my day, but it's usually because my body really needed it.

Falling asleep quickly when you're tired I think is something that can be trained; I probably learned it in boot camp, where most days we got only 6 hours of sleep, unless you had watch duty, in which case you got 5 hours; and near the end there was a week where we only got 4 hours. Your body just learns to grab whatever sleep it can.

Re taking short naps: When I was at university, if I needed a power nap, I'd set the timer on my watch for 7 minutes and set it on my forehead; then I'd normally do two of these in a row (so 14 minutes of nap total). Once I got used to it, 1) as soon as I closed my eyes I'd start dreaming 2) I'd frequently have the experience of slowly coming to consciousness seconds before the alarm went off.

But that only works if you're only moderately tired. If you're really sleep deprived, there's nothing you can do but actually take a longer rest.

Thanks for the feedback. I can see the argument that polyphasic sleep is anything more than one monophasic block of sleep. In practice though, I'd say most people differentiate between a biphasic schedule and a polyphasic one.

Napping is absolutely sustainable. Trying to reduce total sleep time by sleeping in small bursts throughout the day and night does not appear to be sustainable over long periods.

That’s awesome! I guess I’ve been doing that for a year or two now too, although without naming it. I started getting up early to get stuff done before the rest of the world wakes up, but found myself getting sleepy around lunch time. 25min naps ended up being my sweet spot: 20min feel like they end right when it’s getting good, 30+ make me groggy.

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