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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I once changed my schedule for a month to sleeping 4 hours, waking for 4, sleeping 4, and then waking for 12. I would work in the day, come home, sleep 4, wake 4, and then sleep 4 more, then off to work again. On weekends I switched to a normal 16/8 schedule.

I got plenty of rest and got all my domestic stuff done overnight - 24h grocery store, laundromat, etc. I was never unusually tired.

The down side is that it mostly killed my social life. So I quit; the advantages didn’t outweigh the disadvantage of being on a different schedule than everyone else.

Also this was in the late 80s/early 90s before cell phones and the internet.

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There's a very active historical debate about whether a schedule like this, often called "biphasic sleep", was more common in pre-industrial societies. There's a historian called Roger Ekirch who thinks it was, starting in his 2004 book "At Day's Close - Night in Times Past". There's a bunch of criticism of it, since the sources are a bit ambiguous, or if he's generalizing from Medieval England (his main focus).

My brother had a friend try this in university while studying for exams and, according to my brother, it basically made the guy lose his mind. Seems like a roll of the dice on whether it works for people or not.

> I once changed my schedule for a month to sleeping 4 hours, waking for 4, sleeping 4, and then waking for 12.

That's pretty common for crew on yachts. I'd do that when racing or cruising ocean going sailboats. The crew gets split into 3rds, and everybody gets to do a 4 hour night watch. (For racing for me, that'd usually be only for a few days or a week tops. I twice spent ~6weeks on that schedule cruising the Great Barrier Reef.)

This seems like the biggest disadvantage to me too. I see friends four or five nights a week so I would have to give a lot of that up.

Which is a shame because longer days would probably significantly improve my sleep.

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