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Are Alternative Sleeping Patterns Effective?
shmookey asks: "Some people have adopted some unusual sleeping habits, which they believed help them work. The concept is simple: be active for a few hours, sleep for half an hour, wake up and then repeat. This supposedly maximized your effective REM sleeping time and cut back on wasted hours of idleness. Hack-a-day has a nice article and some links on this, which re-ignited my interest. Does anyone on Slashdot actually do this? How do you make it fit in with earning a living? What sacrifices do you have to make to live this kind of lifestyle?" Called polyphasic sleep, or "The Uberman's sleep schedule", this is not something to dive into lightly, as it requires rigid scheduling, and there may be unexpected complications and other issues. Has anyone tried this? What were your experiences?
An excellent writeup on the Uberman sleep schedule can be found here.
In the past I've restricted my sleep to as little as three hours a night for several weeks without ill effects, but I've never tried the Uberman sleep schedule. Now that I'm older, I seem to need my sleep much more desperately than I used to (I get physically ill if I get less than five hours sleep per night), so I doubt I'll be trying it anytime soon.
I have a friend who decided to try it during his long period of unemployment (in fact, I first heard of it from him), but he dropped out after a few weeks. I suspect that he just enjoyed sleeping too much to give up so much of it. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I really wonder. Biologically, we process melatonin best between the hours of 12:00am and 2:00am. I'm wondering, with our biology hardwired that way, is any alternate sleep patern ever effective?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
We all know how well this stuff worked out for Cosmo Kramer.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Let me tell you a bit about my experi... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
What limited info I know about long-term sleep deprivation is that its very deceptive. Subjects think they are fine once they get used to it. But objective tests show significant declines in cognition performance. The point: feeling fine and being fine are two different things when it comes to sleep and the brain.
Before embarking on this, I'd get and baseline some cognitive tests (memory, reaction time, logic) to ensure that the new schedule isn't adversing affecting your brain.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
check out http://www.stevepavlina.com/
see subject.
I can't remember where I read this, but apparently our urban ancestors had different sleep habits than we have today.
If I recall correctly, they would go to bed early, wake up about midnight, play around and eat for a few hours, and then go back to sleep. Then they would wake up early in the morning.
You could find vendors who would go down the street offering apples and such for sale in the middle of the night at that time.
Pretty weird.
Our habit of sleeping all in one chunk is probably a result of World War II, where the military enforced that sleep habit. Other than that, rural people live like this (sun up-sun down) for obvious reasons. They couldn't miss a moment of daylight.
I wouldn't be surprised if various patterns of sleep were highly effective. I know my children like the naps during the day, even if it means they only get 8 hours of sleep at night instead of 10.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
If you forcibly deprive someone of sleep, they end up with physical brain damage and then die. You're unlikely to be able to do that to yourself, but... take care, okay?
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after. -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I don't know about the half hour nap, four hours awake thing, but...without enough delta wave sleep a lot of important things don't happen, among them the relaxing and healing of muscle tissue. People subjected to traditional sleep deprivation develop fibromyalgia symptoms, one of the causes of fibromyalgia in many cases being a sleep defect that prevents entry into delta. I don't know if 30 minutes is enough time to get REM *and* Delta. Any sleep experts out there?
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time. For starters, it tends to take people a certain amount of time to get to sleep, which changes depending on time of day and overall sleep debt that has been built up. This wastes precious minutes.
As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt.
You don't WANT to maximise your REM sleep at the expense of slow-wave sleep. While it's true that REM sleep tends to happen in 90 minute cycles mostly unrelated to the sleep/wake cycle, REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep. In normal people, it tends to happen most towards the end of the sleep period. It's also interesting to note that people suffering from clinical depression tend to have a greater ratio of REM sleep to non-REM sleep.
It would be much more effective in my opinion to gradually decrease the amount of sleep you get each night by something like 15 minutes. Once you get down to around the 5-6 hour mark, you're likely to start to suffer for it, but if you break the rigid routine, you're likely to require less sleep than you did before decreasing sleep time. The theory goes that people who do this sleep more efficiently - they also tend to get greater periods of slow-wave sleep early in the sleep period.
And of course, the so-called 'Uberman' cycle completely ignores the effects that light and dark have on people. Try looking up the research of Dr. Leon Lack into bright light therapy. If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any. Even if your sleep/wake cycle becomes uncoupled with the time of day - which is unlikely considering that people with different sleep patterns like this STILL find it more difficult to get to sleep at certain times of day - bright light and darkness will probably have a big impact.
Polyphasic sleep is used by Solo Circumnavigating sailors. It's the only way to survive. Taking 20 minute catnaps is a lot safer than trying to sleep for hours at a time. Or, for that matter, doing something as dangerous as sailing around the world by yourself while chronicly sleep deprived. I think there was a Nova that talked about this sort of thing a while back.
this is not something to dive into lightly, as it requires rigid scheduling
Pfft. Just have a kid. I guarantee that at least one parent will automatically do this.
A friend of mine in College suggested this pattern of sleep to me awhile ago. (In fact, when I saw the /. headline, I tought he had submitted it.) I think he is fairly interested in trying this sleep pattern. I would be interested also if I didn't feel like it would interfere with lecture/lab times. It could also cause significant trouble at work. Convincing your boss that you need to sleep every 3 or 4 hours for a half hour mightn't go down too well. Plus if your boss knew you were undertaking such a sleep pattern, he might be worried about your mental ability to carry out your job. For now, I guess I'll stick to my normal sleep patern, 2am till 8am on weekdays and 4am to 1pm on weekends.
Well, not so much "experiments" as "crushing bouts of insomnia".
I have, in the past, maintained sleep schedules where I averaged just under 3 hours of sleep a night for well over a month at a time. I know precisely how much I was sleeping because I kept precise logs, as per my doctor's request. This wasn't by choice--I simply couldn't sleep.
You see, I've always struggled with insomnia, and twice in my life it's gotten this bad. As such, I've come to be aquainted with what affect sleep patterns can have on a person. I can say that a lot of what I'm reading in the "Uberman's Sleep Schedule" seems plausible, except the bit about not being tired. You're tired, damn tired, but you can't tell after a while.
Naturally, the circumstances for me were a bit... different, but I can't really recommend a schedule like this. When you don't get enough sleep, you're never really awake. Worse, you can't really tell how much it's affecting you while you're still suffering from sleep deprevation--it's a lot like being drunk in that regard. Only the incredibly foolish (or incredibly experienced) think they can tell how drunk they are.
What's the point of spending more time awake if you're only sort of awake?
On the other hand, it's only fair to mention that my curiosity is in fact piqued. I'm tempted to try it myself, and see what happens. Worst comes to worst, it could trigger another long-term disruption in my sleep schedule, but hey, at least that's a known evil!
-- That tickles!
If you forcibly deprive someone of sleep, they end up with physical brain damage and then die.
So it is true that my boss is trying to kill me. I though I was just being paranoid.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
I've basically slept anywhere from 3-5 hours a night for the past 20+ years, with no ill effects. I catch a cold maybe once a year, and most people think I look about 5 to 10 years younger than I am.
As far as cognition goes, I'm a surgeon and my patients do well.
I'll sleep more when I'm dead
..........FULL STOP.
I tried the "uberman's sleep schedule" for two weeks about three years ago. The first week was rough, but the second went pretty well. The rigidity really is a crucial factor... I overslept once and couldn't get back into the schedule (on the 13th or 14th day).
l e.
I've been working up a plan to get a schedule like this going again, but it's really tricky due to the various circumstances of real life... separate weekend activities/schedules from the rest of the week, parties or dates might last more than three hours... it's almost a catch-22 scenario for everyone past the age of four or so.
But the 'thirty minutes every four hours' schedule isn't the only alternative... as another poster mentioned, sleeping in a couple separate blocks also works -- e.g., a 3-1-2-2 schedule (a total of eight hours sleep with one block of 3 hours, a block of 1 hour, and so on), or similar. I've heard rumors from some psychology friends that the most effective sleep schedule is different for each person; perhaps experimenting with a few representative schedules is worth trying.
There is some good discussion on this very topic on everything2, just follow the wikipedia link through (e2 probably doesn't have quite as much server power): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uberman_sleep_schedu
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
Steve Pavlina, apparently a man with a huge amount of people following his blog about various ways of self-improvement, has rather nice coverage on his experiment with polyphasic sleep. Long story short, he's been doing it for over 90 days now and claims to have improved his quality of life tremendously. It's a nice read, go check it out. Here's an excerpt from his entry on day 90:
Personally, I do think polyphasic sleep can have a positive effect. It just takes a lot of character and a suitable life situation to make it work. Not for everybody, but not bogus either.
I was unemployed for a while and found that I quite enjoyed six hours of sleep twice a day. Now I sleep seven hours during the week and twelve to fifteen on the weekend (only once).
....that whole thing about having a boss, and all. If I had no other responsibilities but my own business, I'd try the 28 hour day, though - I've known for a long time that I just don't fit on the "normal" schedule. My grandmother was the same way. Maybe after I become independently wealthy.
Basically, I slept when I felt sleepy - it averaged about 50 to 90 minutes every four hours.
It was REALLY great for me. I definitely got more accomplished. On the other hand, it was driving those around me bonkers. I was either sleeping or going 100 miles an hour at various, and always changing, times of the day/night; so, they could not rely on me for help/conversation/etc unless they could fit it in a certain period.
Had to go to Europe and a "regular" sleeping pattern for a few months, so I changed back to "night" sleeping.
When circumstances allow it I will DEFINITELY go back to what I now know to be poliphasic sleep.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
For not reading any medical literature in the last ten years.
Fibromyalgia does exist, as has been shown by numerous double blind controlled studies, and the sleep study test. Just because medical science hasn't finalized on a complete theory of the disease doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Also, the implication that it's treated with anti-depressants because fibromyalgia sufferers are making it all up is insulting. It's well demonstrated that modifying neurotransmitter levels in the brain alters the perception of pain, along with a host of other effects. As an example, Cyclobenzaprine, an old tricyclic antidepressant that was so bad at treating depression they took it off the market, is now used to treat muscle spasms and the sleep defect of most fibromyalgia patients.
There are two remarkable qualities to the drug. First, you can use it for days at a time, and it only loses effectiveness after about 120 waking hours. At that point you need to sleep - but you never crash; you just sleep a normal 8 hours, wake up refreshed, and swallow the next pill.
One of the problems with a polyphasic sleep schedule is that it doesn't jive well with the normal structure of society. But with Provigil, you can still be fairly well synced-up with everybody else.
Besides, why change your behavior when you can just use drugs?
Am I the only one who is alarmed by the phrase "it sort of feels like my brain is soaking in a warm jacuzzi" or by the idea that one might constantly feel like they just woke up in the morning?
Don't we drink coffee because it gets rid of those sensations?
Links please... Something like this would be considered Major enough that the users will need to instantly plop something in their bookmarks listing - just like everything else on the Internet that gets plopped into a single bookmark listing never to be looked at again.
On a more serious note, such drugs could easily be classified as "performance-enhancing", and could easily cause people to be disqualified when they try to enter the olympics or some other athletics competition. (If cough medicine is somehow tagged as a performance enhancer, then so could this anti-sleep pill.)
Actually, naturally, a human will go to a 25 hour sleep cycle when not affected solely by the sunlight, so instead of an extremely short day before sleep, it would actually be more effective to just stay up longer between sleeping the amount of time you would standardly sleep. In effect, you would be shrinking the sleeping:awake ratio, so it'd be doing the same thing.
http://www.christiannerds.com/, TRUTH and Technology
My sleep cycle is really 30 to 32 hours. Thats just what feels normal. I have to force myself to sleep every night, and have trouble getting up in the morning. But on holidays, I just take the 12 hours sleep + 24 hours awake time which feels very natural. I've slept constantly for well over 24 hours, more like 28 hours, after having been awake for 48+ hours. This was when I wasnt working.
I cant do short cycles, and I could never do afternoon naps. Once I'm out, I'm out at least 7 hours, preferably 12 hours.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The substance is called Modafinil. And I can say from, um, some people that I know, um, that it does what it claims to. The weird thing about it is that it takes a long time to kick in, unlike caffeine, and its effects last for a long time. Even weirder, you can't feel any effects from it at all - that's the point. It's not a stimulant and has no "feel good" properties of other stimulants - you just never feel sleepy. You can basically function fully normally on 4-6 hours a night with it. The only side effect seems to be making your urine smell funny.
In short, many primary care physicians, and many rheumatologists, do not believe that fibromyalgia is an actual disease. I am not the one arguing this point; I'm merely restating the positions of others. If you believe that the article is incorrect then feel free to edit it or explain your rationale on the discussion page.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I tried it off-and-on for a couple of years without much success. In the end, it seems that my body firmly insists on at least 6 hours of sleep per 24, but that's a bit better than the 10 it would take if I let it. I eventually decided the schedule's disruptive effects and the incredible amount of effort it was taking didn't yield a net gain.
Probably the best bit of advice I can offer is to avoid caffiene entirely. When I experimented with having a little diet soda over the nighttime hours is the only time I feel like it was something 'dangerous'.
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/uberman/
this website presented an idea on the topic a while ago. http://emptv.com/sleepcycles.php some of his ideas are pretty wild!
The purpose of this to increase asceticism, mainly to decrease sexual desire which is a distraction while meditating.
Of course, ideally, your meditation can help you feel well rested even on less sleep. In practice this did not work for me, of course I'm still a beginner at meditation.
There is no question that a nap has a great deal of restorative power. However, I'm not so sure that nothing but naps is best.
The best thing I have found for memory, sharpness of mind, general energy ved my level, and productivity is to NEVER use an alarm clock. Of course, I telecommute so it's somewhat easier for me to get away with that. Interestingly, once I gave up on the alarm blasting me out of bed, AND on staying up at night after I get tired, I found that I settled into a natural rythem where I sleep approximatly 8 hours a night. After still longer, it became ALMOST reliable. That is, if I need to get up an hour earlier in the morning, going to bed an hour earlier will do it.
It also greatly improved my general outlook (which was around the borderline of depression before).
I do know that sleep deprivation is insideous and causes it's sufferers to underestimate their impairment.
this article links to the 28 hour day. http://www.dbeat.com/28/ I think its an excellent idea.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
Having done the provigil thing, I can say this: It's good stuff, overall, but I don't use it anymore.
I suffer from hypersomnia; so I'm a prime candidate for provigil. Unmedicated, I sleep over 12 hours a day. (Well, I have to qualify this -- I'm also such a light sleeper that the sound of the sheets as I roll over can wake me up. My college roomate loved me because nobody could pull pranks on him while he was asleep.) It really sucks to sleep this much. It's great for a vacation - but when you can't escape sleep, it's another story. (Falling asleep at inopprotune times is not only embarassing, but life-threatening).
Provigil made a huge difference -- I was able to stay awake enough to have something like a normal life, but was entirely free of the 'hummingbird' feeling of a stimulant. The problem is the stuff is obscenely expensive. (My doc told me about a salesman comparing the high cost to a few cups of starbucks per day).
I stopped taking provigil because I found a considerably less expensive drug whose side-effects I could live with.
Provigil is not without side effects. One that I discovered on my own (and was confirmed through a bit of research): Provigil can cause some rather powerfully rank... urine. Sure, it's not one of those things people will worry much about, but it is an unpleasent side effect.
For starters, it tends to take people a certain amount of time to get to sleep, which changes depending on time of day and overall sleep debt that has been built up. This wastes precious minutes.
the whole point of polyphasic sleep is to get to a point where your body can instantly go to sleep. the first week is the problem because you arent trained for that yet, it takes forever to go to sleep after you slept four hours ago. the trick with polyphasic sleep, the way to learn how to do it is, you only put your head down on the pillow for the alloted time. sleep or no. by the end of day three a 15 minute nap is instant and divine. there is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
As well as this, there have been quite a few studies that have examined what happens to people who try polyphasic sleep. The results tend to involve an ever-increasing sleep debt. You could try looking for the '90 minute day' - most participants who come out of those experiments will afterwards sleep for quite a while. That's pretty strong evidence that they've built up quite a bit of sleep debt.
like most things in nature, growth is bounded. if you dont sleep for four days straight, you dont need 24 hours of consecutive sleep. polyphasic sleep simply finds that upper bound of sleep debt very quickly and forces your body to adjust to recieving and maximizing the short duration payments it recieves. That restlessness before sleep you spoke of, the inability to get to sleep... the point of polyphasic is to overcome that.
REM sleep is not the only goal of sleep
indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through.
"If you are stupid enough to try polyphasic sleep, you might want to make sure that during your wake periods, you're exposed to quite strong light and during your sleep periods, you don't get any."
As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will.
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In summation;
You list a number of barriers to starting polyphasic sleep; trying to get to sleep in the middle of the day, trying to sleep during the light, &c &c. Its true taht these all can be barriers to entry but the point of the exercise is to overcome these barriers, to adjust your system, maximize sleep value and reap enormous temporal rewards. the question is "can we go to the moon?" and you start talking about how gravity's keeping us down... well great, the question wasnt "is it easy", the question is, is it possible.
Polyphasic sleep isn't an effective long-term way to decrease your overall sleep time.
Yes and no. Polyphasic sleep is an exceedingly effective way to get the magic 26 hour day. Yes, it really is. It works great, you feel fine (after you get adjusted & break through the problems establishing the cycle) and you're sleeping one third the time.
What makes your statement right is the terms "long-term":
Actually living a polyphasic sleep cycle, once you've started it, is extremely difficult. The cycle continues itself fine, without problems, but it is extremely inflexible to the callings of real normal life. It is an unstable equilibrium, waiting for the first moment of deviation to go spiralling out of control. Accidentally oversleeping can have devestating effects, missing a regular rest interval will crush you. When its working, it works fine, there are really no self evident mental defects, no externally discernable oddities (besides the disappearing every four hours)... but keeping it up is exceedingly hard to manage in a relatively busy world. Thats the biggest problem with polyphasic sleep, with normal sleep you can skip nights here&there,
The FDA seems to think otherwise.
But we drink alcohol to bring them back!
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Oi. I'd say that's a bit of an exaggeration. I found that Provigil (or Alertec) was better than Ritalin, but not nearly as effective as frequent, very small, carefully metered doses of methamphetamine. The problem is, Provigil really only staves off the groggies, the slackjaw, the blearies. When you do finally crash (and nothing can prevent the eventual crash-- nothing), you don't wake up refreshed after 8 hours so much as merely "mostly de-tired". Most people-- I'd say close to 95%-- don't know what it feels like to be truly well rested. Nobody gets enough sleep. 8 or 9 hours a night is ideal. We can do with less, but it's not enough. What people think of as "rested" is really just "adequately functional". Provigil manages to keep you at "functional" for quite a while, but it that's about it. Really, I think people need to take a week or two off and actually get enough rest before they describe the effects of sleep regulating meds like these.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
The more I read polarised opinions like yours the more I warm to the idea that there is a wider biological difference between different people than is generally understood.
:) of humans. One group of people living in a hostile environment (lions, tigers, grue's, whatever) over a period of several thousand generations might have developed a completely different sleep pattern to a group living in relative safety. You don't want to be too much of a heavy sleeper if something could find you and eat you at a moments notice! On the other hand if you can sleep deeply in relative safely, it would be an advantage to do so.
Most of the studies I am aware of on how humans react to different things (be it different sleeping patterns or food additives) fail to consider that the people in their sample group might be from a similar gene pool and so might react the same.
Consider the different 'races' (don't flame me for using that word please
So assuming that my reasoning is valid, there is an example of two groups who could respond quite differently to a study into sleeping patterns...
Hi, I did the writeup on Everything2 about this schedule. I felt fine for the nearly six months I did it, and I was in school at the time doing 22-credit-hour semesters on a double philosophy and math major. I don't think my grades suffered, but I wasn't monitoring specifically for that at the time, so hmm.
;)
I think you make a good point--and I think the advice to do some initial, during and post-testing is a great idea; somebody should totally do that. Um, I can't at the time being, so it'll have to be somebody else.
Anyway, I wrote a follow-up to the original article that discusses more of the long-term physical effects I noticed, if you care. http://pure-doxyk.livejournal.com/229675.html
-K*
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Prof. Irwin Corey
There is no "wasted minutes", only ever growing debt and madness which payoff latter by sending you instantly to sleep.
Not so. Even in extended trials of people whose sleep/wake cycle became completely decoupled from their body temperature rhythm and day/night cycle still showed significant differences in how long it took to get to sleep at different times of the day. It's even been theorized that there are 'wake maintenance' zones.
indeed, some people naturally have no REM at all. on the other hand, it does signify a very deep state of slumber. if you can get to rem directly, you're skipping many of "entering sleep" stages most people go through.
REM sleep does NOT signify a very 'deep' state of slumber. It is characterized by rapid eye movement - EEGs also show a lot of activity, similar to when people are awake with their eyes open. It also tends to take place closer to stage one sleep (lightest) than stage four (heaviest). People are generally more easy to wake up during REM than during stage 4, so your statement that REM signifies a deep state of slumber is absolutely untrue.
I suspect that it would be likely that people who deprive themselves of sleep in this way would tend to go to stage 4 sleep more quickly and be REM deprived, based on what I've seen of sleep deprivation research. People don't dream solely during REM sleep.
As for light cycles, most people sleep through some part of daylight. 15 minute and one hour naps throughout the day is not seriously going to injure your daylight exposure. Sitting in cublices all day will.
I'm not talking about negative effects of no daylight exposure. I'm saying that you are likely to find it easier to stay awake if you make sure that you get strong light exposure during your wake periods. Light acts as a zeitgeiber, prompting awakening. While it is true that a lot of people sleep through some part of daylight (myself included), I don't know of anyone who finds it easy to sleep outdoors here in Australia during summer and stay asleep when exposed to the bright light.
Additionally, shining a bright light in peoples eyes constantly has been used as a torture method to induce sleep deprivation, for quite some time. I know that the GULAG did it...
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I certainly didn't say that it was impossible to do polyphasic sleep, just that it was stupid. I still hold firm to that statement. I strongly doubt the scientific validity of the practise. I have to do a thesis this year, I think I've got an idea to pitch to my supervisor now...
People can adjust to polyphasic cycles as well as to things such as the 28 hour day. In fact, in a free running environment without external cues, people tend to live around a 28-30 hour day. Others have been known to live something as short as a 12 hour day.
Before I'd believe any of the sales pitch, I'd love to see some decent studies on it because all of the research to date, long and short term, tends to imply that it's probably not a good idea, at least in a normal environment. In circumstances of long-term sleep deprivation, people tend to swear that they feel fine. Examination of their performance in cognitive tasks say otherwise. I would also love to see how many sleep lapses these people have during their day-to-day living. I've noticed a few people saying that doing the uberman cycle increases appetite. Appetite increases are strongly correlated with sleep deprivation.
All this aside, as you said - it's virtually impossible to do for a long period of time. That is, unless the person doing it is a non-working agoraphobic who doesn't have to worry too much about conforming to the real worlds expectations that he'll go to certain places and do certain things at vertain times. Even if it was physically great for you (which I really doubt), the practical considerations alone would be enough to warrant not bothering with it for most people.
...But I wrote the follow-up pretty recently, and I had to put it on LJ because I lost the pwd on that E2 account like, ages ago, so I imagine nobody's really found it yet. ;) It pretty much answers all the questions I've collected over the years about the experiment, and it makes me wish like hell I'd kept better notes.
...Or follow the link on my homepage. I totally miss that schedule, it was the best sleep and the most awesome gig, and thank you all so much for rubbing salt in the wound. ;)
'Tis here: http://pure-doxyk.livejournal.com/229675.html
-K*
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Prof. Irwin Corey
Those are NOT his experiences with wolves. The story is fiction. The movie is fiction. He did NOT live on mice for an entire summer. He did *NOT* have a rapport with a wolf in the far North.
Belief in the man as a factual historian is stupid to say the least.
This is yet another example of why sources on the Internet, now percolated through hundreds or thousands of sites one to the other like some kind of parasitic frenzy, are worthless as a research source.
So gimme a break already!
I wrote a journal entry about it at the time.
I did doubledays (48-hour day cycles) extensively when I was working as a sysadmin and got stranded by Boston's subway (the "T") shutting down for the night. At first I took naps, but soon started working through the night and all of the next day, being awake for 36 hours of 48, and at my desk working for 30 of those. For reference, this is when I was about 27-30 years old.
You're all probably familiar with this one, so what's to tell? The 24 works far better with the rest of the world, but 28 is more natural and probably a bit more productive, if you function in near-total isolation, anyway.
I did this one for most of my sophomore year in college. Two 9-hour periods of awakeness, each followed by 3 hours of sleep.
I was on this schedule for only 2 weeks (when I was somewhat over 30 years old), but it felt great. It took me no getting used to, I never needed an alarm clock, and I felt invigorated. I spent 4.5 hours awake, then 1.5 hours asleep. Every meal was breakfast.
Long before I learned of REM cycles, back before the information age (in the 1970s), I plotted my waking times and learned that I woke easily at multiples of 90 minutes after I fell asleep. I would typically wake after 7.5 hours, but also woke easily after 6 or 4.5 hours. With effort, I could wake up after 3 hours. These are the 90-minute cycles of natural sleep. I think it unwise to go for a long time without getting 90-minute periods of sleep, and I've heard of research studies that back me up on that.
The more 90-minute sleep cycles you have in a row, the more "watered-down" the later ones become. The first hours of sleep are the deepest and most important, while the later ones are just a few steps down
We're all familiar with the terms "morning person" or "night owl", but it would be interesting to see how many people's internal clocks are a lot different than average.
I've been doing the Uberman sleep schedule for the past month. So far it's going great. Obviously my knowledge is all subjective, but based on my performance in school, I haven't lost any mental faculties. After spending some time on the schedule, it becomes less rigid (which seems to be the primary complaint here). Just during the past week I've started moving my naps around by as much as 1.5 hours, with no ill effects. So far this is working better for me, as I can take less time between naps at night, when I'm drowsier, and more time during the day, when I'm more alert.
I don't know if this will eventually cause me to die or go insane (I guess that's part of the fun of trying new things), but I can report that polyphasic sleep is possible and sustainable, at least for a month. After the adaptation (for me it took two weeks or so), it's not really hard to maintain. And since I can shift my naps, I don't see any reason to give this up.
I can testify that Provigil (modafinil) works incredibly well. The only side effect I've experienced is a tendency to exacerbate headaches. If you stay up too long, you begin to feel some peripheral effects of sleep deprivation. (Staying up for 48 hours straight results in some astereognosis, whether you're on modafinil or not.) It doesn't appear to be addictive, since it's easy to stop and doesn't seem to produce real cravings. It is, however, vaguely habit-forming, as you realize you can just take a pill whenever you're tired and feel completely normal.
There's another major benefit of modafinil over amphetamine-type stimulants: you can go to sleep if you want to. It doesn't stop you from sleeping, just remove the fatigue. And apparently, you spend more time in deep sleep and less time in shallower stages. It's also much easier to get up in the morning. Overall, if you can find someplace to get it, I highly recommend it. One word of caution, however: while it doesn't seem to have too many adverse effects when combined with alcohol, experiences with other substances are mixed.
Provigil does seem to actually help stop you from crashing. There was a study (search PubMed if you're interested) where subjects stayed up for 64 hours straight. While those on some variation of amphetamine and those taking a placebo averaged 15 hours of recovery sleep, those on Provigil averaged 10.
It does appear that some stages of sleep (most notably, REM) are unnecessary, as certain drugs will nearly completely suppress them but people go on living their lives normally. One hypothesis suggests that REM merely exists to make waking easier, thus explaining why REM periods increase in duration as people are more rested. Really, no one knows much about sleep, so it does make sense to be cautious before embarking on some Great Sleep Deprivation Experiment.
I go to sleep when I'm sleepy, and I wake up when I'm rested. This seems to result in a 25 to 28 hour cycle, depending on what time of day I start the "day" and what I'm doing. (For some reason, having new video games around makes the cycle longer . . .)
:)
Every once in a while I run into problems at work thanks to this (I'm a coder), and some people just don't seem to understand it. It can also make meeting up with friends more difficult. However, I'm far more productive - partly because I often end up working at midnight when there's nobody around, and partly because a 24-hour schedule just doesn't work for me. (I tried it for something like six years - it stopped working in high school, and I dropped out of two colleges thanks to that 24-hour schedule before I said "fuck this".)
I don't consider my sleeping pattern to be a strength - it's what works for me, but it would probably be better if the 24-hour cycle worked for me. It doesn't, though, so I do this.
I'm writing this at 1:17 AM while I eat breakfast.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I used to experience similar symptoms while half-asleep on a desk in class.
...or maybe I was just hallucinating.
The truly odd part was that I retained voluntary control over my fingertips and toes, and I could eventually wake myself up by twitching around until it moved my hand, then use that to move my arm, and so on. Also, math tended to make more sense when I couldn't move...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
- Are you going to tell us what this 'considerably less expensive drug' turned out to be? Good for those of us considering alternative options.
For one quarter in college, I'd sleep from roughly 10am to 6pm. I'd work or be social from about 6pm to midnight. I'd spend midnight to 8am on school, hacking code, and whatever else I came up with. Then all my classes were morning classes. My roommate hated it, but I never had to talk to him about it because I was asleep or gone while he was awake.
A complete sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes and includes four stages of non-REM sleep and a stage of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. I read a comment saying some people do not experience REM sleep. The fact of the matter is, if you are sleeping normally, part of your sleep cycle does include REM sleep, in which dreams are most realistic and the brains creativity peaks. Do not think that if you can't remember having any dreams, that you did not have any. Everyone has dreams, every sleep cycle, but the brain tends to erase the dreams you have after each one, if you don't wake up after each cycle.
Anyways, it's late, so I'm going to bed... Hopefully I'll have some cool dreams :P.
"Besides, why change your behavior when you can just use drugs?"
They call 'em fingers, but I've never seen 'em fing.
Oh, wait, there they go....
In first grade I was pulling all-nighters, seeing how many times I could flip Asteroids (forget). In middle school it was the BBS, calling and operating. Melatonin notwithstanding, my internal "wind down" clock shows little if any regularity. Fast forward. This is how I do it now: sleep when sleepy, wake when refreshed; repeat. My work (composer) fits comfortably in my waking hours. I cannot imagine a more efficient way to structure it. My body follows it's own natural, organic rest schedule; I've no difficulty significantly extending my awake time as needed; when my immune system requires greater rest in which to fight off a virus, it gets it, and sooner rather than later. My sleep patterns slide around, but overall, 4 up and 4 down is close a description as any. The Uberman deal sounds pretty hardcore. Google Answers http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=41 3131 has some links to scientific research on that method.
I can't recommend my sleep habits to anyone, not knowing how they'd work for you. But I have "converted" a couple of people, and while perhaps lacking the freedom I have, don't know how they put up with the hassle of the conventional schedule.
Whatever works, like always.
Okay, I wrote the E2 article. I did this for almost 6 months, and I had NONE of the problems you describe, including sleep debt: When I came off the schedule (not because I wanted to), I just started sleeping 8 hrs a night again. Some, but not all, of the sleep disorders that the schedule "cured" for me came back, but not as severely, and over time I got rid of them through other means.
No, light and dark caused me no trouble whatsoever. I didn't get tired when it was dark, and I had no trouble falling asleep in broad daylight (as long as it was naptime). Nor did any time get wasted falling asleep...before this schedule, it used to take me at least an hour to get to sleep (hell, it still takes at least half an hour), but while I was on it I could fall out in less than 5 minutes, every time. I could also, once I was adjusted, wake up after exactly 20 minutes without an alarm clock.
A polyphasic schedule, properly adhered to, is NOT the same as just reducing the amount of time you sleep. It's not just "sleeping less", it's "going to sleep every 4 hours". And for every ten people who say it didn't work (and who all, in my experience, didn't have the discipline to keep the schedule as strictly as is required), there are a few like myself and Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/ who did it properly and experienced no ill effects whatsoever. (I'm not counting adjustment issues, which can indeed make you feel a little crazy or disoriented for a while, but that's mostly because you're no longer operating on the same wavelength as the rest of the herd, and that does mess with your brain a bit -- you get over it, though.)
For a fuller list of long and short-term side-effects that I felt, you can read my follow-up article (http://pure-doxyk.livejournal.com/229675.html); and I strongly suggest reading Steve's site, since he did a much more thorough job of cataloging his progress as he adopted the schedule.
Ta!
-K*
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Prof. Irwin Corey
> Has anyone tried this?
Falling asleep in front of the computer every few hours? Sure.
> What were your experiences?
It's likely to get you fired.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
For some people melatonin can cause vivid dreaming and nightmares- it did for me. I was cautioned about it before I took it. I took the 3mg recommended dosage for three nights. Then I experienced a nightmare that was not a normal bad dream, but much worse. I woke up screaming (never done that before), but even though I was awake and my husband was talking to me, I couldn't get the dream to stop for over an hour. I knew it was a dream, but I couldn't get out of it- it was still happening in my mind. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
If I hadn't been warned that melatonin could cause nightmares I wouldn't have made the connection and would have kept taking it. As it was, I took it back to the store and got a refund the next day. I did a google before posting this and saw that others have experienced the same thing.
I think there are safer ways of getting to sleep if sleep is a problem: limiting bright lights and stimulation for several hours before bed by turning off the TV and computer (hard to do, I know), reducing caffeine during the day (another toughie), chamomile tea, or warm milk before bed (the magnesium is a natural sedative and most people are magnesium deficient), a drop of lavender essential oil on the pillow can help, too.
Oh indeed, Provigil does soften the "crash" at the end. My point is that I don't think people actually know how to properly gauge what constitutes true recovery. After skipping two nights of sleep and then sleeping until they felt "rested", whether it was 10 or 15 hours is largely immaterial to my larger point. A have serious doubts that those subjects knew they were still tired because the normal baseline in the "modern world" seems to invariably be a state of mild-to-moderate sleep deprivation.
On a side note, I found that the additional "crash time" of amphetamine was more than made up for by a certain degree of "productive enthusiasm" that Provigil didn't provide. In the end though, I found that pharmaceutical solutions were inadequate for my hypersomnia. What I really needed was to have its underlying causes addressed.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
This is the first I am reading of any of this, so I don't assume to know the answer one way or the other. BUT, what the hell makes you an expert on the matter, and with no sources to boot?? The most I can find is one (1) instance in which the Toronto Star claimed that he was lying about the time he spent with these wolves. You, with the big mouth and short temper, clear it up for everybody or go fuck off. Thank you.
why? forty-two.
So I am reading all the comments on this and everybody seems to be missing the big one, why the hell would you want to do this? People who advocate this really need to get a life outside work and learn to relax (what sleeping is for most people, RELAXING). I put in a 84 hour work week at a tech firm and still find time to sleep 7 to 8 hours a day, go to the gym, drink with friends, and pursue my hobbies (reading and gaming). Lack of time really doesn't seem to be a problem. I just fail to see the need for the uberman keep up with the jones hyperproductivity that plagues America. Sit down and breath for once, you will find life much more enjoyable.
De Oppresso Liber
Unless you have serious brain damage, you need at least around 8h/day (there is some variation, but not much) on average. When you get them doesn't matter. If you try to sleep less, your body will accumulate a "sleep debt" until you catch up (say, on the weekend); while you have a sleep debt, you'll perform progressively worse.
If you don't catch up on your sleep debt, you'll start having microsleep episodes--you'll black out for seconds at a time and not even notice it; if that happens while driving, you may die. (Microsleep episodes are insufficient to catch up on your sleep--they are just an emergency measure. If you still don't catch up with a real sleep, you'll start having hallucinations.)
Since you need at least 8h anyway, and since there is nothing to be gained by splitting it up, it's simplest to do them at one stretch, although in some environments, people find it convenient to split it up into two separate periods.
Note that 8h/day is a minimum. When you're catching up with a sleep debt, you may sleep much longer. Even when you don't have a sleep debt, it's normal to sleep longer if you don't have anything on your mind. But while you can go into sleep debt, you can't "save up" sleep for later use.
Here is some more info.
Nobody gets enough sleep. 8 or 9 hours a night is ideal.
Ideal is about 10h/night, like humans used to get (usually together with a moderate amount of physical activity during the day). 8h/night is the minimum for most people.
The number sound a little exaggerated, but that type of schedule is possible for most people: you accumulate lots of sleep debt during the week and make it up on the weekend.
Note that you don't quite need to make up your sleep debt exactly hour-for-hour, but, in return, you'll also not function as well while you have a sleep debt.
I don't need to prove anything. They are the ones making the claims. They supplied no proof. There is no proof he did any of the things in the novel! Farley himself never defended himself against any of the claims made by John Goddard in the May 1996 article of Saturday Night Magazine.
Why don't you look up "Hardly Know-It" on Google, since you're such a smart fellow, and read the Salon article about the guy? This is my last response to you. You clearly have no ability to research beyond simple Google searches; I'm not going to do any more of your drudgework for you.
Go to your local library, read up on the controversy, and stop buying the lying hype about Farley like some kind of patsy.
I've tried the 12 and 14 hour day.. Couldn't do 'em.
One odd one I have found worked for me was the "48 hour day". Did it while working graveyard for probably six months when I had three non-sequential days off (Wed, Sat/Sun). Wake up 11pm Monday, work a 10, goof off for 12 hours in the daylight, work a 10, crash for 12 hours and repeat. (Four one hour drives to and from work). The last day off was either catch a four hour nap in the afternoon or go to bed a little early and catch 14 leading into the week. Didn't drink too much coffee, didn't get cranky, wasn't too dull-headed at the end of the second work day.
Right now my sleep schedule is all fouled; My girlfriend works days, I'm on nights, and none of the days off match. So I end up doing things like staying up 24 hours straight every Wednesday to flip back to sleeping nights on the weekend so I still have a sex life. I drink waaay too much caffeine with the irregular system, and am a total asshole some mornings, but meh.
.sig: Now legally binding!
The amount of REM sleep that an animal requires depends on how long it's taken care of by other animals.
.
"A different approach to assessing the relation between REM sleep and intelligence is to examine the enormous variation in amount of REM sleep across mammals. Contrary to what might be expected, humans do not exhibit unusually high amounts of REM sleep, calculated either in hours per 24-hour period or as a percentage of sleep time. Figure 1 presents examples of species with high and low amounts of REM sleep. In general, animals that are born relatively mature, such as the guinea pig and marine mammals, have low amounts of REM sleep, whereas animals born relatively immature, such as the platypus, ferret, and armadillo, have high amounts of REM sleep throughout their lives (36, 37). "
36. J. M. Siegel, et al., Neuroscience 91, 391 (1999)
37. H. Zepelin, in Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, M. H. Kryger, T. Roth, W. C. Dement, Eds. (Saunders, Philadelphia, ed. 3. 2000), pp. 82-92.
The passage and its bibliography was found here
REM seems to be there to help build instincts and whatnot. It happens to occur more later in sleep because sleep just gets lighter as it goes. (graph here)
Well, yes, that's another hypothesis, but the function of sleep is still pretty ambiguous. While there are a few proven effects of sleep deprivation, little is known about the evolutionary purpose of sleep. You might want to look at this article from Nature for a more comprehensive and up-to-date review.
At the time I was a grad student, not working, and due to a quirk in my university schedule, only taking one course at the time. I did not need much of a social life at the time, so I decided to try it: 2 hours awake, half hour sleep. I set alarms for when I had to go to sleep or wake up. I timed it so that my only class, a 2-hour lecture, fit into a 2-hour wakeful time slot. Once or twice I had to take my half-hour nap on school grounds (I found a spot in the library), but I adhered to the schedule strictly.
It did not work. I lasted somewhere more than 24 hours but less than 36. I did not feel particularly sleepy at the time, although it felt weird, something I attributed to just being disoriented on my schedule. But during one of my supposed half-hour naps, I slept right through the fairly loud alarm and ended up sleeping 3-4 hours. That threw my schedule off, and since the total number of sleeping hours per day with the extra-long nap was the same as my usual number of hours, there was no point trying this new schedule, so I went back to the conventional sleep schedule.
Thought people might like to know.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
On the other hand, I noticed that when I take short, deep naps during long, crowded and boring meetings, I often feel more relaxed than if I did my regular 8 hrs sleep. Maybe this has to do with the interruption of sleep right before REM, or something like that..
raising babies Bwaaaahahahahah!!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
My brother-in-law works at an oil refinery in southern Louisiana. The plant where he works at has a weird shift schedule based on a 10 day "week". They work 12 hour shifts during the day for 3 days in a row then get 3 days off. Then they work another 2 days for 12 hours/day and then get 2 days off. Then they switch to nights and start the schedule over again. So that's 3-on, 3-off, 2-on, 2-off days, then 3-on, 3-off, 2-on, 2-off nights. Supposedly they did some study that showed this kept the workers more alert and better rested as they had longer recovery times, and rolling over to the night shift falls in line with theories that the body clock tends to run slower than 24 hours/day (hence the 28 hour theory, etc.)
Other refineries follow different schedules. One I worked at has a schedule of 7-on, 7-off days, then 7-on, 7-off nights. And another plant that I almost took a job at has 3 days at 12 hours, 1 day at 8 hours, then 3 days off, then they go for 3 days at 12 hours, followed by 4 days off. And then they start all over, for night shifts!
I'm currently working a plain ol' ordinary 8 hours a day, 5 days a week day job with weekends off, and frankly, I find it torture because I can't keep my sleeping habits on a schedule as rigid as my job. I have a tendency to nap in the evenings and then stay up until the wee hours of the morning, then "nap" a little longer before going to work. Then I stay up until sunrise and sleep until noon on the weekends (and no, it's not because I'm out drinking.) I'd love to work a schedule that's more flexible, but I can't work at night because my workplace is only open during the day (and besides that I wouldn't want the sun to set on me in the hood where I work, somebody might cap my ass), and I can't telecommute, because of the nature of my job. (I've done autocad drawings and worked on spreadsheets for work at home, but not on a regular basis as I still gotta go in for a full day the next day, and don't want to burn my candle at both ends.)
I have worked alot of night shifts, way too many. Sometimes it tends to catch up with me, and getting older now, I realize this. I still prefer (and do sleep better) during day light hours. In HS I finished all my work before classes end, rarely had homework, and if I did I would spend an hour tops when I got home to finish it.......then I went out and partied (alot). I seemed to manage thru HS just fine, even though on days off of school or my weekend if I didnt go out, I could consume about 14hrs of sleep. I once slept thru an entire weekend when the house was being remodeled and only woke to use the restroom, I think I may have been sick too.
:) See where this is going yet? I started working night shifts shortly after 98 and for the most part, worked more nights than evening and even less days. A good bit of the time I spent in AZ (really bright sun) and tried to avoid it at all cost. Covered the windows, slept with eyepatches, etc. I still find myself sleeping better in the days, which sucks, maybe one day I will be 'normal'.
:)
For my last year in HS and the year following, I ran a self made business and worked out of the house, so I slept whenever I felt I needed it, however still being 'youthful & dumb', I partied alot.
I dont party nearly *enough* as much as I did before, but Im getting older now too. I have went thru working 11hr night shifts to having an infant at the same time (and guess who was up when the baby was even on days off). Last night I managed to sleep from abit after midnight til right before 9am, until a damn bird woke me up that wants to nest in the shutters of our house, I need a bb gun, anyways. It takes sometime to get back into the norm of things, maybe I will maybe I wont. I dont wake well to alarms (music I can handle sometimes, the BUZZZZ thing no way), I still do better as a night hawk than a morning bird. Naps still help and Im not scared to admit that, naps are good, esp. lazy sunday naps when nothing good is on tv and you dont feel like gaming.
While Mowat's writing tends to be somewhat, ah, enhanced for dramatic effect, Goddard doesn't seem so lily-pure either. Judging by the attitudes he expresses in various interviews, he's not above a little embellishment in the name of his own causes de jour.
In fact after reading whatever Google spit up on the controversy, I've come to the opinion that much of what Goddard had to say about Mowat was merely bashing someone he thought of as a rival competing for the same readers' eyeballs.
The two of 'em remind me a great deal of how rival explorers trashed each other's motives back in the days of Amundsen and Perry....
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've never been able to sustain it (getting busy at work seems to wreck the cycle), but even as a card-carrying night-person the most effective sleep pattern I've ever had has involved getting up at 6am, having a completely fruit-based breakfast, going straight to the gym for an hour of cardio or weights, by the end of which I'm really awake, being at work by 8am (I live 4 mins from work, and really recommend it), and thereby being being absolutely stuffed by around 9 at night, and ready for a solid 8+ hrs of sleep. You're out of sync with a lot of people, but your alertness is amazing. I went into UrbanMonkMode (TM) for my own personal 'Summer of Code' (yep, southern hemisphere) on the holidays and I was amazed at how much good stuff I wrote in a single solid week following this pattern -- problems I'd toyed around with for a few years were knocked over one after the other. The combination of sleep cycle, diet and exercise has an impressive affect on coding ability.
Is this what they were doing on Lost, with the alarm every 108 minutes? That opens up a whole lot of intepretation...
Staying up for 48+ hours also throws off your sense of time. Standing watch in the Navy is usually comprised of 2 to 6 hour shifts (four is typical, but manning can dictate otherwise). The dreaded 0000-0400 shift (or balls to four, as it's commonly known) ensures you probably won't get any sleep that night, since you generally have to be up by around 0500. You can sometimes push it to nearly 7 if you sacrifice hygiene and/or food, but if you're living in a common quarters environment, you can be pretty sure that other people getting up in the meantime will make enough noise to prevent any quality sleep. At any rate, after standing the mid watch, you tend to lose track of what day is what. That can be detrimental, especially where time-sensitive matters are concerned. Although, on the upside, the weekend sometimes seems to arrive faster if you've missed a night of sleep.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
While I realize this is entirely un-scientific, working on that shift allowed me to be as healthy as I have ever been in my adult life. All that while eating a terrible bachelor diet of almost entirely fast food.
While my chance for incidence of cancer might have increased slightly (absolue risk), my chace for serious illness and/or death from other causes decreased dramatically due to my increased general (and mental) health. So my total risk went down significatly. Especially if you factor in the car ride to and from work. Not having to drive in rush hour traffic is hard to beat.
You mean "jibe."
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. — Dorothy Parker
REM sleep is absolutely vital to your mind and body's condition and you will die without it; the other stages of sleep do little more than provide time for the body to rest and grow and heal.
HELLO?! Allowing your body time to rest and grow and heal seems to be good enough reason to me to keep a normal sleep schedule. This polyphasic sleep might be OK if you are relatively inactive, but not if you are getting reasonable amounts of exercise.
As someone who has done distance running since high school, I shudder to think what would happen if my body didn't have time to recover from my workouts. I certainly wouldn't have survived in one piece long enough to be able to run the marathon I did last fall. Another poster mentioned solo circumnavigating sailors using polyphasic sleep schedules while on the water, but I seriously doubt they would use it under more normal circumstances.
*shrug* I think that would depend on how much you're willing to make the world work to your schedule. Two half-hour naps in an 8-hour period pretty much corresponds to the federally mandated 30-minute unpaid break and two paid 15-minute breaks for employment in the US, so you'd just have to have a supervisor who was willing to let you juggle things around a little to make that side of it work. As for having to be certain places or do certain things at certain times, this sleep method involves periods of maybe a half an hour (20 minutes of sleep plus 10 for getting to sleep and waking at most). Are there really appointments in your life that can't be delayed or moved up by half an hour to make things work? If someone says, "meet me at 6" but you know that 6 is your time for napping, you arrange to meet them at 6:30 instead, and get your nap at the meeting place.
*shrug* Then again, I've never done this polyphasic thing before outside of my setup at college where I'd usually sleep about 4 hours at night and then catch a handful of 15 minute naps during the day.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Interesting.. I can't recall a single time where I've awoken/been awoken that hasn't been in the middle of a dream. IE, I (seem to) dream almost constantly. That could explain a lot.
Actually, that's supposedly just a side effect of how the cycles work. You actually have multiple 5-7 minute (I can't remember the actual figure, but it's a short period) periods of dreaming of which almost everybody only remembers the last one, if at all. Admittedly, sometimes you do get woken up in the middle (those dreams where you hear your alarm clock going off seem to fit in there), but I wonder how much of that is a person revising their dreams after the fact as they often do.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.