Polyphasic sleep, or more precisely Uberman’s sleep is a special way to sleep, which allows for a massive reduction in total sleep time. The term polyphasic sleep itself only means sleeping in more than two chunks (two chunks would be called biphasic). The ‘normal’ sleep schedule most people follow would be called monophasic sleep (one big chunk).
Schedule for Uberman
Now with polyphasic sleep there are several different possibilities to schedule your naps. Probably the most widely known variant is the so called Da Vinci (Allegedly Leonardo Da Vinci followed this schedule) or Uberman sleep. The term Uberman was coined by a blogger called Puredoxyk who was the first to blog about this way of sleeping. As a student of philosophy she was referring to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. This comes from the fact, that somebody who sleeps this way only needs about two hours of sleep per day. One can easily see that to an outsider this might seem to grant superhuman powers.
Now what exactly is this mysterious way to sleep. Basically it’s very simple. You take naps of 15 to 30 minutes length every four hours. This totals 6 naps per day and an average time spent asleep of 1.5 h to 3 h.
But that’s Sleep Deprivation!
I can hear you say, that this is severe sleep deprivation, but believe me it isn’t. It’s similar to the way soldiers are advised to sleep during a prolonged battle situation. It’s also common with solo sailors who have to stay awake for a long time to maintain optimal performance. There’s also a study by Claudio Stampi which discusses two experiments that indicate that such a way of sleeping is possible.
How does it work?
This is pure speculation, since there is only one scientific study available on this topic.
The following are my own ideas on the topic: As far as I understand it, our mind works, on a very simplified level, similar to a rechargeable battery. When you are awake, you drain energy from that battery, while you are sleeping you recharge it. For your brain battery to last a full 16 hours you need to charge it for 8 hours. But what if you could charge your brain faster in the beginning? Then you could recharge more frequently to increase efficiency. As it seems you can charge it for 20 minutes which will give you enough energy to run for another 4 hours. This way you can greatly improve your sleep/wake ratio.
The Adaption
Before you can get the benefits of polyphasic sleeping you have to go through an adaption period in which your brain will adapt to the new conditions. The time to adapt is about one week and involves some serious sleep deprivation, since in the beginning you can’t fall asleep fast enough and even if you do, you won’t enter the essential stages of sleep fast enough (most people consider this to be the REM sleep). After some time however your mind learns that it doesn’t get much sleep, but it gets it regularly. When this happens it starts to jump immediately into the more important and refreshing stages of sleep.
Previous Tries
So far I’ve tried to adapt to polyphasic sleep a couple of times, however without much success. I never made it through the adaption period, as I was constantly oversleeping which is the worst thing you can do because it totally destroys all the results you have achieved up to that point. I managed to oversleep even with 5 to 6 alarms set. The problem was not as much sleeping through the alarms, but to reset them frequently to get ‘just one more nap’. After the second or third consecutive nap my mental abilities declined considerably and I wasn’t able to reset my alarms properly which led to a sleep of several hours
The next Try
Starting with Monday (actually I’ll start on Sunday but Monday will be officially day one, as it is the first day I will sleep completely polyphasic) next week I want to give polyphasic sleep another try. This time I want to increase my chances for success as much as possible. So to avoid the biggest mistakes I made last time I will make the following changes and add some new rules for this time:
- No consecutive naps during the adaption (I might allow one additional nap during one cycle to fight fatigue however.)
- Create an BFL: This stands for Big Fat List. It’s a list of things to do while sleep deprived. It will consist mostly of tasks that don’t require to much thought, but will keep me awake anyways.
- Create an EBFL (Emergency BFL): This is an extension of the BFL which contains things to be done when I’m on the verge of falling asleep standing.
- Post regular updates of my progress on youtube and on this blog to create responsibility.
- Create responsibility by telling others about my experiment.
- Before a nap, exactly plan what to do after I wake up, as my ability to think will not be too great immediately after waking up. (Not that it will be great between naps but maybe it’s at least on the level of a zombie instead of an armless legless braindead zombie with a head shot. But that’s why I created a BFL, right?) This way I can jump directly into action and will have something better to do than going back to bed right on the spot.
- Only one try! On previous attempts I overslept repeatedly. However those prolonged naps didn’t leave me rested. So when I was starting over again at this point I already had a big amount of sleep debt on my shoulders, only making success less likely. Therefore I will include a rule this time, that I have to wait for at least 2 month after a failed attempt to start another try.