Can someone point me to an argument or evidence supporting the suggestion that short polyphasic sleep allows most people to decrease their sleep requirements without negative cognitive, physical, or health consequences?
I’m a long sleeper (my sleep requirements are on the higher side), and I am interested in reducing my sleep requirements. I encountered the idea of polyphasic sleep after learning quite a bit about sleep. Polyphasic sleep is often touted as a way to decrease sleep need, via making your body quickly go into REM sleep. Quickly going into REM when asleep is a sign of either narcolepsy or sleep deprivation, neither of which are regarded as good things. I haven’t found the original source for the idea that your brain goes into REM immediately on a short polyphasic schedule, but Claudio Stampi’s studies suggest this is false. More recently I’ve seen some short polyphasic sleepers suggest the schedule will allow you to skip over the lighter stages of sleep so you can sleep more efficiently. With this much confusion and misinformation, I’m not confident about the justification for short polyphasic sleep.
Some folks (e.g., puredoxyk) have suggested that you have to deny that some people seem to work okay on short polyphasic schedules (or believe they are lying) to suggest that it doesn’t work as described. I don’t think so. It seems that the fraction of people who seem to do well on short polyphasic sleep schedules is comparable to the fraction of people who are short sleepers. I don’t have any hard numbers for the former, but I believe it is on the order of 5% or so (puredoxyk suggested over 90% of attempts at short polyphasic sleep fail). The latter is more well studied. A fairly recent review stated that about 4.0% of people sleep less than 5.5 hours per night. So, my hypothesis is that those who do well on short polyphasic sleep schedules are short sleepers, and thus it doesn’t make sense to suggest polyphasic sleep as a way to reduce sleep requirements.
Still, with so many rationalists buying into the idea, I’m wondering if I am missing something. I would appreciate any suggested reading on the topic.
I still stand by what I wrote in the answer to the Skeptic Stack Exchange question that you linked to. I don’t think there good reason to assume that polyphasic sleep is very useful.
At the same time it’s an interesting topic for research. If I understand right puredoxyk wants to do some group research at the moment. I would also be interested in the current conclusions of those Leverage Research folks who started polyphasic sleep a while ago.
I while ago I did meet a girl via PlentyOfFish who claimed to have been for a year on 1 hour of sleep per day without doing any kind of polyphasic schedule or other personal development tricks and that’s without her knowing about my interests in the subject. It didn’t kill her but it probably wasn’t healthy either.
Some folks (e.g., puredoxyk) have suggested that you have to deny that some people seem to work okay on short polyphasic schedules
Phrases like “work okay” have a fairly broad meaning. There are plenty of people who think they are highly functioning but who could function a lot better. If I remember right puredoxyk was depressed when she wrote the post. She was depressed before she even started polyphasic sleep, but that doesn’t set the bar for “being okay” very high.
I had not realized the Stack Exchange post was yours. Good work.
New research into short polyphasic sleep is not so interesting to me. I think it is plausible that a polyphasic schedule could modestly reduce sleep requirements (perhaps around 1 hour at most) by reducing the duration of lighter stages of sleep (but not eliminating; it’s not clear these stages are unimportant). But that’s not what people interested in polyphasic sleep are testing. Instead, they try very short schedules that don’t make sense. I skimmed through puredoxyk’s original post on polyphasic sleep and it seems she decided 2 hours total was right because that was about as much REM sleep as she was getting before. This goes back to problems mentioned elsewhere: REM is not the only important sleep stage and nap-type sleep schedules don’t produce purely REM sleep. I’d like to see a change in research direction among polyphasic sleep proponents towards longer schedules.
Phrases like “work okay” have a fairly broad meaning. There are plenty of people who think they are highly functioning but who could function a lot better.
I agree. I think many people who maintain short polyphasic sleep don’t recognize how impaired they are. I wasn’t trying to set the bar low. I was responding to the suggestion that I must think everyone who claims success is lying. I do think lying and exaggeration play a role, but here are some other easy justifications I can offer: acclimation (short polyphasic sleepers get used to being sleep deprived), placebo sleep effect (they think it works, minimizing the tiredness), positive publication bias (might explain why the Leverage Research folks haven’t followed up), and wishful thinking. These explanations are in addition to the self-selection effect for short sleepers that I previously mentioned.
There are a number of other ways to potentially reduce your sleep need that I believe are more plausible than polyphasic sleep. I’ll detail a few I am aware of.
I’ve read that some people with delayed sleep phase disorder find that they can sleep at times not aligned with their circadian rhythms, but the sleep is not restorative. Aligning your sleep with your circadian rhythm seems like one way to potentially reduce sleep need. The only sleep schedules that fit well with your circadian rhythm are monophasic and biphasic (i.e., with an afternoon nap).
Another thing I’ve found that potentially will reduce sleep requirements is meditation, but with a roughly 1-to-1 meditation-time to sleep-time conversion rate, it doesn’t seem to help with the larger goal of increasing useful time awake. (But for those who like meditation, this seems like a reason to do it.)
There also are various drugs that increase deep sleep at the expense of lighter sleep that could reduce sleep requirements, however, most of these drugs are not available (e.g., ritanserin is not produced on a large scale, and GHB is highly regulated) and/or unattractive for other reasons (side effects, cost, half-life, toxicity). Stimulant drugs also are options during the day, though, they won’t make your sleep more restorative.
I’ve also done some research into the effects of physical exercise on sleep architecture and wakefulness. Exercise can increase deep sleep. It is not clear if this effect is larger than the increase in deep sleep required to repair your body after exercise, though anecdotes in the article suggest that people believe it is (I am unsure). Also, physical exercise does not appear to wake you up for very long and likely will make you more tired until you go to sleep if you are sleep deprived.
Another idea I’ve had involved applying optimal control theory to mathematical models of the sleep cycle, but I suspect this will just tell you to sleep at times aligned with your circadian rhythm.
I agree. I think many people who maintain short polyphasic sleep don’t recognize how impaired they are. I
To be fair, the same goes also for most people who aren’t on polyphasic sleep schedules.
There are also other effects. Polyphasic sleep is like a commitment contract to do time planning. If you don’t do time planning while on Uberman you are very screwed. As a result the schedule forces the user to plan his time and therefore the user might be more productive.
As a footnote, what strikes me most about short polyphasic sleep is that it has caught on among many rationalists, yet the evidence for it is comparable to that of acupuncture and homeopathy.
Acupuncture and homeopathy are subjects which are investigated by a lot of people and where a lot of knowledge is available about various experiments that people did about the subject.
Polyphasic sleep is a subject where very little information is available. You are very fast in a realm outside of what’s studied in mainstream academia. That makes the topic interesting while both acupuncture and homeopathy are fairly boring topics.
Polyphasic sleep as such also doesn’t violate any laws of how reality is supposed to work in the way homeopathy does.
The reasons of why humans have to sleep the amount of time that they do aren’t very clear.
There also are various drugs that increase deep sleep at the expense of lighter sleep that could reduce sleep requirements, however, most of these drugs are not available
As far as I understand the normal person can reach 4 hours of sleep per day via modafinil and uphold that schedule for months. On the other hand I’m not sure whether that healthy for a period over multiple years.
While I don’t think polyphasic sleep is as obviously wrong as homeopathy, it is clear that many of the claims short polyphasic sleep proponents make conflict with things known about sleep.
A polyphasic schedule that ignores the circadian rhythm requires sleep deprivation (a bad thing) for some of the naps to happen. Circadian rhythms seem quite rigid for many people. For example, orally taken melatonin is often prescribed in an attempt to shift the circadian rhythm of a patient with delayed sleep phase disorder. The longest study I could find on the subject suggested that melatonin does not work long-term for delayed sleep phase disorder (added 2015-06-30: jacob_cannell pointed out that I misread the study, so I retract this sentence). Indeed, a recommendation I’ve seen for people with delayed sleep phase disorder has been to not fight their circadian rhythm if they don’t have to, and sleep offset from most other people. Based on what I’ve read from polyphasic sleepers, it seems to me that they usually can’t fight their circadian rhythm either, as schedules with a “core” night sleep tend to be more successful (though most people still can not adapt).
Polyphasic sleep proponents also make many assumptions and false claims regarding sleep architecture. To summarize points already made, common claims from short polyphasic sleep proponents include that REM is all you need or the more sophisticated argument that light sleep can be skipped. More than REM is important, in fact, there are a few studies (e.g.) that correlate objective measurements of sleep architecture with subjective measurements of sleep quality, and they consistently find that SWS/deep sleep is the most important. It’s also not clear that the lighter stages of sleep are necessarily unimportant (e.g., the K-complex that occurs in stage 2 sleep may play a role in memory formation). Certainly, if someone gets too much light sleep they could benefit from reducing that, but it’s not clear to me that polyphasic sleep necessarily does that, and no one knows for certain how much is adequate (I believe greater than zero light sleep is optimal).
I have a copy of Stampi’s book now. Skimming through the book, I’m somewhat struck to learn there’s a fair bit more academic research into polyphasic schedules than I imagined. In chapter 10 (table 10.1), Stampi cites 11 studies that looked at what he calls “polyphasic schedules with sleep reduction”. There are other studies that did not reduce sleep. I’ll have to examine this more closely when I find the time.
Based on what I’ve read from polyphasic sleepers, it seems to me that they usually can’t fight their circadian rhythm either, as schedules with a “core” night sleep tend to be more successful (though most people still can not adapt).
Schedules with the core sleep don’t seem to equate that being awake for 6 hours in a row completely screws you up for a day. That’s why they are a lot more practical than Uberman if Uberman works as advertised.
To summarize points already made, common claims from short polyphasic sleep proponents include that REM is all you need or the more sophisticated argument that light sleep can be skipped.
While that’s certainly claimed by some polyphasic sleep advocates there are others who read a bit and who therefore don’t make that false claim and still advocate polyphasic sleep.
Even more, those people who do make the claim don’t know that they claim something that in conflict with the academic literature on sleep. That’s quite different from the case of homeopathy where the conflict is obvious.
That makes a difference for the spread of memes, if you are interested in why the meme spreads.
Circadian rhythms seem quite rigid for many people.
Quite rigid doesn’t tell you at all what you need to do to mess with them and reprogram the brain to do something different.
It’s theoretically possible that you can change some mental patterns if you exert strong enough stress. People are certainly possible to switch up their circadian rhythms after having jet lag produced through a intercontinental flight.
There one theory not yet covered in our discussion. It possible to imaging sleep as a garbage collection process. After N hours of being awake the body needs N/2 hours of sleep to get sort through all the information stored while being awake. It’s also possible that it needs (N^2)/32 hours of sleep to sort through all the information.
Both formula suggest a monophasic sleep schedule of 8 hours for a 24 hour day but the second one also allows Uberman sleep to work.
I’m not aware that the academic sleep literature proves that the relevant formula is linear and not quadratic.
There one theory not yet covered in our discussion. It possible to imaging sleep as a garbage collection process. After N hours of being awake the body needs N/2 hours of sleep to get sort through all the information stored while being awake. It’s also possible that it needs (N^2)/32 hours of sleep to sort through all the information.
Based on my experience the couple times I stayed awake for more than 24 hours in a row, I think it’s very unlikely to be quadratic, at least for large N.
BTW, does anybody know of anyone who’s tried http://xkcd.com/320/ for more than a few weeks in a row?
Based on my experience the couple times I stayed awake for more than 24 hours in a row, I think it’s very unlikely to be quadratic, at least for large N.
So you are saying you did spent something like 36 hours awake in a row without negative side effects?
So you are saying you did spent something like 36 hours awake in a row without negative side effects?
I’ve spent more than 36 hours without sleep and while there are side effects, the point is that when you finally get to sleep, how much you sleep isn’t a quadratic function of of how many hours you were awake.
Yes, there were negative side effects, but these didn’t include having to sleep 36^2/32 hours in a row to catch up.
(Edit: what happened is I slept six-ish hours in a row as soon as I hit a bed, waking up in the afternoon, then I reverted to my ordinary sleep schedule except the first couple nights I went to bed about an hour earlier than usual.
Then that’s not directly relevant to what I’m arguing. I’m speaking about the amount of sleep in a stable schedule that you need to feel alright.
I’m not sure that your brain processed all the experiences during that longer awake period in a healthy way and formed memories for those that should stay in memory.
Quite rigid doesn’t tell you at all what you need to do to mess with them and reprogram the brain to do something different.
It’s theoretically possible that you can change some mental patterns if you exert strong enough stress. People are certainly possible to switch up their circadian rhythms after having jet lag produced through a intercontinental flight.
I was unclear. There are a number of ways to influence your circadian rhythm. These do allow you to change time zones, etc. It is not clear that these can be taken advantage of for short polyphasic sleep. However, speculation is not necessary, as Dr. Stampi addresses this point in his book (p. 174-175):
Circadian rhythms do not appear to be affected (with the exception of minor phase-shifts found in some studies) during polyphasic sleep schedules, but more detailed studies are required. Preferred times for sleepiness bouts and the “forbidden zone” to sleep tend to occur at circadian times similar to normal monophasic conditions. Anchor-sleep periods at constant times definitely appear to improve stability of circadian rhythms. Data presented in this review suggest also that in designing polyphasic schedules the timing of sleep periods should respect the underlying dynamics of biological rhythms.
The data available verifies my view that a successful polyphasic schedule must respect the circadian drive. Schedules like Uberman seem much less plausible, and other schedules with a “core” period more plausible, but unlikely to be better than monophasic or biphasic (long night sleep with afternoon nap), as those schedules respect the circadian rhythm by their nature.
There one theory not yet covered in our discussion. It possible to imaging sleep as a garbage collection process. After N hours of being awake the body needs N/2 hours of sleep to get sort through all the information stored while being awake. It’s also possible that it needs (N^2)/32 hours of sleep to sort through all the information.
Both formula suggest a monophasic sleep schedule of 8 hours for a 24 hour day but the second one also allows Uberman sleep to work. I’m not aware that the academic sleep literature proves that the relevant formula is linear and not quadratic.
This is an intriguing suggestion. Stampi discusses this possibility as well (p. 18-19):
In other words, the recuperative value of sleep on performance may not be linearly correlated with sleep duration; this is suggested by many studies presented in this volume. Indeed, even under sleep deprivation, short naps normally produce remarkable recuperative effects, disproportionate to their duration.
First, I am not aware of any work in the academic sleep literature that directly addresses this question aside from the few studies into short polyphasic sleep. Based on my quick reading of a few sections of Stampi’s book, these studies seem to have a number of methodological problems, mainly that they had small sample sizes, but I highlight another major one later in this post (sleep inertia).
I’m happy to see others mention a counterexample (that staying awake for a long period of time requires proportionally less sleep to recover) I was detailing as well. I’ll agree that this is not so convincing, as it necessarily involves sleep deprivation. However, it does show that sleep can be more recuperative under certain circumstances, which may be good or bad for proponents of short polyphasic sleep.
Stampi discusses a few other factors in his book that must be factored in. These include the minimum amount of time required for sleep to have any recuperative value, sleep inertia (post-nap grogginess), and the time to fall asleep. It is possible that whatever process that occurs during sleep could be made more efficient in some sense by breaking sleep into multiple instances. That is speculation, however, and what is not speculation is that naps have significant overhead costs associated with them. Stampi seems to recognize that falling asleep fast is difficult if you are well rested and don’t have the help of your circadian drive, as well as the very real effect of sleep inertia. He proposes that people might be able to train themselves to fall asleep or wake up fully on demand. Either would be remarkably useful to people with insomnia or hypersomnia, and I am not aware of any technique that’s fast enough to work here (the closest I can think of is the Bootzin technique for conditioned insomnia).
In Stampi’s book, it’s suggested that none of the testing done on subjects on short polyphasic sleep schedules were done within 20 to 30 minutes of them waking from a nap. This strikes me as a significant source of bias in those studies.
There also is the issue that it appears sleep serves multiple purposes, only one of which may be garbage collection. I think it’s likely that some purposes are better served by polyphasic sleep in line with the argument you’ve just made, but others are not.
(I should also note that this analysis totally ignores the circadian rhythm. The recuperative value of sleep and feelings of alertness are both functions of location in the circadian cycle.)
That makes a difference for the spread of memes, if you are interested in why the meme spreads.
With respect to polyphasic sleep as a meme, what bothers me so much is that many rationalists did not do their homework before diving in. I don’t know about others, but I at least do some fact checking before doing anything odd. Polyphasic sleep should have set off a few red flags right off the bat, yet best I can tell, even something as easily shown as the problems with the REM claims never were mentioned on LessWrong.
I’m really glad we’re having this discussion, as it’s causing me to hash out my thoughts in more detail and research more than I would have if I were merely writing a note to myself. I broke this up into two comments.
While that’s certainly claimed by some polyphasic sleep advocates there are others who read a bit and who therefore don’t make that false claim and still advocate polyphasic sleep.
Even more, those people who do make the claim don’t know that they claim something that in conflict with the academic literature on sleep. That’s quite different from the case of homeopathy where the conflict is obvious.
While perhaps excusable, I don’t think the ignorance of some short polyphasic sleep proponents is a point in their favor.
There are many proponents of short polyphasic sleep who are aware that more than REM is necessary. Take the Polyphasic Society as an example. They make the more argument that polyphasic sleep is more efficient because it reduces time spent in light sleep, but maintains time spent in deep and REM sleep (they even mention the K-complex in stage 2 sleep!). At first, this struck me as plausible, but I see that Stampi has something to say on the subject of sleep architecture on a short polyphasic schedule (p. 172-173):
Summarizing what was presented in this review, it appears that the organization of sleep within a nap under polyphasic schedules is quite different from that occurring in monophasic nocturnal sleep. Naps are indeed “not miniatures of the normal 8-h sleep pattern” (Weitzman et al., 1974), and only rarely are they replicas of the first part of anormal nightly uninterrupted sleep. For example, REM sleep onset episodes are quite frequent during polyphasic schedules, and it is interesting to note that REM sleep and SWS appear to be mutually exclusive under such conditions: they rarely occur together during short naps. Despite sleep architecture being remarkably different, long-duration studies indicated that all sleep stages (and not just SWS) appear to play an important functional role under these sleep reduction patterns. Indeed, after the initial adaptation period in which daily amounts of all stages but SWS tend to be reduced in amount, sleep percentages become remarkably similar to baseline conditions.
The claim that short polyphasic schedules reduce light sleep but don’t reduce deep sleep (SWS) and REM is false. And this book isn’t unknown among polyphasic sleep proponents. I’m having a hard time believing that they didn’t read it, but it seems they have not. At this point, I don’t know of any mechanism by which short polyphasic sleep could work, but I’d accept that it works if I saw empirical evidence suggesting so.
I am somewhat floored by this, to be honest. I want to note that I haven’t read Stampi’s book in much detail due to time constraints, but I’m not finding anything other than this conclusion in there. For those with the book, please point out if I’ve highlighted an opportunistic passage, as I am not trying to cherry pick; I just have not read the book as fully as I’d like.
I’ll detail a few other major problems with one other claim the Polyphasic Society makes. I have not verified all of their other claims, but I became aware of this when investigating long sleep. They cite a study that suggests people who sleep less live longer. There are a number of such studies, and they appear to be confounded by depression and low socioeconomic status. I have not read the study I just cited beyond the abstract, but I should now. This study was not difficult to find, and I’m disappointed that the Polyphasic Society website did not put the effort in to think or find alternative explanations. There also is the issue, as you’ve suggested at Stack Exchange, that correlation does not make causation; simply changing your own sleep duration may not actually change your longevity. Perhaps people who are naturally predisposed to sleep longer would reduce their longevity if they slept less. That certainly would make sense as short sleep is associated with many health problems. For some reason the Polyphasic Society forgot to mention those studies.
If you know any short polyphasic sleep proponents who make better justified claims on average, I’d be interested in seeing them, as this is the best I’ve seen.
While perhaps excusable, I don’t think the ignorance of some short polyphasic sleep proponents is a point in their favor.
There are two distinct questions:
1) How does it come that a bunch of rationalist people advocate polyphasic sleep?
2) Does polyphasic sleep work?
Both are interesting questions.
Stampi seems to recognize that falling asleep fast is difficult if you are well rested and don’t have the help of your circadian drive, as well as the very real effect of sleep inertia.
I think falling asleep fast is a learned skill. It’s just about switching from one mental state into another. I do think that doable to build anchors in hypnosis that instantly allow people to switch off consciousness and go into a state similar to stage 1 or stage 2 sleep.
There are people who can fall asleep in an act of will and wakeup at a predestined time with +-5 minutes whether it’s 3 or 7 hours after getting to sleep.
Don’t underrate the effect that determined decisions can make. Yes, your average Westerner might need to be tired to fall asleep but that’s simply because he’s not much in control over what his brain is doing.
If you know any short polyphasic sleep proponents who make better justified claims on average, I’d be interested in seeing them, as this is the best I’ve seen.
I would be surprised is the leverage research people who attempted polyphasic sleep think all naps during polyphasic sleep are completely REM and that’s a good thing.
I also don’t think that puredoxyk believes it these days.
Perhaps people who are naturally predisposed to sleep longer would reduce their longevity if they slept less.
I don’t like the word “naturally” in this context. Part of sleep is regenerating the body. If someone has a depression that puts stress on the body. It then makes sense that the body needs more time in regeneration mode.
There a claim where I don’t know whether it’s true, that switching from a normal diet to a vegetarian diet reduces sleep needs by roughly 30 minutes. It’s certainly possible that a body that doesn’t has to digest animal protein requires less protein.
I also want to iterate, that it might be a bad idea to think of sleep needs as a one dimensional thing.
The amount of time you sleep without an alarm clock is not the same thing as the amount of sleep that you need to not feel tired. I don’t think either of those is the amount of time you need to not have reduced performance on reaction time test. Memory consolidation is a fourth thing.
It’s certainly possible that there are interventions that solve most dimensions that are immediately but that don’t solve dimensions of sleep needs that aren’t well visible.
I do have experience with mostly exchanging a night of sleep for meditation (I can’t say whether stage 1⁄2 sleep occured, but no REM or deep sleep).
On the one hand it regenerated energy but I still felt tired.
I know that I wake up after fewer hours if I spent a night dancing Salsa and being really in flow then when I’m not in flow while dancing.
I think falling asleep fast is a learned skill. It’s just about switching from one mental state into another. I do think that doable to build anchors in hypnosis that instantly allow people to switch off consciousness and go into a state similar to stage 1 or stage 2 sleep.
There are people who can fall asleep in an act of will and wakeup at a predestined time with +-5 minutes whether it’s 3 or 7 hours after getting to sleep.
Don’t underrate the effect that determined decisions can make. Yes, your average Westerner might need to be tired to fall asleep but that’s simply because he’s not much in control over what his brain is doing.
Do you have any more information about this ability and how one can develop it? I’m interested in trying the same in reverse (i.e., making myself wake up faster).
Do you have any more information about this ability and how one can develop it? I’m interested in trying the same in reverse (i.e., making myself wake up faster).
What do you mean with “wake up faster”? Reducing the amount of time between waking up and getting out of bed? That’s a different issue than waking up at a predefined point in time.
As far as I understand a good way to go about it is to have a specific routine of getting up out of bed, that you do the same way every time. You shouldn’t have to think while in bed about whether you first dress yourself or first put toast into the toaster. The routine should be clear.
Steve Pavlina suggests doing dry practicing of the routine. When you have some time at the weekend you train the routine. You lay down in bed with an alarm clock that rings after 15 minutes and then you do your first 5 minutes of the morning routine. You do that a bunch of time to train automatic conditioning.
I have only anecdotal evidence for that method working and it sounds straightforward and low risk to me.
You might also look at motivation issues. If you aren’t motivated to get up to do something, you will have a harder time.
Sleep deprivation can also make it harder to get up. Personally for me my first priority is that my body has the time to do it’s regeneration processes. I think it makes more sense to first fix the needs of the body.
As far as developing the skill to wake up at a specific period of time, that more complicated. There’s some evidence that well educated people have a harder time. It takes interacting with your intuition.
I have encountered normal people without much training having the ability.
Self hypnosis is one way to get there, but I have no idea what kind of time investment it would be to learn the skill to a sufficient degree.
Ah, I was unclear. By “wake up” I mean “feel fully alert”. I do not have much difficulty getting out of bed. And I do find the idea of waking up at a prescribe time to be interesting and perhaps useful for myself. I’ll investigate the latter further.
I have a morning routine, but the issue is that I often don’t feel fully alert at the end of it. This is likely due to inadequate sleep duration and/or delayed sleep phase disorder, and it may be difficult to use conditioning to counteract either effect.
I have a morning routine, but the issue is that I often don’t feel fully alert at the end of it. This is likely due to inadequate sleep duration and/or delayed sleep phase disorder
In that case the mainstream response would be: Go to bed earlier so that you get enough sleep.
The second question would be: Do you do enough sports? Have you tried doing sports in your morning routine? Showering both warm and cold would be options.
Getting more sleep is easier said than done in my case. I’m working on it. I suspect I have a mild case of delayed sleep phase disorder, so it’s not as simple as going to bed earlier. If I did sleep then, it’s not likely to be very restorative. Instead, I’m going to try starting sleeping at a later time this fall and see if that helps.
In terms of physical activity, I commute by bike and run. I’m probably at the 95th percentile or higher in terms of duration of moderate or high intensity physical activity. I do think this helps, but it does not help enough. Not sure showering has ever made much of a difference either way.
Quickly going into REM when asleep is a sign of either narcolepsy
But only people with excessive daytime sleepiness are tested for quickly going into REM, so the fact that they do doesn’t tell so much. Anecdotally, I find that people with narcolepsy went quickly into REM before they developed the excessive daytime sleepiness. They seem to function quite well, until they develop full-blown narcolepsy. So I don’t think it is reasonable to associate quick REM with narcolepsy. Sleep deprivation is another matter.
Yes, what I wrote was too restrictive. Sleep-onset REM periods (SOREMPs) are definitely a part of normal experience. If they occur regularly in an individual, that’s a symptom of narcolepsy (or sleep deprivation; the two are similar). There could be possibilities that I am not aware of, as well. I know people who have claimed to have SOREMPs sometimes who don’t have narcolepsy and were not sleep deprived. I was not arguing that SOREMPs are necessarily bad, just that what is known about them is not good, which set off a red flag for me.
Can someone point me to an argument or evidence supporting the suggestion that short polyphasic sleep allows most people to decrease their sleep requirements without negative cognitive, physical, or health consequences?
I’m a long sleeper (my sleep requirements are on the higher side), and I am interested in reducing my sleep requirements. I encountered the idea of polyphasic sleep after learning quite a bit about sleep. Polyphasic sleep is often touted as a way to decrease sleep need, via making your body quickly go into REM sleep. Quickly going into REM when asleep is a sign of either narcolepsy or sleep deprivation, neither of which are regarded as good things. I haven’t found the original source for the idea that your brain goes into REM immediately on a short polyphasic schedule, but Claudio Stampi’s studies suggest this is false. More recently I’ve seen some short polyphasic sleepers suggest the schedule will allow you to skip over the lighter stages of sleep so you can sleep more efficiently. With this much confusion and misinformation, I’m not confident about the justification for short polyphasic sleep.
The closest I could find to good evidence was the book Why We Nap by Claudio Stampi, which I have not read. gwern has suggested the evidence this book presents is weak, and others have noted that a more conventional idea (sleep until you are no longer tired) worked best in his studies.. Skeptics Stack Exchange has a question about polyphasic sleep, but it doesn’t have any clear evidence that it works. There also are a few responses to Piotr Wozniak’s article on the implausibility of polyphasic sleep. Neither of these responses seem to make many clear positive assertions about the benefits of short polyphasic sleep. In the latter response, a commenter suggested “polyphasic sleeping can be thought of as carefully managed sleep deprivation”, which doesn’t strike me a good thing.
Some folks (e.g., puredoxyk) have suggested that you have to deny that some people seem to work okay on short polyphasic schedules (or believe they are lying) to suggest that it doesn’t work as described. I don’t think so. It seems that the fraction of people who seem to do well on short polyphasic sleep schedules is comparable to the fraction of people who are short sleepers. I don’t have any hard numbers for the former, but I believe it is on the order of 5% or so (puredoxyk suggested over 90% of attempts at short polyphasic sleep fail). The latter is more well studied. A fairly recent review stated that about 4.0% of people sleep less than 5.5 hours per night. So, my hypothesis is that those who do well on short polyphasic sleep schedules are short sleepers, and thus it doesn’t make sense to suggest polyphasic sleep as a way to reduce sleep requirements.
Still, with so many rationalists buying into the idea, I’m wondering if I am missing something. I would appreciate any suggested reading on the topic.
I still stand by what I wrote in the answer to the Skeptic Stack Exchange question that you linked to. I don’t think there good reason to assume that polyphasic sleep is very useful.
At the same time it’s an interesting topic for research. If I understand right puredoxyk wants to do some group research at the moment. I would also be interested in the current conclusions of those Leverage Research folks who started polyphasic sleep a while ago.
I while ago I did meet a girl via PlentyOfFish who claimed to have been for a year on 1 hour of sleep per day without doing any kind of polyphasic schedule or other personal development tricks and that’s without her knowing about my interests in the subject. It didn’t kill her but it probably wasn’t healthy either.
Phrases like “work okay” have a fairly broad meaning. There are plenty of people who think they are highly functioning but who could function a lot better. If I remember right puredoxyk was depressed when she wrote the post. She was depressed before she even started polyphasic sleep, but that doesn’t set the bar for “being okay” very high.
I had not realized the Stack Exchange post was yours. Good work.
New research into short polyphasic sleep is not so interesting to me. I think it is plausible that a polyphasic schedule could modestly reduce sleep requirements (perhaps around 1 hour at most) by reducing the duration of lighter stages of sleep (but not eliminating; it’s not clear these stages are unimportant). But that’s not what people interested in polyphasic sleep are testing. Instead, they try very short schedules that don’t make sense. I skimmed through puredoxyk’s original post on polyphasic sleep and it seems she decided 2 hours total was right because that was about as much REM sleep as she was getting before. This goes back to problems mentioned elsewhere: REM is not the only important sleep stage and nap-type sleep schedules don’t produce purely REM sleep. I’d like to see a change in research direction among polyphasic sleep proponents towards longer schedules.
I agree. I think many people who maintain short polyphasic sleep don’t recognize how impaired they are. I wasn’t trying to set the bar low. I was responding to the suggestion that I must think everyone who claims success is lying. I do think lying and exaggeration play a role, but here are some other easy justifications I can offer: acclimation (short polyphasic sleepers get used to being sleep deprived), placebo sleep effect (they think it works, minimizing the tiredness), positive publication bias (might explain why the Leverage Research folks haven’t followed up), and wishful thinking. These explanations are in addition to the self-selection effect for short sleepers that I previously mentioned.
There are a number of other ways to potentially reduce your sleep need that I believe are more plausible than polyphasic sleep. I’ll detail a few I am aware of.
I’ve read that some people with delayed sleep phase disorder find that they can sleep at times not aligned with their circadian rhythms, but the sleep is not restorative. Aligning your sleep with your circadian rhythm seems like one way to potentially reduce sleep need. The only sleep schedules that fit well with your circadian rhythm are monophasic and biphasic (i.e., with an afternoon nap).
Another thing I’ve found that potentially will reduce sleep requirements is meditation, but with a roughly 1-to-1 meditation-time to sleep-time conversion rate, it doesn’t seem to help with the larger goal of increasing useful time awake. (But for those who like meditation, this seems like a reason to do it.)
There also are various drugs that increase deep sleep at the expense of lighter sleep that could reduce sleep requirements, however, most of these drugs are not available (e.g., ritanserin is not produced on a large scale, and GHB is highly regulated) and/or unattractive for other reasons (side effects, cost, half-life, toxicity). Stimulant drugs also are options during the day, though, they won’t make your sleep more restorative.
I’ve also done some research into the effects of physical exercise on sleep architecture and wakefulness. Exercise can increase deep sleep. It is not clear if this effect is larger than the increase in deep sleep required to repair your body after exercise, though anecdotes in the article suggest that people believe it is (I am unsure). Also, physical exercise does not appear to wake you up for very long and likely will make you more tired until you go to sleep if you are sleep deprived.
Another idea I’ve had involved applying optimal control theory to mathematical models of the sleep cycle, but I suspect this will just tell you to sleep at times aligned with your circadian rhythm.
To be fair, the same goes also for most people who aren’t on polyphasic sleep schedules.
There are also other effects. Polyphasic sleep is like a commitment contract to do time planning. If you don’t do time planning while on Uberman you are very screwed. As a result the schedule forces the user to plan his time and therefore the user might be more productive.
Acupuncture and homeopathy are subjects which are investigated by a lot of people and where a lot of knowledge is available about various experiments that people did about the subject.
Polyphasic sleep is a subject where very little information is available. You are very fast in a realm outside of what’s studied in mainstream academia. That makes the topic interesting while both acupuncture and homeopathy are fairly boring topics.
Polyphasic sleep as such also doesn’t violate any laws of how reality is supposed to work in the way homeopathy does.
The reasons of why humans have to sleep the amount of time that they do aren’t very clear.
As far as I understand the normal person can reach 4 hours of sleep per day via modafinil and uphold that schedule for months. On the other hand I’m not sure whether that healthy for a period over multiple years.
While I don’t think polyphasic sleep is as obviously wrong as homeopathy, it is clear that many of the claims short polyphasic sleep proponents make conflict with things known about sleep.
A polyphasic schedule that ignores the circadian rhythm requires sleep deprivation (a bad thing) for some of the naps to happen. Circadian rhythms seem quite rigid for many people. For example, orally taken melatonin is often prescribed in an attempt to shift the circadian rhythm of a patient with delayed sleep phase disorder. The longest study I could find on the subject suggested that melatonin does not work long-term for delayed sleep phase disorder (added 2015-06-30: jacob_cannell pointed out that I misread the study, so I retract this sentence). Indeed, a recommendation I’ve seen for people with delayed sleep phase disorder has been to not fight their circadian rhythm if they don’t have to, and sleep offset from most other people. Based on what I’ve read from polyphasic sleepers, it seems to me that they usually can’t fight their circadian rhythm either, as schedules with a “core” night sleep tend to be more successful (though most people still can not adapt).
Polyphasic sleep proponents also make many assumptions and false claims regarding sleep architecture. To summarize points already made, common claims from short polyphasic sleep proponents include that REM is all you need or the more sophisticated argument that light sleep can be skipped. More than REM is important, in fact, there are a few studies (e.g.) that correlate objective measurements of sleep architecture with subjective measurements of sleep quality, and they consistently find that SWS/deep sleep is the most important. It’s also not clear that the lighter stages of sleep are necessarily unimportant (e.g., the K-complex that occurs in stage 2 sleep may play a role in memory formation). Certainly, if someone gets too much light sleep they could benefit from reducing that, but it’s not clear to me that polyphasic sleep necessarily does that, and no one knows for certain how much is adequate (I believe greater than zero light sleep is optimal).
I have a copy of Stampi’s book now. Skimming through the book, I’m somewhat struck to learn there’s a fair bit more academic research into polyphasic schedules than I imagined. In chapter 10 (table 10.1), Stampi cites 11 studies that looked at what he calls “polyphasic schedules with sleep reduction”. There are other studies that did not reduce sleep. I’ll have to examine this more closely when I find the time.
Schedules with the core sleep don’t seem to equate that being awake for 6 hours in a row completely screws you up for a day. That’s why they are a lot more practical than Uberman if Uberman works as advertised.
While that’s certainly claimed by some polyphasic sleep advocates there are others who read a bit and who therefore don’t make that false claim and still advocate polyphasic sleep.
Even more, those people who do make the claim don’t know that they claim something that in conflict with the academic literature on sleep. That’s quite different from the case of homeopathy where the conflict is obvious. That makes a difference for the spread of memes, if you are interested in why the meme spreads.
Quite rigid doesn’t tell you at all what you need to do to mess with them and reprogram the brain to do something different.
It’s theoretically possible that you can change some mental patterns if you exert strong enough stress. People are certainly possible to switch up their circadian rhythms after having jet lag produced through a intercontinental flight.
There one theory not yet covered in our discussion. It possible to imaging sleep as a garbage collection process. After N hours of being awake the body needs N/2 hours of sleep to get sort through all the information stored while being awake. It’s also possible that it needs (N^2)/32 hours of sleep to sort through all the information.
Both formula suggest a monophasic sleep schedule of 8 hours for a 24 hour day but the second one also allows Uberman sleep to work. I’m not aware that the academic sleep literature proves that the relevant formula is linear and not quadratic.
Based on my experience the couple times I stayed awake for more than 24 hours in a row, I think it’s very unlikely to be quadratic, at least for large N.
BTW, does anybody know of anyone who’s tried http://xkcd.com/320/ for more than a few weeks in a row?
:-D
So you are saying you did spent something like 36 hours awake in a row without negative side effects?
I’ve spent more than 36 hours without sleep and while there are side effects, the point is that when you finally get to sleep, how much you sleep isn’t a quadratic function of of how many hours you were awake.
I’m taking about stable schedules that don’t have negative side effects.
How much you sleep and how much sleep would be good for you are also two distinct issues.
Yes, there were negative side effects, but these didn’t include having to sleep 36^2/32 hours in a row to catch up.
(Edit: what happened is I slept six-ish hours in a row as soon as I hit a bed, waking up in the afternoon, then I reverted to my ordinary sleep schedule except the first couple nights I went to bed about an hour earlier than usual.
Then that’s not directly relevant to what I’m arguing. I’m speaking about the amount of sleep in a stable schedule that you need to feel alright.
I’m not sure that your brain processed all the experiences during that longer awake period in a healthy way and formed memories for those that should stay in memory.
See part 1 here.
I was unclear. There are a number of ways to influence your circadian rhythm. These do allow you to change time zones, etc. It is not clear that these can be taken advantage of for short polyphasic sleep. However, speculation is not necessary, as Dr. Stampi addresses this point in his book (p. 174-175):
The data available verifies my view that a successful polyphasic schedule must respect the circadian drive. Schedules like Uberman seem much less plausible, and other schedules with a “core” period more plausible, but unlikely to be better than monophasic or biphasic (long night sleep with afternoon nap), as those schedules respect the circadian rhythm by their nature.
This is an intriguing suggestion. Stampi discusses this possibility as well (p. 18-19):
First, I am not aware of any work in the academic sleep literature that directly addresses this question aside from the few studies into short polyphasic sleep. Based on my quick reading of a few sections of Stampi’s book, these studies seem to have a number of methodological problems, mainly that they had small sample sizes, but I highlight another major one later in this post (sleep inertia).
I’m happy to see others mention a counterexample (that staying awake for a long period of time requires proportionally less sleep to recover) I was detailing as well. I’ll agree that this is not so convincing, as it necessarily involves sleep deprivation. However, it does show that sleep can be more recuperative under certain circumstances, which may be good or bad for proponents of short polyphasic sleep.
Stampi discusses a few other factors in his book that must be factored in. These include the minimum amount of time required for sleep to have any recuperative value, sleep inertia (post-nap grogginess), and the time to fall asleep. It is possible that whatever process that occurs during sleep could be made more efficient in some sense by breaking sleep into multiple instances. That is speculation, however, and what is not speculation is that naps have significant overhead costs associated with them. Stampi seems to recognize that falling asleep fast is difficult if you are well rested and don’t have the help of your circadian drive, as well as the very real effect of sleep inertia. He proposes that people might be able to train themselves to fall asleep or wake up fully on demand. Either would be remarkably useful to people with insomnia or hypersomnia, and I am not aware of any technique that’s fast enough to work here (the closest I can think of is the Bootzin technique for conditioned insomnia).
In Stampi’s book, it’s suggested that none of the testing done on subjects on short polyphasic sleep schedules were done within 20 to 30 minutes of them waking from a nap. This strikes me as a significant source of bias in those studies.
There also is the issue that it appears sleep serves multiple purposes, only one of which may be garbage collection. I think it’s likely that some purposes are better served by polyphasic sleep in line with the argument you’ve just made, but others are not.
(I should also note that this analysis totally ignores the circadian rhythm. The recuperative value of sleep and feelings of alertness are both functions of location in the circadian cycle.)
With respect to polyphasic sleep as a meme, what bothers me so much is that many rationalists did not do their homework before diving in. I don’t know about others, but I at least do some fact checking before doing anything odd. Polyphasic sleep should have set off a few red flags right off the bat, yet best I can tell, even something as easily shown as the problems with the REM claims never were mentioned on LessWrong.
I’m really glad we’re having this discussion, as it’s causing me to hash out my thoughts in more detail and research more than I would have if I were merely writing a note to myself. I broke this up into two comments.
While perhaps excusable, I don’t think the ignorance of some short polyphasic sleep proponents is a point in their favor.
There are many proponents of short polyphasic sleep who are aware that more than REM is necessary. Take the Polyphasic Society as an example. They make the more argument that polyphasic sleep is more efficient because it reduces time spent in light sleep, but maintains time spent in deep and REM sleep (they even mention the K-complex in stage 2 sleep!). At first, this struck me as plausible, but I see that Stampi has something to say on the subject of sleep architecture on a short polyphasic schedule (p. 172-173):
The claim that short polyphasic schedules reduce light sleep but don’t reduce deep sleep (SWS) and REM is false. And this book isn’t unknown among polyphasic sleep proponents. I’m having a hard time believing that they didn’t read it, but it seems they have not. At this point, I don’t know of any mechanism by which short polyphasic sleep could work, but I’d accept that it works if I saw empirical evidence suggesting so.
I am somewhat floored by this, to be honest. I want to note that I haven’t read Stampi’s book in much detail due to time constraints, but I’m not finding anything other than this conclusion in there. For those with the book, please point out if I’ve highlighted an opportunistic passage, as I am not trying to cherry pick; I just have not read the book as fully as I’d like.
I’ll detail a few other major problems with one other claim the Polyphasic Society makes. I have not verified all of their other claims, but I became aware of this when investigating long sleep. They cite a study that suggests people who sleep less live longer. There are a number of such studies, and they appear to be confounded by depression and low socioeconomic status. I have not read the study I just cited beyond the abstract, but I should now. This study was not difficult to find, and I’m disappointed that the Polyphasic Society website did not put the effort in to think or find alternative explanations. There also is the issue, as you’ve suggested at Stack Exchange, that correlation does not make causation; simply changing your own sleep duration may not actually change your longevity. Perhaps people who are naturally predisposed to sleep longer would reduce their longevity if they slept less. That certainly would make sense as short sleep is associated with many health problems. For some reason the Polyphasic Society forgot to mention those studies.
If you know any short polyphasic sleep proponents who make better justified claims on average, I’d be interested in seeing them, as this is the best I’ve seen.
Continue to part 2 of this post.
There are two distinct questions:
1) How does it come that a bunch of rationalist people advocate polyphasic sleep? 2) Does polyphasic sleep work?
Both are interesting questions.
I think falling asleep fast is a learned skill. It’s just about switching from one mental state into another. I do think that doable to build anchors in hypnosis that instantly allow people to switch off consciousness and go into a state similar to stage 1 or stage 2 sleep.
There are people who can fall asleep in an act of will and wakeup at a predestined time with +-5 minutes whether it’s 3 or 7 hours after getting to sleep.
Don’t underrate the effect that determined decisions can make. Yes, your average Westerner might need to be tired to fall asleep but that’s simply because he’s not much in control over what his brain is doing.
I would be surprised is the leverage research people who attempted polyphasic sleep think all naps during polyphasic sleep are completely REM and that’s a good thing.
I also don’t think that puredoxyk believes it these days.
I don’t like the word “naturally” in this context. Part of sleep is regenerating the body. If someone has a depression that puts stress on the body. It then makes sense that the body needs more time in regeneration mode.
There a claim where I don’t know whether it’s true, that switching from a normal diet to a vegetarian diet reduces sleep needs by roughly 30 minutes. It’s certainly possible that a body that doesn’t has to digest animal protein requires less protein.
I also want to iterate, that it might be a bad idea to think of sleep needs as a one dimensional thing. The amount of time you sleep without an alarm clock is not the same thing as the amount of sleep that you need to not feel tired. I don’t think either of those is the amount of time you need to not have reduced performance on reaction time test. Memory consolidation is a fourth thing.
It’s certainly possible that there are interventions that solve most dimensions that are immediately but that don’t solve dimensions of sleep needs that aren’t well visible.
I do have experience with mostly exchanging a night of sleep for meditation (I can’t say whether stage 1⁄2 sleep occured, but no REM or deep sleep).
On the one hand it regenerated energy but I still felt tired.
I know that I wake up after fewer hours if I spent a night dancing Salsa and being really in flow then when I’m not in flow while dancing.
Do you have any more information about this ability and how one can develop it? I’m interested in trying the same in reverse (i.e., making myself wake up faster).
What do you mean with “wake up faster”? Reducing the amount of time between waking up and getting out of bed? That’s a different issue than waking up at a predefined point in time.
As far as I understand a good way to go about it is to have a specific routine of getting up out of bed, that you do the same way every time. You shouldn’t have to think while in bed about whether you first dress yourself or first put toast into the toaster. The routine should be clear.
Steve Pavlina suggests doing dry practicing of the routine. When you have some time at the weekend you train the routine. You lay down in bed with an alarm clock that rings after 15 minutes and then you do your first 5 minutes of the morning routine. You do that a bunch of time to train automatic conditioning.
I have only anecdotal evidence for that method working and it sounds straightforward and low risk to me.
You might also look at motivation issues. If you aren’t motivated to get up to do something, you will have a harder time.
Sleep deprivation can also make it harder to get up. Personally for me my first priority is that my body has the time to do it’s regeneration processes. I think it makes more sense to first fix the needs of the body.
As far as developing the skill to wake up at a specific period of time, that more complicated. There’s some evidence that well educated people have a harder time. It takes interacting with your intuition. I have encountered normal people without much training having the ability.
Self hypnosis is one way to get there, but I have no idea what kind of time investment it would be to learn the skill to a sufficient degree.
Ah, I was unclear. By “wake up” I mean “feel fully alert”. I do not have much difficulty getting out of bed. And I do find the idea of waking up at a prescribe time to be interesting and perhaps useful for myself. I’ll investigate the latter further.
I have a morning routine, but the issue is that I often don’t feel fully alert at the end of it. This is likely due to inadequate sleep duration and/or delayed sleep phase disorder, and it may be difficult to use conditioning to counteract either effect.
In that case the mainstream response would be: Go to bed earlier so that you get enough sleep.
The second question would be: Do you do enough sports? Have you tried doing sports in your morning routine? Showering both warm and cold would be options.
Getting more sleep is easier said than done in my case. I’m working on it. I suspect I have a mild case of delayed sleep phase disorder, so it’s not as simple as going to bed earlier. If I did sleep then, it’s not likely to be very restorative. Instead, I’m going to try starting sleeping at a later time this fall and see if that helps.
In terms of physical activity, I commute by bike and run. I’m probably at the 95th percentile or higher in terms of duration of moderate or high intensity physical activity. I do think this helps, but it does not help enough. Not sure showering has ever made much of a difference either way.
There are three things that you could experiment with before going to sleep:
1) Progressive relaxation/hypnosis MP3 to induce sleep in an healthy way.
2) Some form of breathing meditation.
3) Feldenkrais exercises right before going to sleep (Book: Awareness through Movement—Moshé Feldenkrais)
But only people with excessive daytime sleepiness are tested for quickly going into REM, so the fact that they do doesn’t tell so much. Anecdotally, I find that people with narcolepsy went quickly into REM before they developed the excessive daytime sleepiness. They seem to function quite well, until they develop full-blown narcolepsy. So I don’t think it is reasonable to associate quick REM with narcolepsy. Sleep deprivation is another matter.
Yes, what I wrote was too restrictive. Sleep-onset REM periods (SOREMPs) are definitely a part of normal experience. If they occur regularly in an individual, that’s a symptom of narcolepsy (or sleep deprivation; the two are similar). There could be possibilities that I am not aware of, as well. I know people who have claimed to have SOREMPs sometimes who don’t have narcolepsy and were not sleep deprived. I was not arguing that SOREMPs are necessarily bad, just that what is known about them is not good, which set off a red flag for me.