Polyphasic Sleep Experiment

[Kshartle]

So I'm always trying to think of ways to change my life for the better. Recently I've been intrigued by the idea of switching from a monophasic sleep pattern (whereby you go to bed once per day for 7-9 hours and more or less stay on that exact schedule) to a polyphasic sleep pattern where I nap in 20-30 min intervals approximately 6 times per day. The idea is you can train your brain to hit REM sleep immediately upon sleeping rather than taking the usual 90 min or so. This makes even a 20 min nap very valuable as a re-boot and can actually increase your total REM sleep while saving you up to 30 hours a week unconscious and basically not really experiencing life.

My major motivation is to use that 30 hours to find more balance between my 3 major competing priorities, my interests, my girlfriend, and my work. All 3 have been neglected, especially the first one. The side effect of not devoting time to my interests has been resentment of my GF, hurting our time together and procrastination and disinterest in work leading to productivity drops.

I think even if I spent the entire 30 extra weekly hours (all occurring between 11 PM and 6 AM) on my own stuff it would improve the other two priorities. I am going to try to squeeze an hour or two per night on work projects until I feel very caught up there though. This way as soon as the GF gets home from work I won't feel frustrated while paying attention to her. Also I'll probably be able to wrap up very early on Friday when she's usually off and have better weekends as well.

I expect lots of challenges like sleepiness and schedule difficulties until my sleep prowess increases.

If anyone has been interested in trying this I'm going to journal it for at least the first week by individual nap with maybe some thoughts on the side of the effects in my life. If I stay on it after that I'll probably just post a daily and then weekly update of the developments.

[Kshartle]

I woke up at 5 AM, having slept approximately 6 hours. I wasn’t overly tired when I went to bed so I woke up relatively easy and within minutes I was fully alert and on with the day. I felt my best chance would be to start the experiment right away with a good night’s sleep even though I expected to have difficulty falling asleep at the scheduled nap times.

8:30 AM – First attempted nap. This would give me a chance to get 30 minutes in before 9 AM when most everyone gets going at work and emails and activity start buzzing. Often when I get up at 5 I feel a little drowsy at this time so I thought this was a good place to start. Surprisingly I managed to fall asleep after 15 minutes or so and actually started managed a small dream. I woke to the alarm and was fully alert, looking forward to getting some stuff done and excited about the experiment.

12:30 PM – Second Nap. I didn’t have high hopes for this one at all. Between 9-11 I had drank two cups of coffee, probably a mistake. I doubt I would have been tired enough to sleep anyway but I should have told myself no. With a room not quite dark enough and thoughts of work in my head I couldn’t manage to fall asleep. I came close twice, but at the last moment I sprang out of it. I might have been overthinking it, trying to will myself to sleep. Somehow being aware of my attempt and concentrating on it was keeping me alert. Also in my mind I starting guessing at how many minutes had passed and what a rip-off it would be to fall asleep one minute before the alarm. Deeper breathing might help combat this.

4:45 PM – Totally alert and focused on what I would do post nap. Couldn’t shut my brain down. I was thinking about the trip to the gym I would take on awakening and a few emails and posts I was going to respond to. I basically covered my head with the pillow and tried to will myself to sleep again. No luck. 

[Kshartle]

8:30 PM – Skipped it. I wasn’t tired and I figured Heather would want to go to bed around 10:30. Might as well wait. I figured if I slept at 10:30 I could get two more naps in during the night while she was sleeping and be up for her morning.

10:45 PM – Argued with her about the sleeping pattern I was going to attempt. She wasn’t in a state that allowed her to listen to me and how I think it will be a huge improvement in our lives and relationship. I’ll try to explain it to her tomorrow. Basically I laid there until 11:45 completely unable to sleep. It was partly due to our argument, partly due to the uncertainty of my alarm (would the headphones work for the phone alarm – nope), and partly my concern about waking her up when I got up. Plus I was doing the mental math of when to best take my overnight naps. I settled on 2AM and 5AM. This should help me be more rested for the workday once I get the 8:00 or 8:30 in, depending on how I feel. I have to be able to perform and it’s going to be tough to get a nap in between 12:30 – 6:00PM, most likely impossible.

2 AM – Still a challenge to fall asleep quickly but I’m pretty sure I drifted off for 10-20 min. It’s difficult to tell which. I think I was dreaming a small bit and it involved firearms. Though I got up pretty easy I do kind of want to go back to sleep. Typing is awkward. I haven’t decided on 4:30, 5 or 5:30 yet. I’d like to push it. 2:37 and pretty much fully alert now. Typing is now a cinch.

5 AM – Slept for 20-25 minutes. Got up with the alarm, no problems at all. Perfect.

[Kshartle]

8:30 AM – Another good nap. At least 20 minutes. This is looking easier than I thought. Only feeling groggy for a minute or two after waking but I sense my motor skills and awareness of everything around me is impaired. Daytime is easier for certain.

12:30 AP – Was able to sleep another 20 – 25 min. Pretty sure I dreamt a little. Still not retaining the dream so it wasn’t hardcore REM.

5:20 PM – Can’t sleep at all. First off I wasn’t tired. Part of the problem here is I drank two cups of coffee. I anticipated not being able to nap until 6 at the earliest because of a work meeting. It ended early. So did this attempt at a nap. Not feeling tired at all but still experiencing clearly impaired motor skills and awareness.

[Kshartle]

11:30 PM – I didn’t feel overly tired even though I hadn’t slept a wink in 11 hours. I remember hitting the alarm at midnight and deciding to stay in bed one more minute. Mistake. I woke up on my own at 12:45. I’m not going to beat myself up over this. It’s a perfectly natural reaction to going 11 hours without sleep. Two lessons: 1. No more coffee 2. Spring out of bed at the alarm. Motor skills are degraded. Will just surf the net rather than work until after the next nap at 2:30.

2:30 AM – Good nap. Fell asleep quickly, woke up to the alarm. Wanted to stay in bed but had something to look forward to – the UK trading open. That helped. Another good lesson for fighting through this: Have something to look forward to immediately upon awakening. Drowsiness subsided in about 45 minutes. Mental clarity was really good by 4 AM. It’s apparent that nighttime is much more challenging than daytime. Looking forward to the 6 AM nap though and the sun coming up.

[Kshartle]

End of Day 2

I’ve devoted less than 6.5 hours to sleep in the last 48 hours and only managed about 4 hours of actual sleep. All things considered, I feel very good physically compared to my expectations at this point. The long term plan is to get 3 hours of sleep per day. Odd as it seems I think if I had even achieved this much by now I’d feel close to 100% alert. The extra time I’ve had to myself at night for my own interests has made my work time more productive and time with the GF a lot better. I don’t feel work and GF time is a sacrifice of my time now that I know I’ll have 4-5 hours at night to myself. This is going well.

[Kshartle]

Everyone please feel welcome to post comments or ask questions. I'm not trying to lay claim to this thread as a personal blog. I'll maybe just add some distinguishing marks at the top of log posts for readers who want to skip any discussion.

Maybe no one other than Doodle is interested.


Here's a crazy thought I just had - An extra 30 hours of wakefullness per week translates into 1,560 hours per year or 97 FULL days of normal 16/hr per day wakefullness.

So basically if this can be sustained it's like having a 462 day year instead of everyone else's 365. Should make reaching annual goals easier   Maybe now I can get to the last 900 pages of Atlas Shrugged and learn Russian. 

[doodle]

I'm reading along. I think the biggest hurdle you are going to face is going to be the societal pressure to conform to ordinary sleep patterns. If you lived in a community which practiced polyphasic sleep and patterned the day around periodic naps it would probably be relatively easy to adopt this sleeping pattern....however, doing so on your own and maintaining the discipline to do so is going to be extra tough. My biggest letdown with sleep is how little I dream (or remember of my dreams). If I had vivid exciting dreams every night I would be more than happy to spend half my hours of life in sleep.

[WildAboutHarry]

[quote=Kshartle]Recently I've been intrigued by the idea of switching from a monophasic sleep pattern (whereby you go to bed once per day for 7-9 hours and more or less stay on that exact schedule) to a polyphasic sleep pattern where I nap in 20-30 min intervals approximately 6 times per day. [/quote]

So my more frequent napping is really a "polyphasic sleep pattern" and not the effects of creeping old age?

[barrett]

I wish you success with this, K. Having suffered from insomnia for many long years, I am interested how this works out. One of the things that apparently makes it hard to sleep at certain times of the day is that body temperature tends to be on a predictable cycle. It's harder to sleep when you are warm & easier when you are cool. But I would imagine that the human body can make some adjustments. I know from one of your other posts that you spent some time in the military. I would think that polyphasic sleep would be an incredibly important asset to a soldier. Anyway, best of luck. Please keep the posts coming.

[Kshartle]

I'm reading along. I think the biggest hurdle you are going to face is going to be the societal pressure to conform to ordinary sleep patterns. If you lived in a community which practiced polyphasic sleep and patterned the day around periodic naps it would probably be relatively easy to adopt this sleeping pattern....however, doing so on your own and maintaining the discipline to do so is going to be extra tough. My biggest letdown with sleep is how little I dream (or remember of my dreams). If I had vivid exciting dreams every night I would be more than happy to spend half my hours of life in sleep.

From what I've read, when you get in the swing of this, you will wake up 5-6 times a day from a vivid dream.

If you've see Inception then you're familiar with the concept of time appearing to slow down in your dream. That is, 10 minutes of dreaming might seem like an hour or two of action. The key is, you have to wake up from it for it to have felt real. You may very well be passing through REM, having vivid dreams, but since you wake out of a different state you have no way of knowing they occured.

I'll post my first 3 naps today later, but I can tell you I had a vivid dream from 6 - 6:30 AM and I remember it when I got up. I was actually physically angry at someone because of something from the dream. This is good progress I think.

[Kshartle]

I wish you success with this, K. Having suffered from insomnia for many long years, I am interested how this works out. One of the things that apparently makes it hard to sleep at certain times of the day is that body temperature tends to be on a predictable cycle. It's harder to sleep when you are warm & easier when you are cool. But I would imagine that the human body can make some adjustments. I know from one of your other posts that you spent some time in the military. I would think that polyphasic sleep would be an incredibly important asset to a soldier. Anyway, best of luck. Please keep the posts coming.

I'm already noticing I'm more sensitive to cold. I let the temperature get up to 84 yesterday in the house (Florida) which I never do. I was actually comfortable.

My last two naps I took probably 5 minutes to fall asleep. I wonder if my body isn't running at a slightly cooler temp.

Yes soldiers learn how to sleep doing anything, even practically standing or marching. Even if we weren't tired, if the guys were loaded up in the Humvee or in the blackhawk we would all pass out, even if just for 10-15 min. We were all getting prepared to walk in the jungle for potentially 24 straight hours.

[Pointedstick]

A couple of co-workers did this experiment some years ago. Their conclusion was that it works extraordinarily well as long as you can keep to the schedule. If you deviate from it, you get wrecked and become a walking zombie. It would make sense why this isn't our evolutionary approach to sleep; we humans rarely had the luxury of being able to dictate when we slept and for exactly how long, and do it on a repeatable schedule. It also makes sense why powerful leaders and the wealthy have often been able to pull it off; they do have that level of control over their lives.

[LC475]

What comes to mind for me is that maybe you should take some sort of mental acuity tests occasionally to see if it you are improving, suffering, or staying the same from this experiment.  There was an experiment in sleep deprivation done wherein one group got 8 hours, one group got 6 hours, and one group got 4 hours, and one group couldn't sleep at all.  Something like that.  Anyway, after a couple days, the no sleep group did horribly on their tests, their brain was totally shot.  That's not too surprising.  The interesting thing is that the 4 and even 6 hour groups eventually both also did just as poorly as the no-sleep group, but they thought that they were just fine!  The no-sleep group knew they were out of it, in zombie-mode, but the people getting 6 hours thought they were still alert and fine, when really after a few days they were just as zombie as the no-sleepers.

[Kshartle]

What comes to mind for me is that maybe you should take some sort of mental acuity tests occasionally to see if it you are improving, suffering, or staying the same from this experiment.  There was an experiment in sleep deprivation done wherein one group got 8 hours, one group got 6 hours, and one group got 4 hours, and one group couldn't sleep at all.  Something like that.  Anyway, after a couple days, the no sleep group did horribly on their tests, their brain was totally shot.  That's not too surprising.  The interesting thing is that the 4 and even 6 hour groups eventually both also did just as poorly as the no-sleep group, but they thought that they were just fine!  The no-sleep group knew they were out of it, in zombie-mode, but the people getting 6 hours thought they were still alert and fine, when really after a few days they were just as zombie as the no-sleepers.

That's interesting.

I've noticed through observing myself that I am getting uncoordinated and missing a lot of things that would normally be on autopilot. For example I might go grab a plate and walk over to the stove but not grab a fork or spoon. Now this is something I would have grabbed automatically before, requireing zero conscious thought.

Little things like that are happening all over the place. I'm noticing them after the fact, but in my head I feel like I'm as sharp as ever thinking-wise. I don't think my posting here is suffering. My short term memory is though.

Unfortunately work got in the way and I had 6 hours between naps instead of 4 hours. That is making it tough today.

[Jan Van]

This is a cool experiment, very interesting to see how you'll do.
I watched Michael Mosley's documentary "Stay Awake" not too long ago. In it they featured this guy who was using modafinil. He works double shifts, daytime and nighttime. In between he spends time with his family. When his wife goes to bed, he goes to work. It was pretty funny really. How safe it is, who knows...

Good luck!

[Kshartle]

****

6:05 AM - crept back into bed. Slept 30 min. Alarm went off and GF hit the snooze. I immediately went back to sleep for another 10 min. As I said earlier, I definately had a vivid dream. Even though I was sleeping for 30-40 min it felt closer to two hours. Seemed like a lot different scene changes in the dream.

Anyway I got up and got ready for work . Normally I work from home and only go in once a week to see friends. I was picking up a friend at 8 though who had loaned her car out to someone. Driving took a lot of concentration. I could tell I wanted to sleep and wasn't 100%. Luckily years of drunk driving prepared me for this. j/k. I just focused and there was no problem. If I had felt there was any risk to anyone I wouldn't have gone. Went to work and basically everything was good, got more in the flow. Decided I would leave after my late morning meeting to get home for a nap. I didn't want to be driving in rush hour on no sleep for 11 hours.

12:35 - got home with only 20 min before another freaking meeting so I immediately dove into bed. I set the phone alarm while driving for 12:59. Managed to fall asleep get up and only be 3 min late to sign on to the waste of time meeting. The combination of going 6 hours and then only getting 20 min along the complete drudgery of this ridiculous meeting made me unable to do anything but sit there online. I noticed I was starting to almost fall asleep there and actually dream while sitting up. I was afraid if I went off mute I would start babbling something incoherent.

3:30 - survived a two hour borefest with follow up and made it to a lifesaving nap. I'm now falling asleep within probably 2 min and waking up to the alarm feeling pretty refreshed. I went from about 30% to 75% imo.

5:30 - Decided to get in 30 min before the GF gets home because that will likely be my last opportunity before 11PM or later. Perfect nap. Fell asleep quick, dreamt, slept the entire time. Now it's after 9 and I feel totally solid. I went out to drop off a movie at the redbox, ran some other errands, cooked dinner, have gotten a little work done, read some stuff. I feel about 90% still. This is a good sign that I was dying at 1 PM and two full 30 min naps spaced only 2 hours apart completely restored me. I feel better than if I had gone a full nights sleep, worked and it was now 9 PM. I feel like I could stay up for 5 more hours. That will help as night approachs. I've got specific goals related to work output tonight. If I get it all done before my 6 AM nap it will be a huge success.

[Tortoise]

http://youtu.be/XLTg2nHZEHQ

[Pointedstick]

12:35 - got home with only 20 min before another freaking meeting so I immediately dove into bed. I set the phone alarm while driving for 12:59. Managed to fall asleep get up and only be 3 min late to sign on to the waste of time meeting. The combination of going 6 hours and then only getting 20 min along the complete drudgery of this ridiculous meeting made me unable to do anything but sit there online. I noticed I was starting to almost fall asleep there and actually dream while sitting up. I was afraid if I went off mute I would start babbling something incoherent.

As a person who works from home himself, I can't tell you how hilarious I found this! I can totally relate. Most days I feel this way about calling into meetings even after sleeping 8 hours...

[Kshartle]

12:35 - got home with only 20 min before another freaking meeting so I immediately dove into bed. I set the phone alarm while driving for 12:59. Managed to fall asleep get up and only be 3 min late to sign on to the waste of time meeting. The combination of going 6 hours and then only getting 20 min along the complete drudgery of this ridiculous meeting made me unable to do anything but sit there online. I noticed I was starting to almost fall asleep there and actually dream while sitting up. I was afraid if I went off mute I would start babbling something incoherent.

As a person who works from home himself, I can't tell you how hilarious I found this! I can totally relate. Most days I feel this way about calling into meetings even after sleeping 8 hours...

I try to be as unprofessional looking as possible during them, even though no one can see me. My headset isn't portable but the computer is. I cook, use the bathroom, watch TV, play with dog, anything more productive. He likes to take the opportunity to bark when I go off mute to clear up everyone's confusion.

[Kshartle]

http://youtu.be/XLTg2nHZEHQ

Beautiful! 

Kshartle, your name isn't "Cosmo" is it??

I wish...........I've thought of this episode.

With any luck i won't end up dumped in a river by the mob.

[barrett]

I can't believe how often I am logging on to see if Kshartle has taken a nap!

[Kshartle]

10:30 - Wasn't feeling tired but I did it anyway. It's been 5 hours and I need to be as consistent as possible, especially when I have full control. After a few minutes I was sure the entire time would go by without falling asleep. I was doing the mental math of whether or not I should try again at 11:30 or skip this one altogether and where that would put me for future naps.

Then I woke to the alarm feeling like I had slept for 2 hours or more. I had to double check the time to make sure it was only 25 min.

Looking forward to a productive early evening session and a 2:30 nap.

A major benefit I'm seeing is I can pick up exactly where I left off from a task as easily as if I had just gone to the bathroom or for a glass of water. There is no disruption caused by the nap like a full blown night's sleep would cause.

It's like I'm permanetly awake but also having lots of sleep (because it's so frequent). I feel like I've been awake now for 5-6 days but not tired like I would expect. 

[Benko]

There are a number of circadian rhythms i.e. 24 variations of hormones e.g. cortisol, etc and wonder if this is a great idea as I would suspect it would disrupt natural hormone patterns which is not a great thing.

[Mountaineer]

Ok, well you better get on to proving morality then.  We're all floundering in a sea of moral turbidity turdidity here, while you're goofing around with your polyphasic sleep experiment.  You selfish bastard (I can prove that, you know).