Experiment #1: Biphasic Sleep

With the world active during the day and sleeping at night, most of the human race has become accustomed to monophasic sleep or one time block of sleep. However, what many people do not know is that there is a such thing as biphasic, triphasic, and polyphasic sleep. If you haven’t guessed it yet, biphasic sleep is having 2 time blocks of sleep, triphasic sleep is having 3 blocks of sleep, while polyphasic sleep is having multiple blocks of sleep. Though biphasic and triphasic sleep doesn’t sound too dangerous, you are probably wondering about the detrimental effects that polyphasic sleep can have on your health. Well so far, there are none. There have been many people who have tried this out and none of them have experienced any short-term detrimental effects. Long-term detrimental effects have not been noted but it is possible. On the other hand, polyphasic sleep was noted to cure sleep walking and many other sleeping problems. For the curious out there, the science behind surviving on polyphasic sleep is that you trick your body into becoming more efficient falling into REM sleep so after the 20 minutes that you have to nap, you can wake up feeling refreshed as if you had slept for longer.

Because of the things i want to do and everything I want to learn, I have been wanting to experiment with polyphasic sleep, specifically the Uberman sleep schedule for some time. The Uberman Sleep Schedule consists of 20 minutes of sleep every 4 hours. There is a week or two in which your body has to become acclimated but after that as long as you keep to your nap schedule, you should feel as you did on monophasic sleep. However, it requires the discipline to stick to your schedule for every nap so your body can acclimate. It will be hell at first but I feel that the results will be well worth it. You can get more information about polyphasic sleep with Steve Pavlina’s Polyphasic Sleep Logs. A few other famous sleep schedules include free running sleep, which is when you only sleep when you’re tired, and Everyman sleep cycle, which is polyphasic sleep with a core nap.

Unfortunately, my work schedule limits the flexibility that I can take with naps so I won’t be able to do the polyphasic or even the triphasic sleep cycle. Instead, I will do the biphasic sleep cycle. Starting tonight, I will go to bed at midnight, wake up at about 4:30am, and then take a 1.5 hour nap at 11:30am. I hope this sleep schedule will increase my productivity and give me time to do everything i want to do. I will keep you posted for the next couple weeks with a detailed biphasic sleep log of how my body feels and anything else that comes up for me.