10 July 2006

Polyphasic Sleeping

Posted by Greig under: Sleep Experiment .

I was reading the other day about advertising using Google’s Adsense and stumbled across a blogsite about personal growth called StevePavlina.com. It has a log of his experiment with polyphasic sleep, that is, when you sleep for only 30 minutes at a time, approximately every 4 hours. With this kind of sleep-schedule you only end up sleeping for about 3-4 hours a day. His log chronicles the challenges he faced but also his success he eventually attained in adapting his lifestyle to this kind of sleep pattern. It’s fascinating and I think I’m going to try it myself. I should mention that Steve was able to maintain this lifestyle for 5 1/2 months with no apparent negative physical or mental side-effects - which is not as much as i can say for my present lifestyle.

The main theory for polyphasic sleep is that one receives the most benefit from the REM period of sleep. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement and occurs at the end of our sleep cycle. We experience increasing durations of REM sleep as the night progresses. Our sleep cycles usually last about 90 minutes and we progress from Level 1,2,3,4 and then REM at the end of the cycle. A person usually experiences 5 sleep cycles in one night with the last cycle having the longest REM period.

If we can train our brains to fall into REM sleep faster, then we can recover faster and need less sleep. Steve Pavlina was able to do this and says that sometimes it took him only 2-5 minutes to reach REM sleep. In order to do this one needs to have an extremely flexible schedule - one that allows for a 30 minute nap every 4 hours. I just so happen to be in such a position.

Starting this Thursday I am going to be taking multiple frequent naps instead of sleeping for a large block of time. Steve was very strict about only napping every 3.5 hours in this transition phase but suggested that perhaps it would ease the transition by increasing the frequencies of the 30 minute naps - perhaps to one every 90 minutes. This is what I plan to do. I tend to agree with him because in theory, the more naps you get while overtired, the more practice you get at dropping off into REM sleep quicker. This weekend happens to be a long one with Monday being a holiday, so I plan to start this experiment on Thursday night. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday should be the most difficult times but only Friday is a work-day, and I hope that by Tuesday my internal clock and sleep-patterns should be adjusted enough to function semi-normally.

Of course, I will have to do this all without consuming alchohol or caffeine, both of which would throw off my sleep cycles.

Why am I doing this anyway? The answer is A) because I am open-minded to these kind of weird things B) so I can say I have done it, hopefully successfully C) as a test of my self-disipline, which I am trying to improve D) so I can ultimately increase my productivity. I figure it will add at least 25 hours of waking hours to my week and I would love to use that time to make my website look better.

I’ll keep you posted!