Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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!
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.