Ask HN: Anyone here on a polyphasic sleep schedule?
I just read a fascinating reddit post on it (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_ubermans_sleep_schedule_for_sixty/) and it's something I've been contemplating doing for years. I'm currently thinking about taking the plunge into the everyman schedule - wondering if people here have any experience / advice.
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[ 32.8 ms ] story [ 1247 ms ] threadBut, even as someone who works for himself and thus has more control over his schedule, napping every 4 hours seems a bit impractical to me. That's why I've been looking at the everyman sleep schedule (http://everything2.com/title/Everyman+Sleep+Schedule), which entails 3 hours of sleep at night and then 3 20-minute naps during the day. Apparently the everyman schedule is much more forgiving if you move the naps forward or backward an hour so than the uberman schedule.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142
I think it's self-evidently crazy. You don't have to be a genius to tinker with your sleep pattern. The fact that such a vast majority of the seven billion contemporary humans nonetheless has a normal sleep pattern (i.e. monophasic to moderately biphasic) is a pretty big signal that it's part of the basic design.
And that's without even pointing out that there is actual science on this topic. Here's Stanford's heroic effort to convince you to get some rest:
http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/
http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/
I need to read this stuff for inspiration. But not now, because I should really get to sleep.
I also attended Dr. Dement's Sleep and Dreams class while I was at Stanford. His class was basically a propaganda program for students to get more sleep: He even gave us extra credit for sleeping during class. The man is a true believer in getting tons of sleep and that does indeed say a lot towards discrediting people who vouch for polyphasic sleep schedules. I tend to trust what he says, even if he was rather old and eccentric.
On the other hand, what's going on with all of these people who write such glowing reviews of the process? Are they just delusional?
His idee fixe is understandable. It's a story as old as the Greeks, who wrote the myth of Cassandra for a reason: You set out to discover something important, and you do, and the answer is seemingly obvious, especially to a highly rational person... and yet society just can't seem to act on that obvious answer, and people's lives just continue being screwed up. It works on your nerves, over the years.
(I used to work in cancer research, and I get a small pang of this feeling every time I see a lit cigarette. So far I have been able to control my impulse to whip out the scale model of the diseased human lung and confront people with it, like that guy in the movie Clerks. But if I spent another twenty years in the field I'm not sure I'd be so restrained.
Similarly, I met a cardiologist and the guy was pretty animated when selling me on the advantages of exercise. There's something about watching people die on a daily basis that makes you a very forceful salesman.)
what's going on with all of these people who write such glowing reviews of the process?
I also think it's partly the Efficacy Fallacy: When you make a decision to do something, you have a powerful internal motivation to defend the efficacy of that action. After all, nobody likes to think of themselves as stupid, and it actually is a bad idea to second-guess yourself every ten seconds. So your decisions have a psychological momentum that takes time to wear off.
That would explain why people embark on these life-changing crazy ideas, then enthuse loudly about them for a certain number of months, and then quietly give them up. I've been there.
It's also worth remembering that, like drunkenness and drug addiction, chronic sleepiness has a "death spiral" pattern: It impedes your judgement, which causes you to do stupid things, which may impede your judgement further...
It is also likely that this weird sleep cycle does "work" for some people. A few people may have really odd biological clocks. Others may find that the ill effects of messed-up circadian rhythms are canceled out by some good effect, in their particular circumstance, or for their particular psychology. If you desperately need to escape a miserable home life, becoming a marine and being shipped off to war might be a net win, and if you desperately want to hack on the lab full of million-dollar equipment -- or you desperately need to get out of sync with the time-wasting meetings that dominate your daytime office life -- having a crazy sleep schedule might be a net win. Or at least feel like one.
When it works -- that is, when you actually fall asleep and wake up when intended -- it's _awesome_. However, I found it very difficult to adjust and ended up not quite falling asleep, then getting up 40 mins later, then not quite falling asleep, and getting up 40 mins later... etc. Eventually I had been awake 8 hours with only 40 mins of sleep, then crashing and sleeping for many hours, further ruining the routine.
I started during finals week and figured in neither helped not hurt; I had more time to study (and used it to do so), but was often tired when studying and taking tests.
Steve Pavlina tried it for a while and blogged about his experiences. At the bottom of this post, he has provided a list to said blog posts: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
I decided to try it again when I was older (I was 18 or 19 at the time), which was considered safer because of the belief that the human brain stops producing new brain cells once it/its body has become an adult. This has recently been falsified.
If you're willing to be limited to not doing anything for more than a few continuous hours it just might work. This which can be difficult unless you're not very social, and don't have a job in which you work regular hours, and don't have a girlfriend, and rarely have to be somewhere at a particular time. In 2004-05 I happily fit into this category, and still do (despite having two-going-on-three income streams), but I don't think I'll be trying Uberman again... Perhaps I should?
Thanks for reminding me that this exists. :-)