Back to blogging..

Hi. I'm back, but for a reason.

I wanna try out an experiment... mostly out of curiosity and to see its benefits and disadvantages it has for myself. Its called, Polyphasic Sleep.

Basically, it means sleeping more than once a day. Most of the people in the world sleep monophasically, that is, 8 hours a day, then awake time of 16 hours to make up our 24 hour days. But with polyphasic sleep, it consists of 6, 20 minute naps, throughout the day.

Now, most people would think "it wont work, you'll be sleep deprived, you wont have energy, you cant concentrate, and its not healthy"..

Here's the catch:

There are 5 different phases of sleep. One of them would be sleeping with REM (Rapid Eye Movement). This is the phase where people tend to dream... but besides that, study shows that REM phase is the only phase required to refresh yourself from a good night sleep. In other words, the other 4 phases are not required to reboot yourself for the next wake up time.

Also, according to this guy, he managed to keep up polyphasic sleep for more than 5 months before returning to monophasic sleep.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

He concluded that polyphasic sleep is highly effective, however, because of the odd hours of nap time, his schedules must go around them. He did not have any health problems, he said his alertness is higher than that of when he slept monophasically, and that he had more energy throughout the whole day equally. He also did workouts and recovered naturally as anyone would. In other words, there are more benefits for the body and mind with polyphasic sleep than that of monophasic sleep.

Explanation:

Imagine waking up from 8 hours of sleep. The mind and body requires maybe an hour or 2 to function 100% after waking up. Whereas after small naps, it functions 100% within a few minutes of waking up. This is because the body was not in hibernation and does not require a boot up time to work 100% again.

Furthermore, at the end of the day, most people get exhausted and lose energy and concentration. This is a sign for them to go to sleep. This happens because the mind and body is constantly operating throughout hours and hours of awake time during the day. Unlike polyphasic sleep, you rest and regenerate every 4 hours; refreshing both mind and body for constant concentration and energy.

That's what I figured anyhow..

Benefits:

2 hours sleep a day = more awake time = more productivity.

Higher concentration + constant energy replenishment.

Disadvantages:

Gets in the way of schedules.

Most people get bored with so much extra time.

If you're interested, read more on http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

Scroll down and you'll see log entries of how he went. Skip to "Polyphasic Sleep 2.0" to see his conclusions, also "The Return to Monophasic" to see his reasons for stopping polyphasic sleep.

Now, I'll try :). Naps are scheduled to 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, 10pm accordingly. btws, he mentioned that it took him a week to get used to it. I'll record my opinions from here on.