Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Prologue

Recently in my life, I've been running into a very serious brick wall to my personal goals both internally and career-wise: I, as an adult, need to sleep a set number of hours every day, usually 6-8.

In and of itself, it didn't seem like a big problem to me. When I set out to go to college, get a job, etc., a standard desk job seemed like a valid occupation. I felt I could still achieve my other goals (all of which take time) while still working on hobbies that I love (which also take time).

...but I've been finding myself more and more wrong as I've gotten into my adult life outside of college.

I've always been more of a "night owl", really. I would be unlikely to get productive work done in the morning or afternoon, but after about 7 or 8 pm until the sun came up, I could program, do homework, etc. efficiently and steadily. I had enormous focus during those hours. If I had a choice, I'd see the sun when I woke up (setting) and again when I got ready for sleep (rising). One of the best times of my life was a semester when I had no classes before 2 pm... I could sleep from 5 or 6 am until just around 1 pm every day. I got so much done, personally, and I felt much more fulfilled.

But, alas, my "grownup" job is not structured like that. I work as a scientific software engineer for a large manufacturing company; I write software simulations of their processes. It sounds like the sort of job one would be able to take home to work and set a very loose schedule. But it's not. I need to go to meetings, and support my users, be available to other developers for informal conversation... you get the idea. It boils down to being tightly stuck on a "be awake by 7 am" schedule. Of course, this then results in me sleeping through my most productive hours.

It really hit me hard this past weekend. I have a personal programming project that I'm starting work on, still in the design phase. I was up around 11 pm, had gotten comfy with the laptop in my office on a spare bed and really went at it. But I just ran out of time before I "needed" to sleep. It was frustrating.

Then, last night, my mind was abuzz with ideas. I was sorting them out in my head for a lot of the evening while idly doing other things. But when I had to go to bed, I was again frustrated in that I wasn't done with my thinking. I was up until 4 am, completely unable to sleep because my mind wouldn't sit still.

I finally took it as a sign that I needed to do something to increase my personal time.


I've been reading a little on Steve Pavlina's attempt at a polyphasic sleep schedule, and have been somewhat intrigued. For those not aware of what polyphasic sleep is, I suggest hitting the Wikipedia article on it Wikipedia article on it. The concept just seems a little bizarre, given that we've been trained to assume that we need to sleep nightly, and that most of society is based on that same assumption.

When I first heard about the concept, I was decidedly skeptical about trying it. While there are some reasonable hypotheses behind a lot of it, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of scientific evidence around to demonstrate that it is safe or useful.

I long ago promised myself that when I perform personal experiments, I would do them safely and responsibly, prefaced with a good deal of research. At the very least, I would attempt to understand the possible consequences and determine if they were acceptable.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that there is an awful lot of formal research on the topic. (But if you know of a lot of good sources beyond the book by Claudio Stampi, feel free to email me about it) Only a (growing) collection of anecdotes seem to support it.

To be fair, that's only on a cursory examination of the phenomenon. I'm digging deeper, but my frustration has reached a pretty high point, so I've decided to go ahead and try a modified Uberman Schedule before I have dug up everything I can find.

At first, this seems a little irresponsible, but I've weighed the potential risks, and I'm going to go ahead with it based on the following (in ascending order of importance to me):

1. It sounds cooky and fun. It'll be interesting to explain to people that I only sleep 2 hours a day.
2. I really enjoy having more lucid dreams.
3. The extra time is worth it. And I really mean that. Many things that I would really love to do instead of lying down doing nothing.
4. It can't be worse than the large and long amounts of sleep deprivation I experienced (suffered?) in college. If I recall correctly my Psychology 101 course around that same time, one could fully recover from the detriments of complete sleep deprivation / "sleep debt" with extra sleep, so it makes sense that full recovery from polyphasic sleep is likely. I'm no doctor, though.
5. I often slip into REM quickly anyway. No, really. I can nap just about anywhere. I slip into it quickly, and often have dreams in short naps. I did it all the time during college during my free periods.
6. I already sleep polyphasically, in a strict sense of the word, anyway. My wife works 2nd shift, which is 1:00 pm to 9:30 pm. My aforementioned desk job keeps me at work 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. The offset in schedule meant that if we slept "normally", our time together would be drastically reduced. And I like spending time with my wife. Heck, I married her, did I? :) So, to allow us to spend more time together, I usually take a 2-3 hour nap shortly after I get home from work until I need to start making dinner around 8 or 9. This is just another step that way.
7. It's not a permanent decision. I figure that if it becomes a problem, I can always abandon it safely later on and recover.

So with that in mind, I’m going to give it a go and follow my intuition on it. Currently, my plan is based around my work schedule (I still have my day job, after all… bills and all that).

Naps at 7:00 am, 11:30 am, 5:00-ish pm, 9:00 pm, 12:30 am and 4 am.

I’m concerned that it may not work out as well, mostly because I’ve had to spread out the time in the day and then, as a consequence, also compress the time between naps at night. But if it works out, I’ll have the keen advantage of being able to do the schedule while still working a pretty standard 8-5 job.


Here goes nothing…

-Sean