Alternate Sleep Cycles
highexistence.com
highexistence.com
Sleep is not the enemy. Sleep is fantastic.
I'm no expert on sleep in general, but a good nights sleep makes me feel great upon waking up (usually for the rest of the day). I can remember things from the day before with much more clarity and recall, giving me a tremendous edge over those who didn't. Plus, I'm pretty sure it feels fantastic nearly the whole time I'm doing it... I just happen to be unconscious for that part. :) It certainly must be better than a good deal of the things I do while I'm awake.
A close relative of mine is on the uberman cycle. He's narcoleptic. He sleeps nearly instantly upon his head hitting the pillow (seconds, not minutes) and wakes up 15-20 minutes later, unable to continue sleeping. It's literally a nightmare, not only because the world is 'monophasic', but also because he's in a fog, can't focus/falls asleep when not moving (e.g. driving a car), and has a hard time distinguishing reality from dreams (since they all run together).
Thanks, but I'd rather continue hacking the other parts of my lifestyle to make room for more fulfilling activities, like sleep.
Whatever floats your boat, I guess?
It's crazy that Steve Pavlina's series of blog entries is still the #1 reference even though he turned his back on it afterwards.
That said, sleeping less at night and taking a deep nap or two after lunch is awesome. I wish it would've been socially acceptable in my German university. There is a lot of progress to be made (flux et al) without drastic and dangerous sleep cycles.
> “It is worth mentioning that anthropological studies conducted in tribes active at night show that human sleep can be highly polyphasic in certain cultures. Although they have different cultures and ways of life, both the Temiars of Indonesia and the Ibans of Sarawak have similar polyphasic sleep-wake behaviors (Petre-Quadens, 1983). Their average nocturnal sleep episode duration ranges between 4 and 6 hr, and nighttime activities (fishing, cooking, watching over the fire, rituals) at any one time involve approximately 25% of the adult members. Daytime napping is very common in both tribes: at almost any time of day, about 10% of the adult members are asleep. Whatever the cause of these polyphasic sleep patterns,whether the expression of an inborn ultradian rest-activity tendency or other factors, such populations exhibit extremely flexible and fragmentary sleep-wake cycles. The minimal contact with modern civilization could be one of the reasons for the preservation of this possibly ancestral sleep pattern.”
There's http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/10/what_is_a_natural_slee...
And then, for all the European examples, see http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ah00034... The author apparently has a book on the same topic which I really ought to read, but the preceding is the article mentioned on his profile-page:
> _At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past_ (W.W. Norton, 2005), a sweeping study of nocturnal culture before the Industrial Revolution, which garnered four prizes, including an award given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history. His article in 2001, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” in the American Historical Review, earned two awards, including the James L. Clifford Prize given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
It would take a much longer experimental time frame, under more rigorous scientific study, to convince me that any of these alternatives are safe and worthwhile.
Was there something wrong with the article?
Otherwise, good article.
And yes, failing to mention the little tiny detail of it not working at this date is a reason to be "disdainful" of an article like this; it encourages one to wreck weeks or months of ones life on something that we pretty much know doesn't work. Negligent at best, evil at worst.
(Excepting "siesta", which there is some evidence for, but isn't the promised miracle, either.)
This belief in polyphasic sleep reminds me of a guy I used to know who was a huge conspiracy theorist. He used to tell me that you could build a perpetual motion machine and generate unlimited energy from home and that he was doing it. I tried to reason with him and let him know that stuff was bunk but he never changed his mind despite his machine not working (for which he made some dumb face-saving excuse about not using the right material or something). No matter how much evidence and reasoning you present someone with beliefs like this they refuse to change their mind. The absence of evidence is not evidence for something.
We know polyphasic doesn't work not only because of all the failed attempts and what you talked about in your comment but also because of what we know about how the brain and human body works.
Also, as I said with "siesta", there is definitely evidence of alternate sleep schedules, basically to the point that it is so uncontroversial it is almost not worth discussing. What I don't see is any evidence that anyone not simply genetically disposed (for unknown reasons) to two-hour sleep nights can cut their required sleep per day by 3/4s or more by some crazy scheduling regimen.
The article would be much more credible if you backed it up with some solid science (has there been rigorous scientific studies on polyphasic sleep?). Without that, the credibility based on bloggers is no more than the credibility of snake oil salesmen.
Always amazes me how CS students and hackers think they can defy biology ...
(One key to this is not going to bed too early. Sometimes I'm tired in the middle of the day, and then sleep from, say, 6 to midnight. This fucks everything up.)
I sleep at about 2-3am every night. On weekdays I'll sleep 5-6 hours. On saturday, around 10 hours, and on sunday around 8 hours. That averages to around 6 hours per night.
I've been on this cycle for over 10 years, and even though I always feel bad about it and want to "fix" it, it works quite well.
My natural cycle seems to end at around 6AM, and then I need 8 hours of sleep, so I'm not up until 2PM. This make social obligations a bit more difficult.
I feel like I'm constantly fighting my body's natural cycle. When I had school/a job that required a specific schedule, I used an alarm clock to get up, and had constant fms flareups and frequent insomnia. When I switched to my current job (at a startup, and no longer required to stick to a specific schedule as long as I'm getting my stuff done), I ditched the alarm clock, and my fibromyalgia pain has vastly improved, just from not trying to force my sleep schedule.
But the problem with that, is left to my body's own devices, I tend to want to be awake for about 20 hours, then sleep around 7. Then I start feeling guilty about coming in later and later every day, and there's still a limit to how many hours straight you can work and be productive, and even as flexible as my schedule is, there's still a bit of pressure to work 5 days a week for 8+ hours, not 4 days a week for 10+ hours. And coming into to work between 10pm-4am just never feels right. Once I get to the point where I'm waking up at 8-9pm, I usually have to waste a weekend forcing myself to stay up 24hrs or more to "flip" my schedule back to something reasonable. I hate doing that, because then my entire weekend is spent feeling like a zombie and then it's straight back to work again.
So if you've got some more details on how melatonin and a lightbox worked for you, even just a blog post you could point me at, I'd be really appreciative.
so, my thing was like my boss was like "you're just getting insane with your schedule" so I started googling around and came across DPSS, which sounded like me, so I had a visit with my GP, who sent me to a sleep clinic.. their first advice was to do sort of like you and just give into whatever happens naturally, and i wound up doing like a 2~4 am to 10am~12noon thing most of the time, and I felt, well, better rested, and it seemed safer to drive.
i work an on-call job for a fortune 500, so they had to go back and forth with the doctors to figure out something that would work in regards to making sure i could sleep uninterrupted. this was an ADA thing.
once that was figured out, i started the treatment which was to take melatonin in a small dose at like 11pm and then go to sleep when it felt like i could (and generally practice a whole litany of sleep hygiene practices like avoiding naps unless absolutely necessary, watching caffeine and nicotine in the evening, keeping a journal of it all) ... and then set the alarm for like 8am, and ASAP be in front of a 10k lux light box at the rated distance for a half hour. there are a lot of caveats to all of this, so i would recommend to you or anyone else reading to consult a doctor about all of this. I may be missing sometime important here, so just FYI.
I started this on a Friday night into a Saturday as that's when I got the box delivered, and the correct low dosage of the pill. I would say I felt like a million bucks every since then, which was like well, a month ago. Over thanksgiving I was travelling and had two days without the box, and I could definitely feel the afternoon and evening dragging on, and a little more awake at midnight than I had been.
That's about all I could say for now. I've pushed this back an hour to see if I can get in a little earlier to work, but that was just yesterday, so we'll see how that goes. I go back for a follow up in February.
I can definitely relate to the boss saying "your schedule is getting insane." That's where the guilt starts to come in, and boy, all I can say is it's a good thing I'm good at my job and it's worth it to the company to let my schedule fall where I'm most productive. (EDIT: By which I mean, I feel unbelievably grateful and lucky to have such a flexible job.)
1). F.lux: it seems like now the computer doesn't keep me awake until 4am anymore. I feel naturally tired at around 11pm.
2). Mental preparation just before falling asleep. Irrespective of what time it is I try to always get up at the same time (that has kinda forced me into a pretty natural rhythm). The only way I manage to do that is by spending at least 5 mins imagining the next morning (kinda like watching yourself in a movie and seeing things step-by-step: I hear the alarm, I blink my eyes, I stretch, I get-up, I go to bathroom, I put the kettle on, I take a shower, ...). That helps a lot (I used to never even hear the alarm-clocks and now I sometimes wake up seconds before it goes off :-)
I always link to this source; in a subject full of anecdotes and misinformation, this book is essential for providing substantial and concrete scientific results.
1 used from $314.52
[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R3W1ZLVUQ1N867/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...
For those still in/at college in the US, interlibrary loan has several copies available around the country. That's how I got to read a copy.
A couple of points from my own blog post on this ("Cheating the brother of death" http://sk.or.at/p6YBXf ):
- This is mostly about mental strength and perseverance, not so much about just following plan X and having more free time.
- Having more free time is not as simple as you'd like it to be. You do have to have something to fill that time. And it has to something actually meaningful that you care about.
- It is a good idea to have something to wake up to so you don't have to search for an answer to the "why do I have to get up now?" question when you're in it.
- The hardest part is setting the right boundaries and anticipating how bad your mental situation will be - so you can deal with it appropriately even if your experiment means that you might not be in the right state of mind at that moment. Because you were before, when you started it and that's when you need to make the right plans.
I did the everyman for about three months when my startup was doing a big pivot a few years ago. It took about two weeks of being completely blurry to transition, but once I did, it was very effective.
I would wake up ~7AM and get to work, have my first ~1/2 hour nap at 11AM, next nap at 6 in the afternoon, and then a nap at midnight. I'd be totally awake and aware until ~3:30AM, and then I'd go to sleep.
After the transition, once my body got settled, I'd usually be awake a few minutes before I set an alarm, and my caffeine needed to stay alert went way down.
Like most of the other anecdotal evidence, I stopped for social reasons - my girlfriend wasn't a fan of me coming home from work at 6, immediately snagging a nap, and then be up rattling away until 3 in the morning every day.
Also I wasn't able to fill the day - I'd be burnt out on work after 12+ hours of grinding away on some Rails code, and have to do something else, so I'd either tinker in the garage, cruise the web, or play games. Once I started up with the video games, I decided it wasn't worth it, and flipped back to a "normal" sleep cycle.
It took ~2 nights to go back to a normal cycle.
I wonder if there's a way to make this become socially acceptable. People always think these things take a lot of time, and sometime they do (e.g. phone use that would have been considered obnoxious 15 years ago is not impolite today. Today's obnoxious would have been casus belli 15 years ago). However, there are cases of nearly spontaneous social change -
In many places in the world (a lot of countries in Europe, not sure about the US), chewing gum after a meal is considered an acceptable and healthy practice; This change was brought on within 3 years thanks to an ingenious Wrigley Orbit campaign.
Now that I have a very inviting living room in my home wih a comfy couch, I might try it again once spring hits. Or maybe the Everyman schedule.
The big problem, IMHO, is interfacing with the entire rest of the Western world, which is on the one big sleep schedule.
That said I was thusly looking at Pavlina's blog. And at the entry where he looks back on it, one year later (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-on...) and talks about how it's transformed his sleeping, even when he's gone back to "normal" sleep. And I think my month or so doing polyphasic left me with a little something, too: I now have a very well-tuned alarm clock in my brain. I don't have to get up for a day job any more, so I don't have to use it very often - but as I'm going to sleep, I can tell myself "I'm getting up at 7:00" or whatever, and I will be awake when the alarm goes off.
(I still set alarms, though, because they give me that extra boost of HEY YOU HAVE A REASON TO GET UP!)
In fact, I'm taking a plane trip tomorrow. Flight's at 7:40 so I basically need to be up and moving by 5:40 or so. I did those calculations and told myself when I was going to be getting up, and I could FEEL my body going through... something. Some adjustment of my cycles to get me to be tired in time to be up and moving then, these weird little waves of... levels of awakeness kind of cycling in me for a few minutes.
As to people saying that "we evolved for the eight hours sleep and trying anything else is fighting against evolution" - no, no we didn't. Babies basically do polyphasic. It was considered completely normal in the pre-industrialized days to go to bed around sundown, then wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night and do some stuff by candlelight. It's only since the adaption of massive industrialized society that we've been expected to be up ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.
(And hell, right now I'm visiting my mom. She basically does the Everyman schedule since she's retired - it's not formalized, her throughout-the-day naps are kind of randomized - but she's got one biggish core sleep at night, and several midday naps.)
Sleeping at night is obviously a result of lack of light during the night. I don't believing sitting/lying consciously will be that different from sleeping unconsciously as to providing rest for our bodies. It's just a learned habit and we should be able to get over it.
Slavery and dictatorship is more natural, see how monkeys or any other animals group their society? Why don't we give up democracy for something more natural?
I have OSA. I had it for years before it was diagnosed. I would go to bed and dream more or less non-stop for 10, 12, 14, 16 hours. All the REM sleep a man could ever want.
And I was still tired as buggery.
My idea of a good night's sleep is the deep dreamless kind.
Not to mention sleep's centrality to recovery from physical exercise.
coldarchon 49 minutes ago | link [dead]
after being 5 years in research for brain activity during sleep and being a natural lucid dreamer and short sleeper myself, I can only warn anyone about polyphasic sleep if you never had a tendency for this in your life before.
It will literally turn off your Mojo ..
http://mindhacks.com/2011/11/17/the-dreams-and-hallucination...
(In case you were wondering, 63% said "Yes.")
I saw this on HN before and I think it's a great read if you have the time. It really goes in depth and debunks these sleep cycle myths. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...
Fact is there's not a ton of evidence for it not working out. There has been virtually zero research on it, despite plenty of polyphasic people volunteering for research.
To me it seems obvious that Wozniak has a clear agenda with the article considering his general advocacy of free running sleep as the Only Path.
And the term "Anecdotal evidence" is often used as smear word to ridicule what otherwise would be called direct observation. It's an old dishonest politician ploy: if you can't rebut observations, try to discredit the observer.
In my own case I found (during school days, cramming for finals) that I'd fall into a weird fast-cycling sleep schedule with no hours-long sleeps and no apparent sleep debt over a term of weeks. I suspect that conventional sleep research would label this insomnia: needing constant catnaps of 5-30min duration, and complete inability to sleep nights. Most important: it took many days before the fast-cycling appeared, and once this rhythm took hold, no alarm clock was needed. When I required a nap, extreme grogginess came on suddenly and I almost had no choice. Immediate dreaming as soon as my eyes were closed. ~10 minutes later, bam, I'd suddenly wake up fully with no grogginess. Hours later the cycle would repeat. Also it took me days/weeks to escape it and regain the ability to sleep for more than a half hour. I found that strange mental effects did eventually appear, but only after many weeks. This wasn't 'sleep debt,' more like mild sleep deprivation psychosis.
> * Everybody who needs an alarm to wake up is “seriously sleep deprived”. No really, he says that outright. I feel bad for my parents — apparently they’ve never been well-rested in their entire lives. Of course, while I’m sure it’s a better sign if you don’t need an alarm at all (like I didn’t when I had Uberman down pat?), this guy is completely ignoring the known fact that people will sleep extra if they can, just like they’ll have a second helping of pie if you let them. The existence of a second piece of pie on your plate is hardly an indicator that you’re starving!
No, people don't oversleep 'normally', they oversleep as a result of sleep deprivation; this is the standard way to measure sleep deprivation, to see whether, given the opportunity, they sleep more for a while and then start sleeping less! And for that matter, the basic theory of polyphasic sleep - forcing very fast REM rebound to get the REM done within the 20 or 30 minutes - basically presumes constant deprivation because deprivation is what triggers REM rebound.
If a polyphasicer wanted to disprove that, they'd have to switch back to a monophasic or biphasic sleep without immediately incurring any excess sleep penalties compared to their normal monophasic/biphasic sleep lengths.
(I'd do this since I have a Zeo and that would give great data for this purpose, but unfortunately, neither time I tried did I succeed in adapting to polyphasic. Maybe one of the polyphasic sleepers using Zeos http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/forum/176 will do this at some point.)
How's that for not immediately incurring any excess sleep penalties?
Rebuttal might be the wrong word but it points out some serious flaws in Wozniaks conclusions. What of his in your opinion basic point is untouched?
Regarding REM etc, here's a polyphasic forum discussion on Wozniaks article: http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/topic/340/not-sure-if-its-pos...
When something makes experts look questionable, expect irrational flamewars in response. Or derisive dismissal, at the very least.