Polyp Ha Sic Articles

Cheating the Sandman - An Introduction to Polyphasic Sleep, pt.1 Haldo, and welcome to the world of polyphasic sleep!
Most people sleep through roughly 1/3rd of their life, but if you're reading this, you probably don't want to be most people. Imagine, if you will, having 4-6 extra hours per day to do whatever you want. The concept is appealing for obvious reasons - most of us feel rushed, like we can't seem to squeeze everything that we need to do into our lives. Polyphasic Sleep is an attempt to reclaim some of our sleeping time in exchange for usable hours - not a revolutionary concept to anyone who's crammed for an exam. Planning and scheduling this tradeoff, however, can lead to a schedule that allows for this exchange to happen on a regular basis with little ill effects. Before I begin, I think that it is important to lay down a few caveats. The first and foremost one in my mind is the fact that the long-term effectiveness of Polyphasic Sleep has not been studied. To my knowledge, there are only 3 people who have managed to follow the Uberman or Everyman schedules for a period greater than a year, and we have no idea what this would do to someone who managed to stay on these schedules for, say, 10 years. People who are pregnant or under the age of 18 should not attempt Polyphasic Sleep, as it can affect growth hormones. Even on a short-term scale, though, there has not been a great deal of research done on Polyphasic Sleep in an everyday environment. For that reason, everything within this article is purely anecdotal, so please do not believe that I am attempting to give out medical advice - I am merely relaying what I have learned through research and my own limited experience. Finally, I think that it is important to understand going into Polyphasic Sleep that the success rate is shockingly low. 2 of the schedules have no solid adaptations on record, the other two have shown some success, but I imagine that the number of fully successful adaptations remains below 30. It may not be compatible with your body, lifestyle or mental habits. It may take more discipline than you have. There is no shame in quitting Polyphasic sleep if you just can't manage it but please be realistic in your attempts and don't endanger yourself or others.
Now that I have scared most of you away, though, I think it's also important to say that those who have succeeded have spoken glowingly about Polyphasic sleep. In my own experience of 2 weeks on the schedule(In this attempt - I attempted previously and crashed on Day 4), I am showing very few adverse effects and am seriously enjoying the additional four hours. It can open new doors for you - it can allow you to pursue your passions, explore your dreams and truly change your life. If you choose to attempt Polyphasic Sleep, I wish you the best of luck - I cannot honestly recommend whether you should do it or not, but I can tell you that I plan on staying with it for at least the next 3 years.
http://www.poly-phasers.com/articles.php
Just what is Polyphasic Sleep? As mentioned above, it is an attempt to reclaim hours lost to sleep, but it's not just staying up late and waking up early. Polyphasic Sleep is essentially trading sleeping hours for shorter naps spaced throughout the day. The theory is based on the concept of sleep cycles, the idea that our bodies experience sleep in a number of phases, usually estimated to be around 90 minutes each. Polyphasic Sleep doesn't eliminate sleep cycles, rather it trades some or all of them for an equal number of evenly-spaced naps. The most common varients are Uberman, which includes 20 minute naps every 4 hours and Everyman, which is based on a 3hour "Core" sleeping period and 3 20-minute naps spaced throughout the rest of the day.
The concept of Polyphasic sleep is not new, although the more codified attempts for it are. Various rumors abound that similar schedules were undertaken by Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Edison, Nicolai Tesla or any number of other notable, yet eccentric figures in history. I present these claims here only as a matter of acknowledging them - as a history major, I do feel uncomfortable saying whether they are or are not accurate. However, there has been one historically confirmed successful polyphasic sleeper - Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller is notable for being a generally odd character with brilliant ideas - it was him who invented the Geodesic Dome. He was brilliant, but sadly most of his ideas were never really taken up. Fuller did indeed, according to most of his biographers, sleep in a sort of polyphasic routine for a period of time. However, the exact nature of his schedule, the length of time that he was polyphasic for and the nature of his time as a polyphasic sleeper are heavily debated even amongst those who knew him. Successful adaptations have been recorded by bloggers, however. Most famously, Steve Pavlina and Puredoxyk were quite successful in their polyphasic experiments, with Pavlina quitting only due to the social pressures and Puredoxyk still sleeping polyphasically.
There's a lot of debate amongst members of the medical community about whether Polyphasic Sleep is viable, at least amongst those who take the time to debate it. Not being a medical doctor, I cannot explain their arguments here, but if you are more interested in this angle, I encourage you to look up Claudio Stampi's "Why We Nap", a treatise that has been considered the medical basis for the Uberman Sleep Schedule, although his schedules presented there are more geared to long-term racing sailors who need to be up at odd times in order to complete their races. On the opposing side, Dr. Piotr Wozniak's Supermemo gives a fairly scathing review of Polyphasic Sleep, calling anyone who successfully adapts a mutant. Personally, I feel that the medical truth lies somewhere in between. I agree that it sounds completely unbelievable, but I also think that experience shows that it is somehow possible. Most animals do not sleep for long periods at a time, and while we are not most animals, we do share similar patterns to them in other functions.
In conclusion, I hope that this has been a helpful introduction to Polyphasic Sleep. In the next article of the series, I will be discussing some of the ways by which you can prepare to attempt polyphasic sleeping, assuming that you decide that the adventure is worth the risk. I hope you join me for the rest of the journey. Let me know how it goes! Feel free to contact me by PM on the Poly-Phasers forum or in the IRC chatroom. I welcome criticism, complaints, compliments and suggestions. P.S. If you're more interested in my current adaptation attempt, check out my blog! The address is http://netopalis.wordpress.com Everyman Sleep Schedule Everyman is another type of polyphasic sleep schedule that grew out of the experiments I first wrote about in 2000 under Uberman's Sleep Schedule. As of this writing -- January 2007 -- I have been living on the Everyman Sleep Schedule for approximately six months.
How the Everyman Schedule was born The "Uberman" schedule, which was the first polyphasic schedule I experimented with, is very cool, but also really hard to adjust to. A very small percentage of the people who try it make it through the first week, and not even half of those go on to succeed for a month, which is the time required by the mind and body to really adjust. Not that you can blame them: Not only is the sleep deprivation utterly crushing for the first couple days of Uberman-adjustment, but maintaining the schedule requires the kind of anal-retentivity that you usually only see in damaged people (like Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom). Naps must be taken every four hours on the dot; small deviations become possible only after at least a solid month of perfect or darn-near-perfect adherence to the schedule. So even assuming the subject is crazy enough to adjust to the schedule and iron-willed enough to stay on it, for many people it simply isn't possible. Lifestyle can really throw a monkey-wrench in the process, no matter how dedicated the sleeper wants to be: No amount of iron will can compensate for a hectic work-schedule, or kids, etc. Right about the time I was experimenting to determine the validity of the above sentence, people began howling at me about how unfair it was that only hermits and supervillians could ever have both the character and the kind of life-schedule that accomodated the Uberman schedule. After finding out myself, the really hard way, that no amount of sheer guts could maintain the Uberman schedule in the face of work/kids/etc., I realized that I shared their pain: I deeply missed my polyphasic schedule, but it seemed that now that I was a "grown-up", I couldn't have it back! Crushing.
Then someone--I don't remember who was first--suggested that maybe another type of schedule would work. Perhaps Uberman could be modified to make it more flexible.
The "Core Nap" The modification that makes Everyman what it is is the addition of a "core nap" -- a longer nap that occurs regularly somewhere in the 24-hour cycle. The core nap is much less sleep than a monophasic person gets at night -- usually no more than 3 hours, though I've heard of 4 and 5 being used for short periods -- and is supplemented by a corresponding number of 20-minute naps throughout the day. Please note that not every combination of naps and core-nap seems viable. Of the ones that have been tested, the most successful combinations seem to be 3 hours core + 3 naps (the one I'm using), and 1.5 hour core + 4-5 naps. While this seems to suggest a pattern, anything shorter than a 1.5-hour core might as well be just another 20-minute nap (and you'd be doing Uberman); and more than 3 hours' core might as well be siesta-sleep, which involves a short night's sleep and a single afternoon nap. So for now and until somebody proves otherwise, those two schedules above are what we generally mean by Everyman. My experiments with the Everyman schedule, which have now been going on for nearly six months (Free Internet Traffic Advice on Free website traffic, list building, and search engine marketing from a long time affiliate marketing professional.), showed an interesting effect: The longer the core nap, the more flexibility one gains in the nap-times. Obviously individual results vary a bit, but in my case, a 3-hour core nap (1-4 a.m.) means I can take three 20minute naps throughout the day and feel great, plus my naptimes can be shifted by as much as an hour in either direction. So I can nap at 9, 2, and 9 (which is what I aim for), or 8, 1, and 9; or 9:30, 3, and 8:30...etc. This provides that crucial ability to work around meetings, sick kids, traffic jams, and all the "etcetera" that made sticking to Uberman so impossible.
Other differences from Uberman The addition of the core naps causes some other differences from the Uberman schedule as well. Really, Everyman and Uberman are more than just two schedules; they're two different classes of polyphasic schedule, technically referred to as "equiphasic" (all naps equal) and "nonequiphasic" (duh). Whether you're using Uberman (or Dymaxion, another equiphasic, naps-only schedule named by Buckminster Fuller) or either/any variety of Everyman, the following differences remain fairly solid.
One major difference is the adjustment process. As you might expect, the sleepdeprivation involved in adjusting to an Everyman schedule is not as bad as it is for Uberman, though it can still be tricky for a day or two. Significantly, though, to fully adjust to Everyman takes quite a bit longer than it does to adjust to Uberman, so one can expect to be using alarms and carefully monitoring one's sleep for several months rather than a couple weeks. Uberman, being more severe and more extreme, becomes habit a lot quicker once you get the hang of it; and you get the hang of it faster, because it's more "do or die" for your body. Everyman doesn't cause the kind of sleep dep that forces a full adjustment in a matter of days, so it's something you have to get more gradually used to. Having done both, I can honestly say that it's a pretty even toss-up, being horrifically sleep-deprived for a week and vigilant for another week or two, versus being quite sleep-deprived for a few days and vigilant for at least a month. They're both pretty annoying...but I would also say they're both completely worth it. (Of course I would!) Another big difference is the psychological impact. Uberman's is very profound. You've eradicated "sleeping at night" completely. After a while you'll lose track of the days completely if you don't take additional measures. Days will stretch reeeeealllly long, which can be very cool or quite intolerable, depending on your lifestyle. With Everyman, however, you're still getting a chunk of sleep with which to divide the days in your mind, so you probably won't lose track (or not very often, anyway). The days seem long on Everyman (long enough to get dangerously bored if you don't really need / use the extra time), but not endless (like they can/do on Uberman). In both cases, you'll get used to living outside the normal schedule after a couple months, but even once you're used to it, it can feel a little eerie--like being a vampire. There can be social effects accompanying both schedules, that range from a mild reputation for weirdness to full-on rewrite of your social life, depending on what it was like before. As with the psychological effects, the social changes are usually more profound with Uberman than Everyman. (For my part, being both a late-nighter and an early-riser has made me a bit of a conversation piece at work and on a few social occasions, but it's not much of a big deal, since it's not unheard of for some people to only need three hours' sleep, period. Now, when I "never slept", I often felt like a circus freak and sometimes went to great lengths to hide it.) Also, myself and every other successful adopter of Uberman I've read or spoken to has reported impressive effects on consciousness -- increased awareness / energy, sharpened senses, a feeling that the whole world is moving in slow motion and you're not, so you have all the time in the world for everything, even small things like catching a ball. My friend and I, when we first did the experiment, couldn't get over how awesome this was, and while the effect was less noticeable after 3 or 4 months, it was there right up until I quit. On Everyman, you get something of the same effect, but much less so. The feeling of being superhuman that caused us to name the Uberman schedule what we did is more muted and practical on Everyman -- you're
gaining about four hours onto your day, but you don't feel as though you've "beaten sleep" or transcended it. The altered-consciousness part is pretty much invisible; I've felt a flicker of it here and there, but nothing like before. They're the same in a few ways, too -- the ways that characterize polyphasic sleep, as I know it. * Both require strict dedication in the beginning to adjust to. * Both require that you don't mind people thinking you're a weirdo! * Both will cause a shift in your psyhological perception of time, which is probably more inherent to your mental state than you'll realize before you go messing with it. ;) * Both are also apparently safe, physically speaking -- Other people have seen doctors while doing Uberman/Dymaxion schedules, and I've had regular checkups while doing Everyman, and we're all fine. * Both types of schedule will NOT result in being "tired all the time" once you're fully adjusted, though as I mentioned, full adjustment takes longer with Everyman -- for a while you'll still get yawny at night, but it's only aggravating for the first 2-3 weeks in my experience. * Oh, and both schedules can be lifesavers for people who just don't have enough hours in the day!
The Normative Analysis Having done each schedule for about six months now, I would have to call them a tie. They both have benefits, and both have detriments against each other (the purpose of this writeup isn't really to judge polyphasic vs. monophasic schedules, so I'll comment on that later). Probably the biggest benefit of Everyman is its accessibility. Out of the people who want to sleep polyphasically, only about 2% of them seem to be suited for the Uberman schedule, in lifestyle and disposition. Probably about another 25-30% seem to be compatible with the Everyman schedule, and I've seen quite a few people besides myself benefit from it. (For my part, I don't know how I'd live without it. My hectic schedule would leave me no room to relax or pursue my hobbies without the extra time Everyman gives me, and I'd probably go insane.) I'll end this writeup on polyphasic sleep the same way I always end things I write about this topic: With the plea that polyphasic sleeping desperately needs more attention from scientists, who can conduct long-term and controlled research studies. I and others have provided enough testimonial evidence, I think, to show that the projects would be worthwhile. (I also have issued an open invitation for people who'd like to use me or my data in experimental research, and I'm not alone in that either.) I
hope to have my book on the subject done by the end of this summer, with all the details I can muster about the hows, whys, and wherefores of polyphasic sleeping, all wrapped up in an enticing package of pay-attention-to-me that hopefully will drive scientific interest by better informing the public. Source: Everything2.com
For Uberman, Napping is All There Is Its not every day that I get contacted by people regarding polyphasic ultrashort sleep, or Uberman sleep, as its called in all boasting seriousness, or perhaps irony, I havent quite figured out yet. So the fact that I received three such contacts this week led me to this blog entry regarding the topic. For people who are not familiar with this practice, we discuss its merits and short falls in the Extreme Napping chapter of Take a Nap! Basically, a person engaging in this lifestyle shortens her sleep/wake cycle dramatically so that eight hours of sleep and 16 hours of wake are condensed to 2030 minutes of sleep and four hours of wake. So following the clock, your life would look something like this: midnight to 4am awake: 4-4:30 nap; 4:30-8:30 awake: 8:309am nap; 9-1pm awake: 1-1:30pm nap; 1:30-5:30pm awake: 5:30-6pm nap; 6-10pm awake; 10-10:30 nap. Across a 24-hr cycle, she will be sleeping only 2.5 hours and be awake for the rest. This practice rests upon one important hypothesis that our biological rhythms are adaptable. This means that we can train our internal mechanisms not only when to sleep and wake, but also when to get hungry, have energy for exercise, perform mental activities. Inferred in this hypothesis is that we have the power to regulate our mood, metabolism, core body temperature, endocrine and stress response, basically everything inside this container of flesh we call home. Truly an Uberman feat! There is evidence in favor of this hypothesis from studies of humans and other animals. During the summer season in the northern latitudes, millions of people every year acclimate to long lit days without any sign of deterioration to the aforementioned internal mechanisms. During periods of migration, birds will travel for days apparently without the need for sleep. Our 24/7 culture has hospital staff, plant workers, and drivers of goods toiling into the wee hours. These members of society are in fact not living as long, more often infirm, and getting into more accidents than their 9-to-5 working counterparts. But the fact is that they ARE doing it. Shift-work studies show that the trouble isnt actually the odd hours, its the irregularity of them. If people stick with one specific sleep/wake schedule that has them work all night and sleep all day or nap frequently and only have a few hours of core sleep, they do surprisingly well. A sign of adaptation? Perhaps. So why is there such a self-reported low success rate for Uberman attempts? Many online quorums are started up but soon wane from low membership. What causes the fall-out? Lack of motivation, social pressures that enforce more normal behaviors, biological drive? Perhaps listening to the words of the Ubermen themselves will teach us something we dont know. For more information on this topic check out the Google group http://groups.google.com/group/Polyphasic?hlen or http://www.transcendentalbloviation.blogspot.com
Agree? Disagree? Know something I dont? I would like to hear from you on the topic of Uberman sleep schedules. Source: Take A Nap blog Naps Can Help The Heart CHICAGO - Office nappers now have the perfect excuse: New research shows that a little midday snooze seems to reduce the risk of fatal heart problems, especially among men. In the largest study to date on the health effects of napping, researchers tracked 23,681 healthy Greek adults for an average of about six years. Those who napped for about half an hour at least three times weekly had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from heart attacks or other heart problems than those who did not nap. Most participants were in their 50s, and the strongest evidence was in working men, according to the study, which appears in Mondays issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers said naps might benefit the heart by reducing stress, and jobs are a common source of stress. Its likely that women reap similar benefits from napping, but not enough of them died during the study to be sure, said Dr. Dimitrios Trichopoulos, the studys senior author and a researcher at Harvard University and the University of Athens Medical School. Heart problems killed 48 women who were studied, six of them working women, compared with 85 men, including 28 working men. A daytime siesta has long been part of many cultures, especially those in warmer climates. Mediterranean-style eating habits featuring fruits, vegetables, beans and olive oil have been credited with contributing to relatively low rates of heart disease in those countries, but the researchers wanted to see if napping also plays a role. My advice is if you can (nap), do it. If you have a sofa in your office, if you can relax, do it, Trichopoulos said. Exactly how stress is related to heart disease is uncertain. Some researchers think it might be directly involved, through unhealthy effects of stress hormones, or indirectly by causing people to exercise less, overeat or smoke. The researchers in the latest study factored in diet, exercise, smoking and other habits that affect the heart but still found napping seemed to help.
Too stressed for a siesta Previous studies have had conflicting results. Some suggested napping might increase risk of death, but those mostly involved elderly people whose daytime sleepiness reflected poor health, Trichopoulos said. His research team studied a broader range of people, ages 20 to 86, who were generally healthy when the study began. Still, its possible that study participants who napped are just people who take better care of themselves, which could also benefit the heart, said Dr. Marvin Wooten, a sleep specialist at Columbia St. Marys Hospital in Milwaukee. Source: MSNBC
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Optimal Sleep Sleeping is something we don't usually think much about, but if you could do something to convert just 90 minutes of each day from sleep time into productive time that would give you and extra 10 hours each week. Steve Pavlina discovered that he could reduce the amount of sleep he required by an average of 90 minutes each day by getting up at 5 am 7 days per week. He only goes to bed when he is tired enough that he will immediately fall asleep. You can find more about his experience here and here. Polyphasic sleep is a drastic method of changing your sleeping schedule. Basically you try to train your body to enter deep sleep immediately by taking a 20 to 30 minute nap every 4 hours. In this way you only require 2 hours of sleep per day. For most people this would translate into an extra 40 hours per week. Lifehack has some comments on an article by someone who uses this sleeping method. There is also a blog that is following someones current attempt to convert to the schedule. Of course even if you can get by with less sleep there may be other harmful side effects. An article in Nutrition Action Health Letter (Jul/Aug 2005, Vol. 32 Issue 6) discusses some research from Europe into the causes of obesity in children. The researchers expected to find a link between the amount of time children spent in front of the television and obesity. Instead they found that children who slept less weighted more. Another study in Wisconsin of middle-age government employees found a similar correlation. Several people who are using the polyphasic sleep method mentioned that they require a lot more food. It seems reasonable that the body would need more food if it is more active, but polyphasic sleep could impede the body's ability to regulate it's own weight. It is interesting to note that there seems to be very little research into polyphasic sleep. It has also been called Uberman's sleep schedule and Dymaxion sleep. If you do a search through scientific journals you'll find many references to polyphasic, but very few of them are talking about fully replacing our regular sleeping pattern with 4 hour phases. Most of the time they are just referring to taking a several naps in addition to the main time you sleep. One of the main people to write about this type of sleep is Claudio Stampi. In Particular he wrote a book called Why We Nap. It sells for $155 on Amazon so it isn't something you can just pickup from your local bookstore. If anyone knows of some good research regarding this method of sleeping (especially how it impacts your health), please leave a comment.
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Other random pieces of related info: There was a study done on truck drivers printed in Biological Rhythm Research 2003, Vol 34, that talks about polyphasic sleep. In that research they found evidence of a natural rhythm lending to taking several naps during a day. They also mentioned that if the naps are irregular it could throw off the body's sense of timing. The November issue of Scientific American mentions unpublished research where a drug known as CX717 was able to improve the performance of sleep deprived humans. Previously the drug was given to sleep deprived monkeys. The monkeys were then given memory tests (which usually degrade with lack of sleep). With the drug the sleepy monkeys were able to perform at the same level as well rested monkeys. However when the drug was given to rested monkeys, they performed better on the memory tests, so the drug may be more related to improving memory than to suppressing the need for sleep. Arshad Chowdhury of Metronaps is trying to cash in on people people who need more sleep. He invented a "sleep pod" that you can pay $14 to take a 20 minute nap. At the end of 20 minutes the bod vibrates to wake you up. The pods have a type of dome to cover your head and he has them installed in the Empire State Building and the Vancouver Airport. The Metronap pods might be the perfect thing for someone who wants to try to use the polyphasic sleep method, but don't have an office area where they can take the required short naps during the day. Source: Optimal Sleep at Productivity501
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Polyphasic Sleep 101 What is polyphasic sleep? Most adult humans sleep for about eight hours per day, in one block, usually at nighttime. (Think of it as a really long nap.) Some people may take a short nap during the afternoon - this is a form of biphasic sleep, which isnt technically the same as polyphasic, but many people think they fall under the same category. Polyphasic sleep is a schedule which, by definition, includes three or more blocks (phases) of sleep - e.g. one 4-hour nap and two 90-minute naps. While any sleeping pattern with three or more phases would be included, Uberman and Everyman (terms coined by PureDoxyK) are a couple of the more common ones. Uberman refers specifically to six 20-minute naps per day, each one four hours apart - thats a total of two hours per day, for the mathematically challenged. Throughout this page (and this website) I refer primarily to the Uberman schedule.
How is it possible to sleep this way? Short Answer: I dont know. Doctors dont know. Nobody knows - but it does happen. Long Answer: There are quite a few theories, ranging from those which suggest elimination of NREM sleep, to those which suggest elimination of REM sleep, to those which suggest a compression of sleep cycles or even dividing up the stages between naps (e.g. Stage 4 in one nap, Stage 3 in another nap). The most common theory (which I personally am not convinced by) is that the brain learns to skip its normal cycle of NREM sleep and jump straight into REM sleep, supposedly the most crucial stage, at the beginning of each nap. However, its worth noting that virtually no scientific studies have been done on patients who follow an Uberman sleep pattern, so take any and all claims with a grain of salt. 90% of everything I know about polyphasic sleep may be found simply by Googling. The abundance of blogs are the closest we have to hard science on this topic, but they suggest a difficult transition which pays off in the end.
What can I do to start a polyphasic sleeping pattern? Im glad you asked! Start by breaking that ugly habit of hitting the snooze button every morning - youre going to need to jump out of bed at the sound of an alarm clock. Once youve accomplished that, take at least a week off of work/school (preferably two weeks or more). Then prepare to become zombified. Make yourself a to-do list the length of your arm, then have your significant other/boss add an extra 50 things to it. Then double the length again. Seriously, youre going to need to keep yourself busy at all times (preferably with physical activities), or youll have a tough time staying awake. This probably goes without saying, but books (at night, anyway) are out of the question.
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Assuming youre doing the Uberman schedule, figure out a set of six naps, four hours apart, and stick to them like glue. Keep your naps to between 20 and 30 minutes (consensus varies). Dont oversleep - its going to happen anyway, but do everything in your power to avoid it. (Ive found that rigging an alarm to dump water on my face works well. ) Dont move naps, and definitely dont skip a nap. Some people have claimed that following a veg(etari)an diet helps the transition, but I dont know that any science has proven this. I can say, however, that eating somewhat healthy - e.g. a chicken sandwich instead of a Big Mac - has boosted my energy levels tremendously. The transition has been reported to last anywhere from three days to two weeks. The way I understand it is that by Day 3-4, youll have hit the low point. After that, your alertness will gradually improve until you can function normally sometime between the first and second weeks.
Why would people put themselves through that torment!? Besides the obvious benefit of having an extra six hours every day, some polynappers have claimed various mental benefits (clarity, creativity, etc.) Polyphasic sleep could most definitely interfere with having a normal work/social life, so it may not be for everybody. But if youre like me, with a part-time pick-your-ownhours job and an any-time-of-night social life anyway, youve got nothing to lose except maybe your sanity.
Who else is crazy enough to actually try this? PureDoxyK, Steve Pavlina, Stu Hogton, Ted Pearlman Oh, you mean you were looking for people youve heard of? How about Leonardo da Vinci, Buckminster Fuller, or Lord Byron? All are reported to have slept polyphasically in some form. Source: Don't ASQ
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Polyphasic Sleep Applications JOE HARRIS KNEW he was in trouble, even though he was winning the Transat 2004, a masochistic 2,800-mile solo-sailing race from Plymouth, England, to Boston, Massachusetts. Harris, a 45-year-old Boston-based commercial real estate investor, was making his debut in the big leagues of solo sailing and was elated to be in the lead. But beneath the adrenaline, he was exhausted. For almost 24 hours, he had stayed on the deck of Wells Fargo-American Pioneer, his 50-foot sloop, driving it hard through big winds and steep waves"on the hairy edge," as he would put it later. Since the Transat's start, a week earlier, Harris had been subsisting on three to four hours of sleep a day, snatched mostly in 20-minute naps. But when he found himself in perfect sprinting conditions, with his first real chance to tear into the 100-mile gap between "If you sleep too much," Stampi says of the long-distance solo sailors he trains, "you don't win. If you don't sleep enough, you break." Wells Fargo and then-leader Kip Stone, on Artforms, his competitive instincts took over and he stopped sleeping altogether. Hour after hour, Harris ground out the miles. When the morning roll call came in, he had nosed in front. Now he was faced with protecting a slim lead just as his brain and body were screaming for sleep. Harris fought to keep the boat moving as light winds settled over his stretch of the sea, but his coordination deteriorated into five-martini territory, and he started to pass out on his feet, crashing repeatedly to the deck. Finally, he surrendered and slept for two and a half hours while Wells Fargo went nowhere. When he awoke, the position report delivered the cruel news: Stone was back in the lead. "I knew I had shot my bolt," Harris said. "I pushed myself past my limits." MANAGING SLEEP deprivation is a critical skill in the solo-sailing racing game, and Harriswho finished second to Stone after another week of difficult conditionsknew he was risking a meltdown with his mad dash for the lead. Four months before the Transat, he had been to see Dr. Claudio Stampi, the 51-year-old sole proprietor of the Newton, Massachusetts-based Chronobiology Research Institute, which he founded in 1997 and which is dedicated to the highly refined art of achieving maximum performance on minimal sleep. Stampi, whom sailors often refer to as Dr. Sleep, is the go-to guru when you want to race sailboats alone across the ocean on ridiculously small amounts of shut-eye. Stampi had become interested in chronobiologythe study of biological rhythmsas a young student at Italy's University of Bologna, from which he received a medical degree in 1977, a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering in 1983, and a degree in neurology the following year. He has been obsessed with the trade-off between sleep and human performance ever since, publishing more than 100 research papers on the topic and, in 1992, a book, called Why We Nap. Over the years, Stampi has attracted
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a diverse clientele, from NASA astronauts and long-haul truckers to jet-lagged CEOs. But his specialty is helping sleep-deprived solo sailors. "Solo sailing is one of the best models of 24/7 activity, and brains and muscles are required," Stampi said one day at his home, from which he runs the institute. "If you sleep too much, you don't win. If you don't sleep enough, you break." Stampi has been hanging around docks for the past 20 years, placing customdesigned sleep-tracking wrist monitors (which record movement over time) on more than 100 solo sailors. His untraditional research raised questions from scientific sticklers, but according to James Maas, a professor of psychology at Cornell University and a leading specialist in sleep deprivation and performance, Stampi's open-ocean work has been very useful. "People often wonder how these guys, or someone like Charles Lindbergh, do what they do," Maas says. "So any evidence we can get as to how people will react under extreme conditions on very little sleep adds tremendously to our understanding." The extensive data Stampi obtained from the monitors led him to an interesting conclusion: Sleep-deprived humans are better off snoozing like most animalsin brief, precisely timed naps. "For those sailors who are seriously competing, Stampi is a necessity," says Brad Van Liew, a 37-year-old Californian who began working with Stampi in 1998 and went on to become America's most accomplished solo racer and the winner in his class of the 2002-2003 Around Alone, a 28,000-mile global solo race. "You have to sleep efficiently, or it's like having a bad set of sails or a boat bottom that isn't prepared properly." Stampi also helped 28-year-old British sailing superstar Ellen MacArthur to become the first woman to win the Transat, in 2000, and she went on to knock off a singlehanded global circumnavigation, on February 7 of this year, in 71 days and 14 hours, smashing the former record by 32 hours. "The more time you can be awake and alert, the faster the boat is going to be sailing," says British sailor Mike Golding, one of the world's best soloists and winner of the 60-foot monohull class in the Transat 2004. "By working with Claudio, I've been able to cut my average amount of sleep from 5.5 hours to 4.5." So when Joe Harris decided to join the somnambulistic solo-racing fraternity, he made a point of immersing himself in the teachings of Dr. Sleep, who helped Harris learn to nap according to his body's needs. I decided to do the same, albeit for different reasons. I'm an amateur sailor and a new father battling the awesome sleep-sapping powers of the human infant, so I visited Stampi hoping to crack the code on how to perform better with fewer hours in the sack.
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STAMPI IS SLENDER and has an easygoing international charm; he was born to Italian parents in So Paulo, Brazil, where his love of sailing began at age three. Striking photos from his many adventures at sea, which include two round-the-world races, are all over his house, as are vestiges of the boats he has lovedincluding sections of a broken mast and a cabin door that he uses as his work table. After a childhood spent messing around on boats, he moved to Italy as a teenager and went on to receive his medical degree. "I had conflicting desires in life," Stampi says, "but as soon as I encountered chronobiology, I knew I could find a way to merge the sacredmedicineand the profane, sailing." That meant entering the first round-the-world sailboat event he could findthe 1975 Clipper Race, from the United Kingdom to Australia and then on around Cape Horn and back to the startto do some onboard research. Stampi monitored the sleep patterns, body temperatures, and cognitive performance of his six crewmates every two hours. He turned the resulting data into his dissertation. The benefits of frequent naps made sense to the sailor in Stampi, who understood the demands of a boat. But he had no scientific proof that, in situations of sleep deprivation, polyphasic sleepthe term for frequent nappingwas more efficient than monophasic (getting sleep all in one chunk). So in 1990 he turned from the docks to the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Institute of Circadian Physiology's research labs, rounding up some willing test subjects and dividing them into three groups. Each group would sleep only three hours in 24. One group would take all three hours at once. A second would sleep an hour and a half at night and then take three naps during the day. And the last groupthe true polyphasicswould accumulate all their sleep in half-hour naps every four hours. Stampi began by testing the performance of his subjects when they were getting a full eight hours of normal sleep, administering a short cognitive test that was easy to repeat. Then he had them shift to their three-hour routines. After more than a month, the monophasic group showed a 30 percent loss in cognitive performance. The group that divided its sleep between nighttime and short naps showed a 25 percent drop. But the polyphasic group, which slept exclusively in short naps, showed only a 12 percent drop. Stampi was not surprised by the numbers. As he explained to me, there are two types of sleep: REM sleep, which is important for memory and learning, and non-REM sleep, which restores energy and releases hormones for growth and development. Non-REM sleep occurs in four stages: Stage one is a light slumber; stage two marks the onset of real sleep, where the heart rate and breathing slow; and stages three and four provide the deep (or slow-brainwave) sleep that is most highly restorative.
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Generally speaking, sleepers cycle through these stages about every 90 minutes, with a pit stop for REM sleep between each cycle. Interestingly, the body seems to want its slow-wave fix first, and racks up most of the slow-wave quota in the first three hours. If you slash eight hours of sleep to four and your body has to triage, you retain 95 percent of the slow-wave sleep while ditching large chunks of REM and stage-two sleep. "That suggests that slow-wave sleep is the most critical," Stampi says. "Sleep charges your battery more at the beginning of the sleep cycle than at the end, so if you take more naps you are recharging more efficiently, because you take that first big charge frequently." Ripping up normal patterns to sleep almost exclusively in short naps sounds extreme, but as Stampi points out, approximately 85 percent of mammals are polyphasic sleepers. In fact, he says, until about 10,000 years agobefore humans developed the tools and skills that allowed them to stop worrying constantly about becoming some hungry predator's next mealhumans probably were too. Infants are polyphasic sleepers, and even today there are remote hunter-gatherer tribes in Malaysia that sleep four to six hours a night and nap frequently during the day. Perhaps the most famous polyphasic sleeper was Leonardo da Vinci, who supposedly slept only 15 minutes every four hours, for a total of 1.5 hours of shut-eye every 24. "That would help explain his prodigious output," Stampi says. "But I suspect he only used that mode when he was rushing to dissect fast-rotting cadavers." IF YOU EVER NEEDED proof of what sleeplessness can do to a sailor, look no further than the first slide Stampi likes to show clients. In the picture, a blood-red twinmasted racing boat is stranded on its side in the surfline of a remote southwest Australia beach. The boat belonged to exhausted French soloist Jean Luc Van Den Heede, who in a 1994 round-the-world race put his head down for a five-minute nap and woke up when he felt the keel grind ashore. (He refloated the boat and got back in the race.) Stampi's point is that not only do you have to nap; you have to nap wiselymeaning you have to Ellen MacArthur sleeps between 4.5 and 5.5 hours in every 24the minimum amount, Stampi believes, on which humans can get by. tailor nap times and lengths to your body's specific needs. To help his clients, Stampi had to develop answers to an all-important question: When, how often, and how long should polyphasic sleepers nap for maximum sleep efficiency? One of the most striking clues from Stampi's data was that sailors hardly ever slept between 6 and 8 p.m. Stampi theorized that the evening "forbidden zone," as he called it, was a vestige of the long-ago era when humanswho were more vulnerable at nighthad to spend the early-evening hours wide awake, looking for or preparing a
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safe place to sleep. It generally made no sense, Stampi concluded, to try to snooze during these hours, because you would be fighting the natural human biorhythm. At the same time, Stampi also noted sleep peaks that occurred midafternoon and in the wee hours of the morning. This made scientific sense: Humans tend to be sleepiest (or feel "sleep pressure," as Stampi likes to say) then. Stampi thinks the midafternoon sleep bump is also a vestige of early human life, since the heat of the African sun made that a better time to sleep than hunt. His research also showed that afternoon siestas were chock-full of slow-wave sleep, the type that appears to be most important for recharging the body. To Stampi it seemed obvious that sleep-deprived sailors should try to get at least some of their sleep quota then. The key to napping efficiently, Stampi says, is to get in phase and ride these waves of sleepiness and alertness, so no time is wasted merely trying to get to sleep. "My job is to find other hours of the day for each person where sleep is as efficient," he says, "and to try to find a range of sleeping gears, or nap lengths." That means getting in touch with your inner sandman. All the monitoring Stampi has done over the years has supported the anecdotal notion that there are two types of people: morning people, or "larks," and evening people, or "owls." The distinction is important for anyone trying to adapt to sleep deprivation. Larks, Stampi discovered, are good at taking short naps but are not as efficient late at night, and prefer a more regular routine. Owls, on the other hand, appear to be excellent at coping with highly irregular schedules, but prefer longer naps. Mike Golding is an owl, and during the 1998 Around Alone, only 23 percent of his sleep time was devoted to naps of less than an hour. Ellen MacArthur, in contrast, is more of a lark and tends to spend 60 percent of her sleep time in naps shorter than an hour. Despite the different styles, both Golding and MacArthur sleep about the same amount while racing, between 4.5 and 5.5 hours on average in every 24the minimum amount, Stampi believes, on which humans can get by. COULD STAMPI'S STRATEGIES be put to use in other sports? Adventure racers, mountaineers staring down an emergency, and ultra-endurance cyclists experience the same brutal conflict between performance and the need to stay awake. Thirty-sixyear-old American adventure racer Rebecca Rusch, whose Team Montrail won the grueling 2003 Raid Gauloises, says three hours of sleep a day for a weeklong race is common. As are hallucinations: She once conjured up a Vietnamese fruit stand in the middle of a New Zealand field and was so convinced of its existence that she asked her teammates if they had any money. Instead of wasting time trying to convince her it wasn't real, they just told her they were broke. "Oh, OK," she said, and kept going. Anneke Heitmann, research director at Circadian Technologies, in Lexington, Massachusetts, once worked with Stampi on some of his sleep-deprivation
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experiments. She thinks a Stampian approach could benefit these extreme athletes. "A polyphasic regimen gives your body more chance to repair," she says. How about the rest of us? Sleep researchers, including Stampi, agree that if you have the option of snoozing a solid seven or eight hours per night, then taking it is the best strategy for being a well-rested, efficient human being. But if you can't pull it off, a Stampian approach might help keep you upright with less than sufficient sleep. Before I joined him in Newton, Stampi sent me a wrist sleep monitor. For two weeks I tried a variety of extreme sleep patterns. I started with the great Leonardo and tried to sleep just 15 minutes every four hours. After two days I was a walking ghoul, barely able to make a pot of coffee. I decided to go for an Ellen MacArthur solo-sailor pattern, with one to three hours of sleep in the middle of the night and enough 20- to 30-minute naps to get my sleep total up to about five hours in 24. This was a lot better, but, absent the threat of dying at sea, it got harder and harder to limit the overnight sleep to just three hours. Ultimately I gravitated toward a five- or six-hour chunk of sleep at night, supplemented by a 25-minute nap in the sleepy part of the afternoon. Now I was getting somewhere, and when Stampi eventually downloaded all my sleep data from the wrist monitor, he wasn't surprised. He diagnosed me as a hybrid owl/lark, but with the owlish preference for longer sleep periods. "What's your schedule?" I asked him. "Pretty much the same as yours," said Stampi, who slumbers six hours a night, with a 15-minute nap in the afternoon. "I never feel tired." As for Joe Harris, it took the Transat for him to discover where exhaustion ends and a coma begins. "I'm so much more aware of my sleep patterns now," says Harris, who is working with Stampi to prepare for the 2006 5-Oceans Solo Race (formerly the Around Alone). Winning races, or even just getting extra hours in a day, is not a bad trade-off for a little less shut-eye, so Dr. Sleep has an interesting bargain for a tired world. But don't call him after lunch. He'll be napping.
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Polyphasic Sleep: The Conclusion For the last three weeks, I've been deeply engaged in an experiment with a sleep pattern known as polyphasic sleep. What follows is an eclectic mix of my observations, hypotheses, and responses to questions about the adaptation. The Last Week: I've slowly been discovering that my work schedule isn't quite as fit for polynapping as I'd originally believed. This isn't to say that I'm giving up the schedule; on the contrary, I'm trying even harder to make it work. (Did you honestly expect anything less? ;)) Rather than ducking out during lunch for a nap, I've been taking a two-hour nap from 3:30-5:30am, and otherwise following the schedule as normal (with the exception of a 6:30 nap right before work, during which I almost never actually sleep). The core nap appears to be pretty effective in allowing me to survive the workday - however, it may be short-lived. My supervisors have mentioned allowing me to dial in and work from home, which would probably allow me to return to the normal schedule, at least for a couple of days a week. I'll post updates on this as I learn more. Hydro-powered Alarms: I've received several questions about how exactly I've set up an alarm clock to dump water on my face. It's really pretty straightforward; I use the Sonic Boom alarm clock with a vibrating disc. Instead of placing the disk under my pillow like the manufacturers would suggest, I like to place it above my head on the edge of a table, then attach a cup of water to the disc (and attach the disc cord to the table with a little slack, so the disc doesn't smack me in the face). The alarm goes off, the disc vibrates and falls off of the table, and if I'm not quick enough to roll out of the way, then I'm reaching for a towel. If you try this at home, just know that you will spend a lot of time with wet sheets, even if you yourself avoid the torrent. It's a fact of life. Get used to it. Blog & Summary Updates (or lack thereof): From this point on, I will only post blog updates when something significant occurs, and I will no longer keep track of the days. To be honest, I'm not even sure what day I'm on now 22? I stopped updating the summary page last week because I no longer feel that it's helpful. I'm in a phase where I'm modifying the schedule almost every other day, so keeping track of my progress means little, because the definition of progress keeps changing. I'm not sure what I'll do with the logs of the first two weeks; for now, they remain. Does polyphasic sleep really work? A resounding YES! Only a few times over the last three weeks have I slept more than four hours in a 24-hour period, and I'm in no way feeling sleep-deprived. Once my schedule stabilizes, I'm confident that I'll be able to reduce that time to three hours or less, and be a lot more consistent with it. I can't comment yet on the cognitive benefits; I haven't personally experienced them, but my adaptation has probably been more erratic than most people who have. Whether or not those benefits ever surface, the sheer amount of extra time I have is more than enough of a benefit to outweigh the drawbacks of sleeping polyphasically.
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Have you noticed any physical weaknesses? None at all. One of my main concerns before adapting was whether I would be able to fight off all of the cold-season sickies, but so far, I haven't had any problems (*knock on wood*). I've had cold symptoms off and on, but they haven't been as severe or as long-lasting as I would expect. So either I've been fighting a cold pretty well, or the germs just haven't been fighting back. Would you recommend polyphasic sleep to me? That depends. Are you creative enough to make use of an extra six hours every day? Can you handle a zombification period of anywhere from 24 hours to 24 days? (Just kidding. It's no more than a few days, usually.) Do you have a baby? If so, you'll be sleeping just like it, only for shorter durations. Do you have a boss who will understand why you want to bring a pillow to work? In short, I would recommend polyphasic sleep to just about anyone who can manage it in their schedules. Actually, I'd recommend it to just about anyone, regardless of their schedules. The way I see it, there are very few conflicts that would be worth passing this up. Not that I'm biased. ;) Source: Don't ASQ
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Top Eight Kinds of Nap Since we started sleeping polyphasically, I've noticed the quality and nature of naps varies quite a bit. Most naps are just "standard" naps, but I get at least one of these naps each week or so: 8. The Paradox (AKA The Traitor, The Pan Galactic Gargle Nap) Everything seemed to go so well. You lay down on schedule, fell asleep right away, and had a lovely dream involving cake, meadows and fluffy animals. Yet you wake up feeling like someone stuffed your head full of polystyrene and poured bleach in your eyes. Luckily, the effect tends to fade away after a few minutes. 7. The Time Warp (AKA The Forgotten Oversleep, The WTF Nap) Three hours have passed, both alarm clocks have been switched off, along with the light and the MP3 player. You may also have had a drink and been to the bathroom at some point. The last thing you remember is lying down. 6. The Newbie Nap (AKA Murphy's Nap, The Coffee Victim) Your eyes refuse to stay open. Your body is exhausted. Your brain feels like it's been stuffed with cotton wool. You lie down expecting the best nap of your life. Instead, you spend 20 minutes thinking about how badly you want to get to sleep. The ticking clock, humming refrigerator, faint noises from next door and blinking LED on the VCR also don't help. 5. The Phantom Nap (AKA The Non-Nap, The Wake) You were awake when you lay down. You were awake when the alarm went off. You don't remember waking up. Did you sleep in between? No-one will ever know. Unless someone heard you snoring. 4. The Nap-22 (AKA The No-Win-Nap, The Nap-And-A-Half-Without-The-Nap) You wake up feeling pretty good. Eyes open, head clear. But there's a problem. You still have half your time left. Do you get up, or go back to sleep? If you get up you'll feel tired later. If you go back to sleep you'll feel tired when you wake up. You may as well just give up and sleep through to the next nap (not really). 3. The Micronap (AKA The Surprise, The iNap Nano) Why did the hand of that clock jump forward two minutes? 2. The Snap (AKA The Epiphany, The Crystal Pillow) You suddenly snap awake, with one minute left on the clock. You feel like your whole life has been a lead-up to this one moment of startling and unexpected clarity.
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Work fast. You have about 5 minutes before you go back to normal. 1. The Chrono-Nap (AKA The Bullet-Time, The Saga) You fall asleep almost immediately and have an incredibly long and detailed dream. You wake up what feels like hours later, cursing yourself for oversleeping, only to realize you've been asleep five minutes. You resist the urge to call your monophasic friends and tell them how awesome polynapping is. Source: Wayward Wellingtonians
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What You Can Do About Sleep Deprivation: Lessons from Around-the-World Solo Sailors Author: Claudio Stampi, M.D., Ph.D. Chronobiology Research Institute Medically Reviewed On: March 31, 2006 Not Enough Sleep? At first approach, one may think that the problems of fatigue, alertness impairment and sleep deprivation faced by competitive athletes sailing solo around-the-world couldn't possibly relate to everyday living. However, the reality is that the issues that these competitors face are not substantially different from those experienced in the workplace and the strategies they use to deal with sleep deprivation could have a great deal of relevance. Indeed, the around-the-clock availability of key services is becoming a necessity in this era of technological innovation, increased automation, and downsizing. Hospitals must be available to handle emergencies; police and firefighters to protect our lives; trains, airplanes, and road vehicles to ensure swift transportation of people and goods across the globe; power plant operators to provide uninterrupted electrical service. Competitive pressures of the global economy are forcing a growing number of organizations and businesses to provide their services twenty-four hours a day. Furthermore, it is estimated that over 20% of the workforce in industrialized countries work some form of night or shift-work. The problem is that there is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our modern civilization and the design of the human brain. Our patterns of sleep and wakefulness are governed by internal biological clocks. These internal clocks are elegantly attuned to the rhythms of night and day that belong to an era where humans hunted by day, slept at night, and never traveled more than a few miles from sunrise to sunset. In contrast, we now work, travel by jet to the opposite side of the globe, and make crucial decisions, at all hours of the day and night. Inevitably, with these new challenges comes more risk. It is not a coincidence that the most notorious industrial accidents of our times - Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez - all occurred in the middle of the night or early morning, when operators with major responsibilities were dangerously fatigued. Most transportation accidents are caused by human error, and the leading cause of human error is fatigue. Sleep deprivation leads to as many as 200,000 road accidents each year in the U.S. alone, and results in one-third of all fatal heavy truck accidents. It is estimated that fatigue cost the U.S. economy at least $ 20 billion each year in decreased productivity and accidents. In 1960, Sir Francis Chichester took 38 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean, from Plymouth, UK, to Newport, R.I., winning the first Observer Single-handed Transatlantic
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Race (OSTAR). Less than three decades later, the winner of the 1988 edition of the OSTAR crossed the Atlantic in only 10 days. Such a remarkable achievement has been largely determined by the phenomenal improvements in yacht design, construction techniques, electronics and navigation technologies. Today, the limiting factor is no longer technology virtually all competitors sail on extremely fast and state-of-the-art racing machines but the human element. Races are won by solo sailors who, pitting themselves against nature's elements for months at a time, are capable of wisely administering their own resources of stamina, skill, organization, self-discipline and determination. The key to success in these great human adventures and athletic contests is proper management of sleep and rest. For these solo sailors, the temptation to reduce sleep to dramatically low levels is constantly present at any time of day or night in order to continuously optimize boat performance and speed, to survey tactics of competitors and study meteorological reports, and to avoid collisions with ships or with icebergs in the Southern Oceans. The danger often overlooked is that the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation are manifested by subtle decreases in awareness and ability to perform, resulting in errors of judgement and reduced ability to assess ones own capabilities, even before these symptoms become fully obvious and escalate into physical fatigue. Ultimately, lack of proper sleep management undermines not only race performance but, more importantly, safety. Indeed, fatigue and sleep deprivation have been reported as causes for, or contributing factors in, many of the accidents which occurred in past races. In a pioneering effort to address this important safety issue, for the first time in the history of any sailing contest, the Alertness, Sleep and Safety Assurance Program has been launched in the Around Alone 1998-99 competition. Covering 27,000 nautical miles and spanning four oceans, this single-handed marathon (formerly The BOC Challenge) is the longest race on earth for an individual in any sport. Based on state-of-the art research and on solutions adopted in certain industrial, space and aeronautical settings, the program provides competitors with knowledge and tools that substantially contribute to their safety, as well as maximize their efficiency and alertness levels. In addition, the program is an invaluable research tool, generating data and information which will significantly contribute to a further understanding of sleep deprivation and its management. This knowledge will be applied in a variety of occupational and workplace settings. The core components of the Alertness, Sleep and Safety Assurance Program for the Around Alone competitors are education and training. Prior to the start of the race, competitors attended an intensive workshop on the fundamentals of sleep-wake states, alertness, and circadian (twenty-four-hour) regulation. Particular emphasis was given to recognizing the first and subtle signs of sleep deprivation or alertness impairment. Sleep is an active and complex physiological state that is vital to survival. Individual sleep needs may vary considerably from person-to-person and
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depend also on a number of external factors such as motivation and mood. Some people need 6 hours or less, but others require up to 9 hours to feel wide awake and to function at their peak level. However, quality of sleep - which includes keeping regular sleep schedules, proper exercise and nutrition - is equally, or more important, than quantity. When severely deprived of sleep, the brain can shift uncontrollably from wake to sleep. Such spontaneous episodes of sleepiness can be very short (microsleeps) or extend for several minutes, and are associated with significant performance deterioration and may put an individual at risk. What Works for Them May Work For You In the workshop, competitors have been instructed on a variety of strategies for combating sleepiness and fatigue and for optimizing alertness and performance. Because there is no better antidote to sleepiness than, you guessed it, sleep itself, the main focus was placed on how to get the most benefit out of short sleep episodes. Indeed, napping is an age-old response to the basic biological rhythm that controls sleeping and waking. Studies have shown that naps improve judgment, performance, memory retention and mood. The best approach is to nap in advance to prevent sleepiness during a long stretch of wakefulness. It is no coincidence that a number of highly productive and creative individuals were nappers. The list includes Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Napoleon and Thomas Edison, whose invention of the light bulb placed man in an around-the-clock world and keeps so many people up past their natural bedtimes. I have been involved with numerous studies over the past 20 years that have shown that multiple napping schedules (or polyphasic sleep strategies) have allowed transAtlantic sailors to maintain much of their performance levels. Based on these observations and on the fact that over 85% of species in nature show typical polyphasic rest-activity patterns, we believe that polyphasic sleep is the strategy of choice for maintaining acceptable alertness levels under situations of continuous work. This strategy is not new, for apparently it had been successfully tested as early as half a millennium ago by no other than Leonardo da Vinci, undisputedly a highly productive and creative master. According to anecdotal reports, Leonardo would sleep 15 minutes out of every four hours, for a daily total of only 1.5 hours of sleep. Our controlled laboratory studies - including those recently commissioned by NASA in an effort to design sleep management schedules for emergencies in space missions have shown that Leonardos idea makes significant biological sense. Individuals sleeping for 30 minutes every four hours, for a daily total of only 3 hours of sleep, performed better and were more alert, compared to when they had 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep. In other words, under conditions of dramatic sleep reduction, it is more efficient to recharge the sleep "battery" more often. Following the workshop, competitors have been individually coached toward personalized optimal sleep and alertness management plans, tailored to their
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physiologic and circadian profiles, and based on their own wealth of experience. For example, it is important to determine whether a competitor is a morning or an evening person. Morning people (larks) usually require more regular routines than do evening people (owls). On the other hand, larks tend to feel very refreshed following even very brief naps, while owls generally require longer naps to feel satisfied. During the entire 8-month long race, sailors wear wrist activity monitors (a microcomputer the size of a wristwatch) which continuously collect data on quality and duration of their sleep and wake activities. This information is downloaded at the end of each leg and, after sophisticated analyses, is shared and discussed with each competitor in debriefing sessions to further optimize their sleep management strategies. Data from leading competitors who recently stopped in Cape Town after the month-long Leg 1 is currently being analyzed. Preliminary findings indicate that some of the winners managed to remain highly alert and competitive with a total of only 4 hours of sleep per day, thanks to their dividing sleep into multiple short naps throughout the 24 hours. Summary: We live in a 24-hour society that never shuts down to meet the increasing requirements of a global economy. However, these around-the-clock demands represent a major challenge for the human physiology, disrupting sleep, brain clocks, and generating decrements in alertness and performance. Ultimately, the increase in fatigue observed in our society often result in errors and accidents in the workplace, with a dramatic impact on safety and productivity. Scientific research conducted over the past two decades has shown that there are strategies to improve safety, alertness and performance that can be tailored to specific work environments. By examining the pioneering research being conducted to enhance safety in one of the most grueling sporting events in the world--around-the-world solo sailing--we can learn a great deal about innovative solutions which we can adapt for our own lifestyles, and generate tangible benefits to our overall safety, alertness and productivity.
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The Science of Sleep

We spend a third of our lives doing it. Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a night. Thomas Edison claimed it was waste of time.
Why do we sleep?
So why do we sleep? This is a question that has baffled scientists for centuries and the answer is, no one is really sure. Some believe that sleep gives the body a chance to recuperate from the day's activities but in reality, the amount of energy saved by sleeping for even eight hours is miniscule - about 50 kCal, the same amount of energy in a piece of toast. We have to sleep because it is essential to maintaining normal levels of cognitive skills such as speech, memory, innovative and flexible thinking. In other words, sleep plays a significant role in brain development.
What would happen if we didn't sleep?

A good way to understand the role of sleep is to look at what would happen if we didn't sleep. Lack of sleep has serious effects on our brain's ability to function. If you've ever pulled an all-nighter, you'll be familiar with the following after-effects: grumpiness, grogginess, irritability and forgetfulness. After just one night without sleep, concentration becomes more difficult and attention span shortens considerably. With continued lack of sufficient sleep, the part of the brain that controls language, memory, planning and sense of time is severely affected, practically shutting down. In fact, 17 hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% (two glasses of wine). This is the legal drink driving limit in the UK. Research also shows that sleep-deprived individuals often have difficulty in responding to rapidly changing situations and making rational judgements. In real life situations, the consequences are grave and lack of sleep is said to have been be a contributory factor to a number of international disasters such as Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Challenger shuttle explosion. Sleep deprivation not only has a major impact on cognitive functioning but also on emotional and physical health. Disorders such as sleep apnoea which result in
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excessive daytime sleepiness have been linked to stress and high blood pressure. Research has also suggested that sleep loss may increase the risk of obesity because chemicals and hormones that play a key role in controlling appetite and weight gain are released during sleep.
What happens when we sleep?

What happens every time we get a bit of shut eye? Sleep occurs in a recurring cycle of 90 to 110 minutes and is divided into two categories: non-REM (which is further split into four stages) and REM sleep.
Non-REM Sleep
Stage one: Light Sleep During the first stage of sleep, we're half awake and half asleep. Our muscle activity slows down and slight twitching may occur. This is a period of light sleep, meaning we can be awakened easily at this stage. Stage two: True Sleep Within ten minutes of light sleep, we enter stage two, which lasts around 20 minutes. The breathing pattern and heart rate start to slow down. This period accounts for the largest part of human sleep. Stages three and four: Deep Sleep During stage three, the brain begins to produce delta waves, a type of wave that is large (high amplitude) and slow (low frequency). Breathing and heart rate are at their lowest levels. Stage four is characterised by rhythmic breathing and limited muscle activity. If we are awakened during deep sleep we do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes after waking up. Some children experience bedwetting, night terrors, or sleepwalking during this stage. Closed eye
REM Sleep
The first rapid eye movement (REM) period usually begins about 70 to 90 minutes after we fall asleep. We have around three to five REM episodes a night. Although we are not conscious, the brain is very active - often more so than when we
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are awake. This is the period when most dreams occur. Our eyes dart around (hence the name), our breathing rate and blood pressure rise. However, our bodies are effectively paralysed, said to be nature's way of preventing us from acting out our dreams. After REM sleep, the whole cycle begins again.
How much sleep is required?

There is no set amount of time that everyone needs to sleep, since it varies from person to person. Results from the sleep profiler indicate that people like to sleep anywhere between 5 and 11 hours, with the average being 7.75 hours. Jim Horne from Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre has a simple answer though: "The amount of sleep we require is what we need not to be sleepy in the daytime." Even animals require varied amounts of sleep: Species Python Tiger Cat Chimpanzee Sheep Africanelephant Giraffe Average total sleep time per day 18 hrs 15.8 hrs 12.1 hrs 9.7 hrs 3.8 hrs 3.3 hrs 1.9 hr
The current world record for the longest period without sleep is 11 days, set by Randy Gardner in 1965. Four days into the research, he began hallucinating. This was followed by a delusion where he thought he was a famous footballer. Surprisingly, Randy was actually functioning quite well at the end of his research and he could still beat the scientist at pinball. Source: BBC - Science & Nature
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The Power of the Sleep Cycle
Ok, I've been talking to people for a long time about the fact that you can get by on 6 or even 4.5 hours of sleep per day without question. The secret is NOT the amount of sleep, but rather the number itself; a multiple of 90 minutes will change your life. 1.5 hours 3 hours 4.5 hours 6 hours 7.5 hours Those are the sleep quantities that you should aim to get, and those are what your body will naturally take, removing the alarm clock. Guaranteed. Go to sleep without an alarm clock, and watch what times you naturally wake up at. It will be a multiple of 90 minutes from when you first went to bed. This 90 minutes is known as a sleep cycle, and it's how I live my life. Typically, I sleep 3 hours a night, and nap for 90 minutes in the evening. That's a total of 4.5 hours, and I am always alert, always awake and always feel rested and refreshed. Read on for more details... "A group of Harvard scientists trained volunteers to perform a visual task that required them to learn how to recognize certain patterns as they flashed quickly on the computer screen. When the subjects were tested 10 hours later, those who had taken a 90-minute nap did much better than those who didn't nap. In fact, they did as well as people who got a full night's sleep in a previous study" http://www.sleepfoundation.org/Alert/030730.cfm Here's something from the Center for Applied Cognitive Studies (http://centacs.com) "Studies show that the length of sleep is not what causes us to be refreshed upon waking. The key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy. Each sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, which exhibit different brainwave patterns. For our purposes, it suffices to say that one sleep cycle lasts an average of 90 minutes: 65 minutes of normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement), sleep; 20 minutes of REM sleep (in which we dream); and a final 5 minutes of non-REM sleep. The REM sleep phases are shorter during earlier cycles (less than 20 minutes) and longer during later ones (more than 20 minutes). If we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes--for example, after 4 1/2 hours, 6 hours, 7 1/2 hours, or 9
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hours, but not after 7 or 8 hours, which are not multiples of 90 minutes. In the period between cycles we are not actually sleeping: it is a sort of twilight zone from which, if we are not disturbed (by light, cold, a full bladder, noise), we move into another 90minute cycle. A person who sleeps only four cycles (6 hours) will feel more rested than someone who has slept for 8 to 10 hours but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed.... " It explains why, when I get 8 hours of sleep I feel tired and groggy, or when I get 4 hour of sleep, I can barely wake up. As human beings, we should know about this fact, as everyone always says "get your 8 hours". Yet some people fare better than others. Why is that? Probably because the more rested people are actually getting closer to 7.5, or 9 hours, while the 8 hour folk feel constantly unrested. It is said that many of the most productive people in history have understood and practiced this. Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Buckminster Fuller used this *exact* technique. Other great minds likewise used naps to their advantage including Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Napoleon, and Winston Churchhill. Naps are the key to direct Theta brainwave access. Theta brainwaves are the brainwaves of hyper awareness. The more theta you have during your waking hours, the more creatively intelligent you are--it's really that simple. As far as longevity, Fuller lived to 87. DaVinci into his late 60's. --Both lived over DOUBLE the average life expectancy of the men of their time. Monophasic sleep is the "norm" for North American culture. We sleep at night, and work during the day. Polyphasic sleep consists of multiple sleep/ wake incidents scattered throughout the day. A sleep schedule with an afternoon nap is an example of polyphasic sleep. There is evidence to suggest that humans were originally suited to a polyphasic sleeping routine, rather than the arbitrary monophasic one that we are used to. For starters, almost all animals in nature conform to polyphasic behavior. In addition, polyphasic behavior is the predominant mode of sleeping for human infants, and even in the later years, children have to slowly be weaned from the afternoon nap. Furthermore, when people are isolated from the external environment - so that they cannot determine the actual time of the day from natural cues such as sunlight, or artificial cues such as clocks or television programs - they tend to exhibit more napping behavior instead of retaining the single monophasic sleep period during the "night." Finally, it appears that naps - relatively brief sessions of sleep - are more effective in refreshing the mind, than longer periods of sleep. In a sense, we were taught to "unlearn" this natural way of sleeping, when we had to adjust to the arbitrary 9-to-5 schedule. Oh, and on 3 hours of sleep a night, I have one cup of coffee at the most per day.
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The sleep cycle is a beautiful thing. Interesting Note: Your brain cells reset their sodium & potassium ratios when the brain is in Theta state. The sodium & potassium levels are involved in osmosis which is the chemical process that transports chemicals into and out of your brain cells. After an extended period in the Beta state the ratio between potassium and sodium is out of balance. This the main cause of what is known as "mental fatigue". A brief period in Theta (about 5 - 15min) can restore the ratio to normal resulting in mental refreshment. Update: I originally wrote this article in early 2003, it's now late 2005, and my sleep patterns are regular, unwaveringly bi-phasic. I'm healthy, I don't eat any sugar whatsoever, my cholesterol is low and my productivity is higher than it has ever been. Some people have wondered how they would transition into a sleeping pattern like this. The keys (from my experience only) are: 1. Measure the length of your sleep cycle. 90 minutes is a good average, but for some people it is different. Mine has actually changed in the last few years from 90 to about 75. Now, if I hit the pillow at 7:00, I wake up for the first time at 8:15. Never, ever using an alarm clock. Because of the change in sleep cycle length, I now get 4 cycles per day. Usually three late at night, and one in the evening. 2. The key thing is, it MUST be divided up into two distinct sleep sessions per day. It's not enough to just get 4.5 hours and say "that's my sleep done for today". You'll have a hell of a time staying awake for the remaining 19+ hours. You've got to divide it into two (or more) sleep sessions. The REM sleep you achieve has to be spaced throughout the day for it to have the proper "flushing" effect. For anyone interested, here's a picture I found that shows what sleep cycles "look like" on an EEG: http://img31.exs.cx/img31/9306/sp.jpg Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, I'm not a therapist, or anything of the sort. I'm just a guy who discovered this by accident, experienced it, then looked it up to see if there was any research into stuff like this. It started because I was getting less sleep at night, and was tired, so I started having naps after work (at first, accidentally on the couch), but found unexpectedly that it suddenly rejuvinated me the next day, and made everything else easily doable. The rest was history. I've opened a thread on my forums for anyone who wants to have some discussion about this topic. Source: GlenRhodes.com
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CATCHING CATNAPS WOODIE FLOWERS Oh, where did those fifteen minutes go? When you're sailing singlehanded, you've got to do everything yourself. You've got to handle the boat, keep a lookout, navigate, cook. How can you do it? One thing that practically all lone long-distance sailors do is cut way back on their sleep. And the best way to do that seems to be take this precious sleep time and spread it out into little catnaps. That's what most successful ocean racers do. So when you know you can only get a little sleep, you break it up into tiny pieces. Does that make sense? Now there's a sleep study that aims to figure that out. NARRATION Meet Francesco Jost. He's Swiss, he's an artist--and he's a guinea pig. For the next seven weeks he's going to try sleeping for just six half-hour naps per day. Why would he want to do that? FRANCESCO JOST It's difficult to explain. I want to be more productive. And do a job in greater depth. Many times when I produce a painting, I don't really have a lot of time to reflect. Here I will have a lot of time to reflect. NARRATION Running the experiment at a Boston sleep research institute will be Claudio Stampi. Of course, sleep researchers have to sleep, too, so Francesco's brain waves will be recorded 24 hours a day. CLAUDIO STAMPI Buona notte. Chiao. NARRATION The first thing to do is measure Francesco's brain waves during a normal 8hour night's sleep to compare with what happens when he goes on the reduced schedule. Like most people, Francesco sleeps in cycles. First light sleep with small, rapid brain waves. Then deep or slow wave sleep takes over. And finally we reach "rapid eye movement" or REM sleep when we usually dream. Cycles are repeated through the night, each lasting at least 90 minutes. So one key question is: What type of sleep will Francesco's body choose if he never sleeps longer than 30 minutes? CLAUDIO STAMPI Probably what will happen is that the body will automatically prefer to concentrate on the sleep stages or the sleep parts that are most important and most necessary. And maybe by this experiment we will be able to select and filter out what are the physiological aspects of sleep that are more necessary. NARRATION As the 49-day experiment gets under way, Francesco takes advantage of the extra work time. By Day 12 he's getting used to the schedule: Three and a half hours work, a half hour sleep. Throughout each day he has to record in his computer how he thinks he's doing. So far, everything is on the plus side: He can concentrate, he feels alert. There are regular performance tests too. Here he has to subtract 9 from 691. The right answer is 682. Now it's 8 from 682. Should be 674. Some stakes, but overall he's doing almost as well as before the experiment began. CLAUDIO STAMPI I was surprised myself to see that the decreasing performance was so modest. Francesco was able to adapt to this schedule reasonably well in terms of performance. NARRATION But what about his type of sleep? Is he getting the three different kinds? He's been asked to note down his dreams and he's still doing so. So he's probably getting REM Sleep, the type that goes with dreams, but normally comes at the end of a 90-minute cycle. Claudio searches Francesco's brain wave records for the telltale signs of REM sleep. And he finds them. On the top the fast brain waves typical of REM sleep. In the middle the sudden busts of rapid eye movements. And below the characteristic low muscle activity. Francesco's REM sleep is normal. What's not normal is how quickly it starts. CLAUDIO STAMPI A few minutes after sleep onset, REM sleep starts. Whereas, in a normal night's sleep, the REM takes at least 90 minutes, two hours sometimes, or maybe
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sometimes even three hours to appear initially. So the whole architecture of sleep is changed. NARRATION Now look at the next nap Francesco took after the REM sleep one. It's mostly deep sleep, characterized by these big slow brain waves. Francesco seems to be making an extraordinary adaptation to get the three different sleep types. Although his sleep quantity has been cut by more than half, the composition is unchanged. CLAUDIO STAMPI Percentages of sleep stages in the nightly schedule are very similar to baseline normal night's sleep percentages, which suggests that all sleep stages may be equally important in the function of sleep. NARRATION It's now Day 33 of the experiment. Francesco is spending a week at the beach. Both mood and performance are slightly below normal--but they're stable. This really seems to be working. FRANCESCO I am really surprised that I can live like this, that I can adjust to this new schedule without having more difficulties NARRATION The experiment's now two-thirds done, and Claudio springs a surprise. CLAUDIO STAMPI Hello Francesco, how are you? FRANCISCO I am fine. NARRATION For one night only, Francesco's allowed to sleep all he wants. Claudio wants to know if a sudden sleep bonus can affect performance, but he'd kept quiet about the idea so as not to affect Francesco's mood during the first thirty days. Francesco sleeps for ten hours. But once he's back on his reduced schedule, his mood and performance improve dramatically--and stay that way--even exceeding his pre-experiment scores! Claudio isn't sure why Francesco benefited so much, but he thinks sleep bonuses could have practical applications. CLAUDIO STAMPI This suggests that if a person is under an emergency, and the emergency is very prolonged and has the possibility of taking one day off and sleeping as much as a person wants, this will be positive, would give good results. And then, after that the person can start again a multiple-napping schedule, more refreshed than he was before. NARRATION Day 48. Just one day to go. During the last week Francesco's been living at the sleep lab. He's under constant observation because experiments running this long are extremely rare. Anything might happen. But the real problem is nothing's happening. He often finds it a little tough to, well...really get moving after his half-hour nap periods. CLAUDIO STAMPI Francesco, it is time to wake up. No signs. Still sleeping. NARRATION Francesco's girlfriend Magda has a turn. CLAUDIO STAMPI He has been two months sleeping only three hours per day so he has built a tremendous sleep pressure. Now his sleep pressure manifests mostly in a difficulty to wake up rather than sleepiness when he's awake. NARRATION So although Francesco's been showing sleep pressure for some time, once he wakes up, he does just fine on his test scores. Right now, though, it looks like he'll be scoring a zero. Magda gets him to at least sit at the computer--but somehow the questions just don't make sense. And finally, he figures, if they really want me to stick with the computer, there's only one way to do it. It took half an hour but he's finally awake, and amazingly enough his test scores are right on. He answers "No" to the question "Do you feel tired?" and "Yes," he can concentrate. After nearly two months with only three hours sleep a day, it's an extraordinary performance. Could anybody do it? CLAUDIO STAMPI Francesco's a normal person, a normal young person, and he's very representative, if you wish, of the human species, adult human species. So it is possible to
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suspect that individuals like Francesco would be able to adapt to this, relatively easily, to this multiple napping pattern. NARRATION Multiple naps seem to work, although, left to itself, the body might prevent their use through sleep pressure. They'll pursue this and other questions at the lab. Francesco will be coming back as a subject, although, considering his feelings right now, it's a little hard to see why! FRANCESCO I am free! I am happy that I won't have to take any more tests. And I will be able to go out now and live normally. I am ready for a little vacation.
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Cheating the Sandman - An Introduction to Polyphasic Sleep, pt.1 Haldo, and welcome to the world of polyphasic sleep!

The Science of Sleep

What would happen if we didn't sleep?

What happens when we sleep?

How much sleep is required?

The Power of the Sleep Cycle

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