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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?
No wonder that you get ill with so little sleep for prolonged periods. It's not without reason that sleep deprivation is a torture method.
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/
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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?
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.
I don't know that I could pull it off now but for my Senior summer (after a Junior year of slacking) I found myself taking summer classes from 8am-12pm Monday through Friday. This of course was the same time when parties were going on weeknights and quite simply I wasn't going to pass those up.
My solution was to sleep in a 12 hour cycle rather than the normal 24. For 2.5 months I was fully rested, never cranky, and hangovers didn't seem to phase me. I would sleep from 3-6 am and pm every day. After the first two weeks I started to keep the cycle for weekends and I did feel that my body had adjusted to it. I fell asleep fast, but wasn't tired until just about time to go to sleep.
I guess part of the quation should be that you can sleep for short periods of time as long as you only need to stay awake for short periods of time. Maybe alcohol was the catlyst that made it all come together. Anyone who wants to fund a study on this idea should contact me ASAP.
P.S. - I like Vodka and Rum.
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!
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.
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
Without an external stimulus such as daylight or a rigid schedule, most peoples' sleep cycles will be between 25 and 26 hours. 28 hours is about the upper limit of what people can manage, while 22 hours is the lower limit.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Some assembly line thing or another.
I would argue thatchances are that the folks who work graveyard have higher exposure to potentially cancerous materials than your average 9 to fiver.
They compared them directly to their daytime counterparts. They also found that exposure to light prevents melatonin release (or manufacture - I don't remember), and confirmed that the night shift workers had much lower blood levels with no peak during the day when they would be sleeping. They also ran lab tests on rats (I think) and saw that cancerous tumors grew at a rate inversely proportional to the melatonin blood levels. Finally, they saw that the night works had higher cancer rates.
If I seem hesitant, it's because I don't have the article nearby and don't know any more about the study than what was in the article, but they made the gist of it very clear: being awake at night increased some people's chance of getting certain types of cancers.
Oops, I take that back. The full article, along with references is available at Science News. It's much clearer than I could hope to be.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
I went for about 10 years on about 2-3 hours of sleep most nights starting when I was about 39 or 40.
There were some exceptions, but not all that many.
At first, I'd get about 2-3 hours of sleep a night and then crash for a few hours about every 10 days. After doing that for few months, I got to the point where I didn't need to crash very often.
About two years ago, I had some kind of infection that seemed to be more of a nuiscance than anything else. A couple of weeks later, I had a relapse that lasted a couple of weeks. During that time, I spent more time asleep. Since then, I haven't been able to get by on so little sleep.
Now I'm back up to 6-8 hours a night.
I miss all that extra time I had.
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
...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
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.
Actually, 3mg is far, far more than what you really need if you want to adjust your time schedule and have several days to do it, or if you have a naturally abnormal sleep pattern (synchronized but delayed, or even free-running) that is currently correct and you want to maintain it.
9 1.asp for more information.
The idea is that you take a very small dose (0.05-0.5mg) of melatonin a certain number of hours before your natural melatonin release would occur, and this acts to cause your body to think that your natural melatonin release has already begun, meaning that the next night, the natural release will start earlier. You can shift your time schedule in this fashion. Similarly, you can delay your sleep by taking a very small dose after you wake up, so that your body thinks that your natural melatonin release occurred later. Once you get your sleep schedule in the right place, a well-timed very small dose is effective at preventing your natural tendency to advance or delay the onset of sleep.
This method has proven clinically effective even in blind patients, whose retinas release melatonin on a completely free-running schedule because they never receive the light stimulus to suppress melatonin release which synchronizes them with the 24-hour day.
However, a large dose of melatonin (5-10mg) will still be present in the bloodstream well beyond the onset of sleep (if you're trying to advance it), which can cause the melatonin to be present not only during the advancement phase but also during the delay phase, which can cause the effects on your natural sleep schedule to be unpredictable (it advances the natural onset of sleep in some people, delays it in some, and has varying or no effects in others).
See http://www.dialogues-cns.org/brochures/19/htm/19_
By the way, please note that I'm not denying that large doses are effective for use as a sedative for a one-shot get-me-to-sleep-now treatment - I'm just saying that small doses can be effective for manipulating one's sleep schedule in a more delicate manner.