Polyphasic sleeping is a sleeping pattern where you don't sleep through the night in a block (monophasic sleeping) but take a series of naps throughout the day or night. There are a variety of polyphasic sleeping styles, from the Everyman, which is a block of three hours followed by three thirty minute naps during the day, to the Uberman schedule, which consists of six twenty minute naps spaced four hours apart.
So why can polyphasic sleepers apparently cope with as little as two hours of sleep a day? The central theory behind it is that the only part of sleep that really, really matters is Rapid Eye Movement, or REM. This is the part that cleans up your brain cells after a hard day's thinking and balances the books, as it were. Any anomalies that it finds results in dreams. No-one knows what the rest of sleep is actually for, but it appears to be optional. Without REM sleep, however, people first go insane, and then they die. Clearly it's a bit important.
Anyway, most people's sleeping patterns go round in cycles of ninety minutes, of which REM only plays a small part. The goal of polyphasic sleeping is to cut out that unnecessary part of sleep and send the brain straight into REM and stay there for the duration of the nap. That way one gets refreshing sleep but in much less time, giving you more awake time throughout the day (and night).
As I suspect most people do these days, I came across polyphasic sleeping while reading personal development guru Steve Pavlina's blog. Steve took up polyphasic sleeping for over five months back in 2005 and is probably the most successful polyphasic sleeper out there, certainly on the Uberman schedule, so called because you have to be pretty damn hardcore to be able to keep on schedule with the naps, make it through the week of utter hell it requires to adjust to it, and then actually live an extra seven hours a day.
With Steve's example that it really is possible, and keen to have more time in my life, I commenced the Uberman schedule on January 1, 2009. This lasted until approximately April 2009, when increasing pressure on my schedule made it more and more difficult to keep. Consequently, I moved to the Everyman schedule and maintained this to date (July 2009).
There have been all kind of trials and tribulations, and I will try to answer some of the questions that people have asked Steve and others on the web that they couldn't reply to. For some reason, a lot of the polyphasic sleepers out there live very routine, stable lives, which make sit easy to maintain a polyphasic schedule, but renders them unable to give people answers to questions like "what if you get drunk?" Fortunately, I have a messy, chaotic student life and am in a good position to give a reply. :) This FAQ mainly applies to the Uberman schedule, which being much harder to do I had to pay a lot of attention to, but the general principles apply to Everyman as well.
See my polyphasic sleeping diary for the first fourteen days here. If you have any questions you would like to see added to this list, please contact me at ku.ca.retsehcnam.tneduts|hcolluCcM.haraS#ku.ca.retsehcnam.tneduts|hcolluCcM.haraS.
Do you not get tired?
Not when I'm on the schedule properly, no. When I've messed it up and am trying to get back into the swing of things, say after I've overslept for six hours or something, I will feel fatigued approximately twelve hours after I last overslept. If you can, however, push past that, it goes back to being fine.
How often do you oversleep?
A lot. This is for a variety of reasons, the major one being that polyphasic sleeping is relatively easy to adjust to physically but rather more difficult mentally. When stressed, my habit has always been, and remains, getting into bed, shutting my eyes, and hoping it all goes away. For reasons I don't understand, when monophasic, the most I could nap outside of the major night sleep was approximately two hours, maybe four if I tried to sleep again after I woke up. As a polyphasic, I can sleep for up to twelve with no problem. This was very disconcerting at first when I went to bed after a stressful exam at 4pm and woke up at one in the morning. I thus now use an alarm clock even for when I plan to oversleep, to ensure I don't go down for quite as long - usually I set the alarm for maybe three or six hours ahead.
Another reason for oversleeping is drunkenness, and missing a nap, both of which are covered below shortly.
What happens when you're drunk?
I don't really worry about keeping naps when drunk. I don't know about other people, but part of the pleasure of drinking for me is the bit at the end where I lie down in my nice comfy bed and enter oblivion. It also has the advantage that you wake up sober. Personally, I tend to give myself six hours or so after drinking to conk out and get back to normal, and if I do this I usually wake up without problems. I tried to get up three hours after a night out and ended up so groggy I fell asleep somewhere else for an hour completely unintentionally. Best sleep it off, I reckon.
What happens when you delay/miss a nap?
If you delay a nap by more than an hour, you will feel like rubbish for quite a few hours afterwards. It's not worth it if you can help it. If you miss a nap, you will start to feel extremely fatigued, unable to keep your eyes open, and slowly but surely start to fall asleep wherever you are. You will then oversleep, and still feel like rubbish for quite a few hours afterwards. Again, very much not worth it.
Surely if you oversleep that much you are not polyphasic?
No, it just means I am a rubbish polyphasic sleeper, just as I was a rubbish monophasic sleeper, and indeed most people are. How often do you get nine hours of uninterrupted sleep every night? One's sleeping pattern is an underlying default which is regularly ignored by everyone because life gets in the way. The fact is that although I am oversleeping, my body still considers six daily twenty minute naps spaced every four hours to be the norm, and delaying/missing any of these entails Bad Things. I haven't slept through the night since January 1 except once when very drunk, and indeed it seems that I actually can't anymore - an attempt to sleep through the night with my husband resulted in me waking up approximately every hour and a half and staring at the ceiling for a bit before I fell asleep for another ninety minutes. The idea of taking a nine hour night sleep and staying awake throughout the day seems rather alien to my body now.
How on earth do you fit a polyphasic sleeping schedule around a 9-5/monophasic day?
Actually, the days aren't the problem. The 8am nap can be shifted as early at seven so any 9am appointments or lectures are easily attended, and a noon nap can be simply fitted into a lunch break. The trouble comes with the 4pm and the 8pm naps, when extra curricular activities are regularly scheduled directly after lectures or the early evening. My Thursdays, for example, currently have lectures and various meetings of societies I belong to directly after one another from 3-7. Unfortunately I have had no answer to this and the reality is if your day is too full you simply have to sacrifice something to fit in the nap.
What if you have no access to a bed when a nap comes up?
One of the major benefits of polyphasic sleeping is you can sleep literally anywhere. Previous to switching to polyphasic sleeping I could pretty much only sleep on my front in a bed. Since starting polyphasic sleeping, I have slept on sofas, floors, the table of a restaurant while my friends had a meal, more trains than I can count, the toilet of a McDonalds, and even an MRI scanner (though that wasn't a scheduled nap…). I can sleep pretty much anywhere I can shield my eyes from light. I have entered REM sleep while sitting cross-legged on the floor of a train wrapped around a rucksack. Beds aren't really a problem.
