Polyphasic Sleep

[Aurelius]

Not sure if this thread belongs here, but sleep is a part of staying healthy, so I'm gonna roll with it. Pohlyphasic sleep is essentially short naps throughout the day instead of one long rest at night. The extreme version is where you take twenty minute naps every four hours (2 hours of sleep total in 24hrs), and allegedly thats all you need. I'm thinking it might be useful while traveling around sheisty areas or if you really need to stay up for some reason. If anyone has tried this, please tell me how it worked out for you.

 

[Everymanalion]

Is this more healthy than a full nights of sleep? i have horrible insomnia

 

[Aurelius]

People that are way smarter than me have been argueing both sides for awhile, I'm planning on trying it out, but I'd like to hear about other people's experiences before I get on the regimen.

 

[Kim Chee]

I've done several consecutive days with sleep like this usually because I was pretty cold and needed to keep moving. After a couple of days I would notice that I was mentally and physically exhausted and ended up making stupid moves that could be dangerous while riding the choo choo or even crossing the street.

 

[Alaska]

Really, despite all of the arguments, whatever works for you.

I've been suffering a weird case of insomnia recently, but if I'm housed up I normally try to sleep for an hour three or four times a 24 hour period. I feel pretty great doing that, usually. But on the road, it's pretty impractical for me.

Keep in mind, though, that you should try to be a bit active at night, and not just sit in your PJ's. Night owls in general tend to be more prone to heart attack and stroke caused by their lack of physical activity due to the immense differences in schedule from the rest of the world.

 

[suprhromnn]

If you're going to do it, it's something you need to give yourself a good 2-3 weeks to get into the swing of.

As mmmmmmmichael said he was physically and mentally exhausted after a couple of days. That is because it takes your body a couple of weeks to adjust to this.

The sleep you need to recover is your REM sleep, and after a week or two weeks of a polyphasic sleep schedule your body learns to slip into REM sleep immediately because it knows "Oh fuck, I am only going to get this 20 minute rest for the next four hours!" One important thing to note though is that you cannot afford to miss a nap once you are on this. If you run even 20-30 minutes late for a nap you will feel as if you've ran into a brick wall. There is no slow loss of functions as we deal with by staying up past our bedtime. It is a very fast and very hard hit to our mental and physical wellbeing until we catch that nap once we have trained our bodies to need it on this schedule.

In all, I would say it is VERY beneficial to this lifestyle, but it not something easily attained or that many can pull of at all. I would suggest looking into the everyman sleep schedule to start out your polyphasic sleeping adventures, before you switch into the uberman sleep schedule.

There is an amazing amount of information on this, google "uberman sleep schedule" as it is the 20 minute nap schedule you mentioned. Many have done it successfully and had no noticeable detrimental affects once they were in the swing of things. There is one blogger who kept it up for a year before stopping at his wifes request IIRC.