Polyphasic Sleep For The Sleep Deprived
Wired just published this article about a woman who has begun a regimen of polyphasic sleeping. She’s not an insomniac, but merely a self-described geek, and is trying the experiment just to see if it works as well as a full night’s sleep. Check out the excerpt below and then follow this link for the rest of the story.
There are various types of sleep regimens floating around the internet, but the one Rachel tried was called the Uberman (though she’s not much for the name).
It works like this: you break up the 24 hours of the day into 4 hour chunks. At some point in each 4 hour set, you take a twenty minute nap; the total amount of sleep adds up to about two hours. The schedule meant she’d have to sleep some during the workday, which her bosses approved, as long as she documented her progress on the how-to site. Her boyfriend was even up for trying to match their schedules.
“McConnell began her sleep regimen, and at first things went well.
‘I was able to get more done. I was up at three in the morning thinking, “Ok, what can I do now?”‘ she said. ‘I was able to make significant headway on my enormous to-do lists. I would go out on bicycle rides in the middle of the night.’
But by day five, her experience was already starting to deteriorate, even as she held out hope that her body would acclimate to the new sleep schedule.
‘Despite the feeling awful part of the time, I am definitely getting things done,’ she wrote. ‘If I don’t acclimatize and feel crappy half the time like now, it is not worth it.’
Indeed, she made a few changes to her regimen, adding sleeping time, but about 17 days in, McConnell got sick and decided to quit the sleep experiment. In her farewell note, she summed up her experience,’My current belief is that polyphasic sleep is a method for handling sleep deprivation as well as possible, but that it likely does not provide enough sleep for an average person.’”
