Almost everyone who’s heard of polyphasic sleep thinks it’s both brilliant and insane. Well, in a nutshell, the idea is to sleep less, be awake more, and still get the same amount of actual rest (the REM sleep phase) as you would on an 8-hour, monophasic sleep cycle. Sounds ideal, right? That’s the sane part.  The crazy bit is your actual sleep schedule, the most famous of which involves sleeping for 20 minutes every 4 hours.  That equals 2 hours of down time out of every 24, and you’re still supposed to function like a normal human being for the 30 extra hours of wake time you’ve added to your week? With an execution that seems too dangerous to attempt and a payoff that sounds too good to be true, it’s no wonder polyphasic nappers appear to be totally off their rockers.

While there is precedent for polyphasic sleeping, most famously Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin, there isn’t much of it.  The most extensive sources come from internet blogs and forums (a red flag if ever), and almost no research has been done on the long-term eaffects of polyphasic sleeping, mostly because not a lot of people actually DO polyphasic sleep in the long-term.  It’s difficult, it goes against what everyone else is doing, and it’s a huge adjustment to effectively double your waking hours so suddenly.  There’s also concern that there’s something about the 8-hour sleep process polyphasic sleepers will be missing that could ultimately hurt the body (sort of like how vegans and vegetarians have more health concerns because they don’t consume 7 essential amino acids that come from meat and meat by-products), just as easily as internal chemistry could be thrown by how so much waking darkness affects our circadian rhythms. But, as Steve Pavlina (another successful polyphasic sleeper) claims, the hardest part of any change is usually because your surroundings don’t support it. Yeah the world isn’t polyphasic, and that’ll always be the biggest deterrent. Of course, it doesn’t help that true polyphasic sleep is also really difficult to adapt to.  It requires an allegedly hellish few days of sleep deprivation before your body can fall neatly into the schedule, it mandates a huge psychological shift from having a quantifiable marker of days to now experiencing an endless flow of more or less uninterrupted hours, and it takes a certain type of personality to enjoy all the extra time, which is spent alone while the rest of the world is sleeping, let’s not forget. Polyphasic sleep, especially the 2-hours total model, is also really inconvenient.  The nap times are frequent and often inflexible, and most 9-5 jobs don’t allow for constant nap breaks, making it an extremely high-maintainence schedule.  If you’re in a mall, or a class, or a meeting, nipping out because you need to take a nap is some combination of both inconvenient and embarassing, not to mention oft impossible.

So why would anyone in their right mind do this? Polyphasic sleep has some pretty hefty benefits.  First of all, you gain six hours a day you are now spending NOT in bed while still feeling like you did.  In fact, the overhwelming majority of polyphasic sleepers feel BETTER — better rested, more awake and alert, with faster reflex times and more consistant moods — than they did as monophasic sleepers.  And if feeling superhero awesome and creating extra leisure time like a magician wasn’t enough, there are a bunch of other side perks to the process.  You become a lucid dreamer, and your dreams are more vivid and way easier to remember.  It’s easier to stay fit because your body’s in “I’m doing things!” metabolism more or less 24/7.  You will from then on be able to fall asleep anywhere with ridiculous ease.  And if you have any problems or anxieties about sleeping (e.g., insomnia, night terrors, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, and so forth), polyphasic sleep is said to cure all of them in one fell swoop. Well, I’ve done it, rather successfully if I do say so myself, and while I can attest to these perks, there’re quite a few amazing benefits beyond the obvious, five of which in particular are urging me to continue on the polyphasic path indefinitely:

If you think about it for a bit, monophasic sleep — sleeping in one single block daily — is a totally constructed modus operandi.  Yes, the majority of people in civilised society all go to their full night of rest once the sun goes down, but not everyone folows suit.  In fact, many indigenous groups believe humans are supposed to sleep in four-hour blocks twice a day, while scientists calculated the human internal clock’s ideal run-time is 31 hours to a day, not 24. We’ve all had sick days or aeroplane flights where we dozed in an out naturally.  Perhaps the best example of how polyphasic sleeping can work and can be a more natural schedule is infants.  Babies don’t sleep through the night, but instead have to take constant and semi-breif naps every few hours. Like a polyphasic sleeper.  And as a parent of a newborn, what are you advised to do? Sleep when the baby sleeps.  The idea of departing from the norm stems from our ability to toss and turn all night and not feel rested when you wake. Why is this? Because the essential part of sleeping, the bit where all the vital processes, dreams, and actual restoration occurs is in the REM cycle, or the fourth phase of sleep.  Normally, when you sleep for eight hours, you still only get a small amount of REM sleep, about only 1.5 or so hours.  With polyphasic sleep, you are teaching your body to get really good at going straight into REM sleep, so you’re actually getting the same amount if not more, without all that tedious mucking about in the theta phase. Furthermore, your body is self-regulating, so once it goes into REM overdrive, it eventually cycles back through all the phases of sleep again, depending on what your body needs at the time.  Essentially, polyphasic sleep is just a method to make sleep more efficient.

I don’t suggest polyphasic sleep for everyone, but if I haven’t scared you off with all the sciency mumbo jumbo and you’re still intrigued, than I’d urge to check it out. It’s fit my temperament and my personality so well that my quality of life has greatly improved since adapting to the schedule. You can read more about how I did it, and find some helpful resources about polyphasic sleep here.