I’ve a few questions about those “atypical sleep patterns” :
Are there studies about their long-term effect on health, lifespan, IQ, … ?
How do they cope with sickness/wounds ? If you get the flu, will you be able to heal as fast using a Uberman or Everyman sleep pattern ? People doing monophasic will tend to sleep much more when sick, both increase the size of the monophasic sleep and doing naps. What happens if you follow Uberman/Everyman ? Can you get this additional sleep when sick, without breaking the whole adaptation ?
How do they cope with various kind of schedule/social constraints ? With monophasic sleep, you can relatively easily adapt your sleep schedule (staying awake late, waking up early) to cope with any event, from a family dinner to a RPG night to a plane to catch, what happens when you disturb the sleep pattern of Uberman/Everyman ? Do they handle such “transgression” as well ass monophasic ?
Re: 3… Geoff Anders of Leverage, who has been on Everyman 3 for months, said to me in an email:
I don’t even feel like I’m polyphasic anymore. I just feel like I’ve reduced my need for sleep and I typically take a few naps. :)
I think by “polyphasic” he means “adhering to a specific polyphasic schedule” which is what the term often means, given that outside of the polyphasic community people are much more likely to sleep random/flexible hours even if they nap etc.
Nope. Even the literature on chronic partial sleep restriction is abysmal. That’s what I’m trying to change. A seed study with a large effect size might get more people with funding taking these questions seriously.
Don’t know because of 1.
See 2. But word on the street is that some people have much more flexibility than others.
Not at all! I have 2 days a week where I can’t freely schedule my sleep and need to be awake for 8+ hours. This completely killed all attempts to implement any schedule listed on Polyphasic_sleep. To be fair, I almost made it with Biphasic but I tend to have a “long boot time” so I decided it isn’t worth feeling like crap two times a day for half an hour.
In the end I invented my own schedule which, again, was only partial success. While experimenting on the schedules I noticed that I sometimes feel very refreshed in the “morning”, but not often. I thought it’s connected to the REM and tried sleeping multiplies of around 1h30m but either it wasn’t connected to REM or my cycle deviates too much from the mean because experimentally I estimated this “good cycle” of mine to be 2h20m.
Then on a normal day I’d sleep one “wwa-sleep-cycle” two (for 19.4% sleep time) or three (29.2%) times a day which is not even close to Uberman on average, but I feel awesome. The interesting feature of this schedule of mine is that I can switch in/out of it immediately on the next day. Scaling to external constraints works well as a side effect of adaptation time e.g. before a tough day I’d sleep two cycles continuously or even get back to monophasic sleep with 3 cycles continuously.
Of course all this is original research on one specimen so may not apply to anyone else at all. Also, it took me months to do and now I only do it when on a tough deadline because one person would kill me if I’d set an alarm clock in the middle of the night, every night ;-)
In the end I invented my own schedule which, again, was only partial success. While experimenting on the schedules I noticed that I sometimes feel very refreshed in the “morning”, but not often. I thought it’s connected to the REM and tried sleeping multiplies of around 1h30m but either it wasn’t connected to REM or my cycle deviates too much from the mean because experimentally I estimated this “good cycle” of mine to be 2h20m.
Have you tried one of those iPhone/Android apps which guess what part of your sleep cycle you’re in based on accelerometer data, and try to wake up when you’re not in REM or SWS?
There are widgets that do the same thing but are much cheaper than a smartphone¹, though much more expensive than an app if you already have a smartphone.
Than a new smartphone, at least—dunno what the market for second-hand ones is like where you are.
How do they cope with sickness/wounds ? If you get the flu, will you be able to heal as fast using a Uberman or Everyman sleep pattern ? People doing monophasic will tend to sleep much more when sick, both increase the size of the monophasic sleep and doing naps. What happens if you follow Uberman/Everyman ? Can you get this additional sleep when sick, without breaking the whole adaptation ?
When I get sick, I add more sleep to my everyman 3 schedule. I can extend naps to 90 minutes or 3 hours, and add extra hours onto my core. In extreme cases, I can just ignore the normal schedule and sleep as much as I feel like. When I notice early that I am getting sick, I can sometimes prevent the worst of it my sleeping for 6 total hours that day. In all cases, I am able to resume normal everyman 3 after recovering.
That’s been pretty much exactly my experience as well, with the possible addendum that I work really hard to make sure I can sleep as long as I want if I notice that I might be getting sick, since if I catch it early, doing this is VERY likely to prevent the illness altogether.
Studies, no. I wrote a book (ubersleepbook.com, if ya’ll don’t mind me dropping that link—if it’s verboten, I’ll remove it and sorry) that compiles as much as I’ve been able to get ahold of as far as information after a decade of running a site and communicating with people on the subject, and it has chapters that address your other two (very good!) questions. The short answer is: AFTER adaptation, polyphasic sleep copes with events (including sickness, travel, and “just life”) just like monophasic sleep does, only in a compressed / hyperefficient manner. DURING adaptation it’s super strict and will get thrown off by these, but once it’s well-ingrained, things work surprisingly similarly—just shorter.
I’ve a few questions about those “atypical sleep patterns” :
Are there studies about their long-term effect on health, lifespan, IQ, … ?
How do they cope with sickness/wounds ? If you get the flu, will you be able to heal as fast using a Uberman or Everyman sleep pattern ? People doing monophasic will tend to sleep much more when sick, both increase the size of the monophasic sleep and doing naps. What happens if you follow Uberman/Everyman ? Can you get this additional sleep when sick, without breaking the whole adaptation ?
How do they cope with various kind of schedule/social constraints ? With monophasic sleep, you can relatively easily adapt your sleep schedule (staying awake late, waking up early) to cope with any event, from a family dinner to a RPG night to a plane to catch, what happens when you disturb the sleep pattern of Uberman/Everyman ? Do they handle such “transgression” as well ass monophasic ?
Re: 3… Geoff Anders of Leverage, who has been on Everyman 3 for months, said to me in an email:
I think by “polyphasic” he means “adhering to a specific polyphasic schedule” which is what the term often means, given that outside of the polyphasic community people are much more likely to sleep random/flexible hours even if they nap etc.
Nope. Even the literature on chronic partial sleep restriction is abysmal. That’s what I’m trying to change. A seed study with a large effect size might get more people with funding taking these questions seriously.
Don’t know because of 1.
See 2. But word on the street is that some people have much more flexibility than others.
I can provide a data point to 3:
Not at all! I have 2 days a week where I can’t freely schedule my sleep and need to be awake for 8+ hours. This completely killed all attempts to implement any schedule listed on Polyphasic_sleep. To be fair, I almost made it with Biphasic but I tend to have a “long boot time” so I decided it isn’t worth feeling like crap two times a day for half an hour.
In the end I invented my own schedule which, again, was only partial success. While experimenting on the schedules I noticed that I sometimes feel very refreshed in the “morning”, but not often. I thought it’s connected to the REM and tried sleeping multiplies of around 1h30m but either it wasn’t connected to REM or my cycle deviates too much from the mean because experimentally I estimated this “good cycle” of mine to be 2h20m.
Then on a normal day I’d sleep one “wwa-sleep-cycle” two (for 19.4% sleep time) or three (29.2%) times a day which is not even close to Uberman on average, but I feel awesome. The interesting feature of this schedule of mine is that I can switch in/out of it immediately on the next day. Scaling to external constraints works well as a side effect of adaptation time e.g. before a tough day I’d sleep two cycles continuously or even get back to monophasic sleep with 3 cycles continuously.
Of course all this is original research on one specimen so may not apply to anyone else at all. Also, it took me months to do and now I only do it when on a tough deadline because one person would kill me if I’d set an alarm clock in the middle of the night, every night ;-)
Have you tried one of those iPhone/Android apps which guess what part of your sleep cycle you’re in based on accelerometer data, and try to wake up when you’re not in REM or SWS?
No, I didn’t know it exists, cool. Looks like one more reason to get myself a smartphone already.
There are widgets that do the same thing but are much cheaper than a smartphone¹, though much more expensive than an app if you already have a smartphone.
Than a new smartphone, at least—dunno what the market for second-hand ones is like where you are.
How much did you sleep on a monophasic schedule?
Before experiments pretty close to 8 on average, maybe slightly less.
When I get sick, I add more sleep to my everyman 3 schedule. I can extend naps to 90 minutes or 3 hours, and add extra hours onto my core. In extreme cases, I can just ignore the normal schedule and sleep as much as I feel like. When I notice early that I am getting sick, I can sometimes prevent the worst of it my sleeping for 6 total hours that day. In all cases, I am able to resume normal everyman 3 after recovering.
That’s been pretty much exactly my experience as well, with the possible addendum that I work really hard to make sure I can sleep as long as I want if I notice that I might be getting sick, since if I catch it early, doing this is VERY likely to prevent the illness altogether.
Studies, no. I wrote a book (ubersleepbook.com, if ya’ll don’t mind me dropping that link—if it’s verboten, I’ll remove it and sorry) that compiles as much as I’ve been able to get ahold of as far as information after a decade of running a site and communicating with people on the subject, and it has chapters that address your other two (very good!) questions. The short answer is: AFTER adaptation, polyphasic sleep copes with events (including sickness, travel, and “just life”) just like monophasic sleep does, only in a compressed / hyperefficient manner. DURING adaptation it’s super strict and will get thrown off by these, but once it’s well-ingrained, things work surprisingly similarly—just shorter.