Kirk’s Blog

Click here to watch a 7 minute documentary video on my polyphasic sleep experiment.

Polyphasic sleep, or more precisely the Uberman Sleep Schedule (a more structured form of polyphasic sleep), involves trading your normal 8 hour hibernation every night for multiple “cat naps” throughout the day. It ultimately results in about 6 fewer hours of sleep every day, since each of the 6 daily naps lasts only about 20 minutes. This frees up an extra 40 hours of quality waking time per week. Impossible you say? Unhealthy you say? Read on.

My first objection upon hearing about it was, “Yeah but how are you going to get your REM sleep if you never sleep long enough to reach that stage?” The answer is simple: the body adapts. By enduring an initial adjustment period of depriving yourself of sleep, your body soon learns to maximize on the little sleep that it is allowed to get. The proportion of sleep stages changes slightly in that some of the lighter sleep stages are shortened so that the most efficient use of just 20 minutes of sleep can be achieved. In the process, our precious delta and theta brain wave sleep is preserved. The result is that, after the initial adjustment, one feels revitalized after each nap. Successful polyphasic sleepers have reported more vivid, intense, and memorable dreams with a higher frequency of lucid dreams.

Another aspect of polyphasic sleep involves the body’s ability to adapt to the natural rhythms of alert and down times. The most obvious cycle is the circadian cycle, which occurs everyday, and it most effectively describes monophasic sleep (once per day) along with an explanation for the “afternoon slump.” There are other more subtle cycles called ultradian rhythms. These cycles occur multiple times per day. For example, under normal sleep conditions, the mind can be observed to cycle through all stages of sleep on a 90 minute interval. Another ultradian rhythm occurs every 4 hours, and this is the one that the Uberman Sleep Schedule bases its success on.

The history of this type of sleep schedule goes back a long way, and Leonardo Da Vinci is said to have been a polyphasic sleeper. In the late 1980’s, Claudio Stampi conducted a series of clinical trials on the effects of polyphasic and ultrashort sleep on the quality of wakefulness, and he edited a book on the subject, Why We Nap, with a few important chapters written by himself. Quite independently, PureDoxyk published an online article about seven years ago describing her successful use of the sleep schedule, and since then it has steadily increased in popularity among a certain segment of the online community. And more recently, it exploded in popularity when Steve Pavlina decided to try polyphasic sleep, and this is how I ended up finding out about it.

At the time of this writing, I’ve already attempted to transition to the intriguing sleep schedule about 6 months ago. You can read all about the experience, my naive optimism in how easy I thought it would be to transition, and all the mistakes I made and learned from along the way here. Now, 6 months later, I’m at it again. Click here to read the latest blog post on my progress.

Last Updated: October 1, 2006