Is decreasing your sleep time possible?
An introduction to polyphasic sleeping
It was 3:40 AM. I found myself reading through Medium and chatting with some people on Discord. I was a little tired, but ready to get to work nonetheless. It seemed like a good start to the rest of the day.
Specially since I’d woken up just 10 minutes before.
But wait, I wasn’t pulling an all-nighter? That must mean that I went to sleep somewhere around 8PM. An extremely early time to go to bed. Am I some type of ultra early bird?
Well, I actually went to sleep at 11AM. I got 4 hours and a half of sleep that night. This was my “core” sleep, which provided the most rest and lined up with my natural sleep patterns.
You would expect anyone to be like a zombie with such short sleep, but I wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. I’d been on this schedule for 2 days so far, and I was still feeling decent. The sleep debt was starting to kick in a bit, though.
A few hours later, I would take a 20 minute nap. A few hours prior, a second one. These naps would hopefully give my body enough REM sleep to last through the day.
This schedule I was following is a polyphasic sleep schedule called “Everyman 2.”
Polyphasic sleep
Polyphasic sleep is an alternative to the traditional single-core sleep patterns. Most people’s sleep is monophasic, which means that they get all their sleep from a single night’s (or day’s) rest.
In a polyphasic schedule, you get your rest from 2 or more periods of sleep a day. An example of a polyphasic sleep schedule is the siesta schedule common in the Mediterranean. This means sleeping less at night and having a nap in the afternoon.
The siesta schedule is only a biphasic schedule, though. True polyphasic schedules have more than 2 rest periods, just like the one I attempted.
Polyphasic sleep doesn’t just split your sleep into different segments, though. It also shortens total sleep time. On the E2 schedule, I would only be getting 5 hours and 10 minutes of sleep every day. Almost 3 hours less than the recommended 8.
Is this sustainable? Well, that’s a hard one to answer.
The theory behind being able to shorten your sleep comes from looking at sleep cycles. While you sleep, you enter different sleep stages: light sleep, REM sleep, and deep sleep.
Light sleep, as its name suggests, is the period in which you can be woken easily. It is the first stage you enter, and it serves as a transitional stage. It also lasts the longest. It might serve for some memory consolidation, but it does not provide the restorative effect that deep sleep does.
Deep sleep is what really gets you rested. It doesn’t last as long, but it’s arguably the most important of the stages. During deep sleep, your mind cleanses itself off waste material, human growth hormone is produced, and your brain retains newly learned information.
The Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage is the one during which you have dreams. During it, your physiological processes start resembling the ones while awake, and your brain waves become more active.
Polyphasic schedules attempt to reduce light sleep, which is thought to be unnecessary. In this way, total sleep time can theoretically be reduced.
They attempt to achieve this by setting their sleep patterns in a way that will maximize deep and REM sleep. The “core” sleep will last for a longer time than a nap — for example, 5 hours — but will be shorter than 8 hours.
The naps in the schedule are used to get REM rest, which should give your body its much-needed rest. In this way, total sleep would hopefully be reduced.
That sounds too good to be true, though. If you could reduce your sleep time so easily and not face any consequences, surely everybody and their grandma would have hopped onto polyphasic sleep already! Imagine what you could do with a few more hours every day.
This is where the caveats come in. People don’t naturally dive into REM sleep when napping. It takes time to train your body to do so, and it’s not a pleasant experience. You have to teach your body to adapt to these schedules.
This period of “adaptation” can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to months. During this time, you’ll be putting yourself through sleep deprivation to achieve your sleep goals.
Sleep deprivation causes a number of unwanted effects: cognitive decline, decreased alertness, decreased ability to retain information and make memories, and, of course, tiredness. Lots of tiredness.
There are those who really want to permanently adopt these schedules. They are willing to go through the adaptation process and see if they can make it work. In fact, there are entire communities around polyphasic sleeping.
Is this just one of those trends that comes and goes, or is it legitimate? We know that siesta schedules are common in some parts of the world, but what about the more extreme ones?
You might have heard stories about remarkable figures and their peculiar sleep schedules. Nikola Tesla and Leonardo Da Vinci allegedly had several naps a day, sleeping for as little as 2 hours every day. Napoleon would sleep in 2 hour chunks and nap in the afternoon. Etc.
These people are undoubtedly geniuses in one way or another. However, their sleep schedules might be impossible to adapt to by some people. Perhaps they were just unique in their sleep requirements.
Sleeping less won’t make you a genius, but it can potentially give you more time to work with every day. To try to find out what we can accomplish, let’s try turning to more expert knowledge.
To sleep or not to sleep
…there is a lot to be discovered about sleeping in general. We know it’s important, but we still have a lot to learn about its mechanisms.
Proponents of polyphasic sleep claim that human’s historic sleep patterns were polyphasic. The reason that we sleep monophasically, they say, is because electric lighting allowed people to stay up later.
Historians such as Roger Ekirch have argued that, before electric light and the Industrial Revolution, interrupted sleep was the norm. Interrupted sleep is a type of biphasic sleep in which nighttime sleep is separated by a period of wakefulness, generally an hour long. It’s usually accompanied by an afternoon nap as well.
This time was used by people to pray, reflect on their dreams, write, and a number of other activities. People like Ekirch have argued that this is the natural sleeping pattern for humans. Others have also hypothesized that this way of sleeping is important for dealing with medical issues such as stress.
It’s a long stretch from a biphasic sleep schedule to something like the Uberman schedule, though. Even the E2 schedule that I attempted seems a little extreme in comparison.
What does science say about this? As with (seemingly) everything else, it’s a mixed bag. Some research has shown that naps can not only be refreshing, but improve cognitive ability. Other research says that they might not be as great, specially if they disturb nighttime sleep.
When it comes to adapting to polyphasic sleep schedules, there is little evidence of people being able to adapt to anything more extreme than a biphasic schedule.
A study at the University of Chicago found that shift workers, whom slept during the day, had more health issues and lower life spans than people who slept more traditionally. This vindicates the universally accepted idea that sleeping throughout the night leads to better rest.
However, this clashes with other research of its kind; one which concludes that segmented sleep schedules did not affect shift worker’s alertness or cognitive ability. This one is particularly good for polyphasic proponents, since the subjects in this study also reduced their sleep by around an hour.
Still, not a lot is known about biphasic and polyphasic sleeping. In fact, there is a lot to be discovered about sleeping in general. We know it’s important, but we still have a lot to learn about its mechanisms.
Syncing it up
While we might not know if it’s truly possible to adapt to a schedule like E2, we know that people vary in their sleep habits. Some people need less sleep than others, which might make it easier for them to try these schedules out.
The siesta schedule, for example, might be hard to adapt to if you naturally sleep for 9 hours uninterrupted. However, a person that only needs 7 hours to function will probably find it a lot easier.
There are also people with a rare gene called DEC2. This gene allows them to function with a few hours of sleep per night. It is a very rare gene, but people with it could be the perfect polyphasic sleepers.
Of course, if you had that mutation you would probably know it by now. For the rest of us, polyphasics schedules wouldn’t be as easy. The extreme sleep debt makes it so that only the most determined can stick it out through the adaptation period. And even then, there’s no guarantee of long term success.
Another thing to be mindful is your body’s circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm regulates your natural sleeping patterns. This is what makes some people night owls and others are early birds. Careful monitoring of your body’s wind down times can help you know your circadian rhythm better.
If you decide to go through with a polyphasic schedule, it’s important to make it as natural as it can possibly get. Of course, use of alarm clocks and forcing yourself through sleep deprivation is not natural by any means, but anything that makes the process easier is useful.
This is a good site for information, as well as the /polyphasic community on reddit. There are also other communities on platforms like Discord.
Closing thoughts
My own experience with polyphasic sleeping is still ongoing. I failed the E2 schedule after 5 days, as it proved to difficult for me to nap. However, I did a biphasic schedule for a few weeks and it worked pretty well for me. I am currently attempting E1 (As I should’ve done in the beginning.)
Would I recommend polyphasic sleeping? Only if you’re prepared for it.
I also can’t guarantee that it won’t have any long-term consequences; we don’t know much about sleep, so messing with your sleep for prolonged periods of time is probably something that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
However, both the success stories from the community and the potential benefits of polyphasic sleeping outweigh the cons for me. At the end of the day, it’s up to your discretion.
