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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

This made me wonder whatever happened to the non-traditional sleeping patterns that were in vogue in the early 2000s.

I remember reading about polyphasic sleep and how it supposedly was great to win more time.

I pushed myself to try this one summer in college when I was working in a lab that needed things to be checked on at odd hours. I ended up severely sleep deprived, but it was fun to try and debunk it at least for myself.

Polyphasic sleep worked for me but was extremely fragile. As in a slight deviation in schedule would ruin my life for days. It seems like the funny sleep schedules are things that work for some people in pretty narrow circumstances but with significant drawbacks.

I think over time it became more clear that the few people who were able to do it, enjoy it, and keep it going, were physically or genetically unusual in some way. No matter how well they described their approach, most physically can’t copy them.

Biphasic sleep is still quite popular but it tends to be framed as taking a nap rather than as a 24-hour sleep regimen.

Another valuable lesson I got from that rabbit hole is that a "segmented" night's sleep is actually nothing to get upset over. If you wake up in the middle of the night, it doesn't indicate anything is wrong, and you can spend an hour reading by candlelight before returning to sleep, and it won't affect your restedness in the morning. Unscientific source: https://www.polyphasic.net/segmented-sleep/

> Biphasic sleep is still quite popular but it tends to be framed as taking a nap rather than as a 24-hour sleep regimen.

That's right! here in the warmer and highly humid states of Mexico (mainly in the Yucatan peninsula) the Siesta is very popular. A lot of people sleep between 3pm and 5pm (when the heat and humidity are higher) and wake up early in the morning around 5pm . I never got used to sleep siesta, as always woke up groggy.

I tried it for ~six months during undergrad, mid-'00s. I didn't feel sleep deprived but I disliked feeling so out of sync with everyone else.

My biggest complaint was the feeling of time being seamless. My six sleeping periods were all of the same length, so I sort of lost the feeling of a concrete 'yesterday' or 'tomorrow'.

I had a very similar experience. IIRC I did 90 minute naps every 4 hours for a week. My first full night of sleep after a week of 90 minute naps felt like waking up after one really extremely long and weird day.

That's interesting. Maybe it could be a sleep pattern to be adopted when traveling to space for long times, or during other isolation processes.

I got caught up in the fad and tried hard at polyphasic/uberman in 2005, for like six months. It would almost work, but I didn’t feel good, and once in a while instead of waking up after 20mins it would be more like 12 hours and I’d feel even worse. I read somewhere that schedules like that were developed to temporarily get people through life-and-death situations where a long sleep just isn’t possible, and was never meant to be a lifestyle, and I never tried it again.

I had a few friends at university who got really into polyphasic sleep. Turns out college is a terrible time to set your schedule with that much discipline.

I’ve read (sorry no sources, about to go to sleep) that that turned out to not be a super scientific thing, and that while some people might’ve gotten temporary placebo benefits out of davinci naps, it didn’t turn into long term sustainable gains in overall energy.

I say this as I’m about to do 48 hours with 10 hours of sleep, but I’m doing this to hit a really cool deadline, and I’m not under the illusion that this is sustainable.

> but I’m doing this to hit a really cool deadline

What deadlines are really cool? Just curious, sorry.

Fun things you really care about? I once spent almost three days straight writing some VJ software for a music festival I was performing at. Really cool… still a deadline.

While i was in university at some point we had to program a compiler in C for our computer's class. I remember many sleepless nights with my friends and alone implementing that. I had a blast and had no problem doing those kind of cycles. Now I'm 40 and dont think I'll do it ever again. But at the time it was thrilling.

It is impossible to beat natural inclinations that evolved over a vast amount of time.

polyphasic thing probably kept going into 2010s. There was a large polyphasic sleep chat on freenode then.

It seems to have slowly petered out over time.

Right. Same thing I think happened with Soylent nutrition.

I wonder what other health fads are there. It would make a good docu to follow someone like Supersize me! But doing all those health fads together for some time.

I’m actually very curious how do such fads begin?

Sales? What’s there to sell if you recommend polyphasic sleep? Or just harvest attention of clueless morons and act as some health guru?

Such a weird phenomena, and so common, I feel moronical for not understanding what drives it.

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