The Polyphasic Sleep Experiment

I’ve first read about this sleep schedule quite a while back on this site. I thought it was crazy. And freaking awesome. When I first read it, I still lived with my mom and dad. They weren´t exactly supportive about the idea when I told them about it. And it was impossible covering something like this up. So I forgot about it.

I now live on my own for around 8 months. As I stumbled on this topic (polyphasic sleep) again on the web a few days back, I thought: ‘Now it’s possible! Awesomeness!!’

The basic idea is this:

Three hours sleep at night (‘core nap’), plus three 20-minute naps throughout the day. And this is a (more adaptable by what I’ve read) varation of what is called ‘The Uberman Sleep Schedule’. The latter is sleeping 20-30 minutes every 4 hours, on the dot. For now, I simply find it too difficult to do something that disciplined, maybe some other time.

How can this sleep schedule work? A normal sleep cycle is 90 minutes long, and REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep occurs late in this cycle. REM is the most important phase of sleep, in which you experience dreams. If you don’t get REM sleep, you die.

Polyphasic sleep conditions your body to learn to enter REM sleep immediately when you begin sleeping instead of much later in the sleep cycle. So the first week I’m going to experience sleep deprivation as my body learns to adapt to shorter sleep cycles, but after the adaptation period I’ll supposedly feel even better than before.

The sleeping times I’ve made for myself are 4:30-7:30, 12:40-13:00, 17:40-18:00 and 22:40-23:00. This allows me to go out every night, work out or study in the morning and make money in the afternoon. Plus, the schedule is flexible in a way that I can shift my naptimes by as much as an hour in either direction.

If I’m going to start behaving like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’, you know why.

Preparation >>