Polyphasic sleep cycles: Day 1

Recently, I've been looking into polyphasic sleep cycles. The word is pretty self explanatory - instead of a single sleep at night, you have multiple sleeps throughout the day. The most extreme of these is called the uberman cycle. In this cycle you sleep for 20 minutes every 4 hours and apparently, that's all you need! Can you imagine how much you could do in a day with only 2 hours of sleep? I've been wanting to try a polyphasic sleep cycle for awhile, but being a working gent, my schedule doesn't really allow for anything too extreme.

The way polyphasic sleep works, is basically by starving yourself of solid blocks of sleep, your body trains itself to fall into REM sleep much faster. A typical sleep cycle is 90 minutes long - 65 minutes on nonREM sleep, 20 minutes of REM and 5 minutes of nonREM. Not that nonREM sleep is throwaway, but REM is much more restorative. So a person who is adapted to the uberman cycle for example can fall asleep very quickly and almost instantly achieve REM sleep reducing the total sleep needed in a day to 2 hours.

Uberman sleep cycle: awake 92% of the day.

With biphasic sleep I'm not really sure if one can get the same efficiency that you can out of one of the more extreme poly techniques so I'm planning to start continuing on the 90 minute sleep cycle theory. 4.5 hours of sleep (3 cycles) at night and 90 minutes (1 cycle) when I get home from work. I'm hoping that the reduced amount of sleep and giving myself 2 chances for recovery will still increase my REM ratio. This saves me 3 hours a day which is actually a HUGE amount of time. Right now I sleep 9 hours, get up and go to work and get home about 6. I have 5 - 6 hours to cook/eat/clean/socialize/etc per day. Adding 3 hours to this gives me +50% free time! Research indicates that in the absence of social conditioning humans are polyphasic by nature and I'm fascinated by the science behind this and the idea of all this extra free time.

I'm in day 1 of my biphasic sleep experiment. There are 2 schools of thought for biphasic. One is a 6 hour nights sleep with a 20 minute nap in the day. The other is a 4.5-5 hour sleep with a 90 minute nap. The latter makes more sense to me since 20 minutes will not approach REM sleep - at least until I reduce the amount of time it takes to fall into REM sleep. So for now the schedule will be: 2:30am - 7am sleep. 6pm-7:30pm nap.

Biphasic sleep cycle: awake 75% of the day

I had a normal day Friday, went to bed at exactly 2:30 got up with the alarm at 7am. I went downstairs and made breakfast - enough for Diana when she gets up. While the sausage was cooking I did the dishes and a few other chores downstairs, but found myself bouncing from one thing to the next before finishing. That's very unusual behavior for me. I blame the lack of sleep last night. My mind isn't focused and keeps moving to the next thing. So I made a list of stuff to do. Finish unloading the dishwasher, have a protein shake, take a shower, take my vitamins etc. Eventually I sat down in front of the gas logs to enjoy my breakfast. I was really hungry but as soon as I started eating I lost my appetite. Maybe it's because I hate eggs. I forced myself to eat as much as I could but found myself chewing the same bite for a really long time before swallowing. Sitting in front of the fire in the silence was pretty relaxing, except Ebenezer kept trying to get up on my breakfast. I eventually gave him a piece of sausage so he would leave me alone, but predictably he chewed on it for awhile, spit it out and continued to try to eat off my plate. I gazed through the fire, unfocused, a few times. Not asleep, but just kind of zombified. My mind wandered toward the asteroid that nearly hit us and I am going to do a blog post about that soon.

Monophasic sleep cycle: awake 63% of the day

Looking forward to my afternoon nap!