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Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

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Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#71

Post by smabie »

leesec wrote: post #31

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 d…

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.

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#72

Post by dindresto »

fouc wrote: post #66

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…

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

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#73

Post by AndrewDucker »

fouc wrote: post #66

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…

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

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#74

Post by scandox »

bonniemuffin wrote: post #5

Having recently experienced raising an infant, let me tell you, getting all my sleep in 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…

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.

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#75

Post by mrweasel »

monkeydreams wrote: post #54
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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."

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#76

Post by vadyalex »

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.

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#77

Post by gwd »

elric wrote: post #68
leoc wrote: post #17

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

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).

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#78

Post by esperent »

laurieg wrote: post #62
ashtonkem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 full…

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.

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#79

Post by gwd »

elliekelly wrote: post #15
FirefoxIsSlow wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Re: Polyphasic sleep takes napping to the extreme

#80

Post by AlexTrask »

whymauri wrote: post #41

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…

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