Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Why you should not sleep more than 30 minutes

From what I have read the body uses a 90 minute sleep schedule to get through the phases of normal sleep.  Also one clarification that I have discovered is that napping in polyphasic sleep schedules does not elimate NREM sleep phases jumping to only REM sleep, it just shortens the phases surrounding REM, most notably phase 1/2.

Here is an interesting post from Steve Pavlina.

“With a long sleep schedule, there’s the concept of a catnap–a sleep period of 30 minutes or less. Because a catnap stays in Stage 1/2 sleep, it’s easy to wake up from. It can be very useful for getting an energy boost in the middle of the day, but as stated above, it won’t fight sleep deprivation. Sleeping longer than 30 minutes but not in increments of 90 minutes is not recommended since you’ll likely wake up from Stage 3/4 sleep or REM sleep, doing yourself more harm than good.”

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/health-fitness/2294-mechanics-polyphasic-sleep.html

Here is another quote that describes sleep processes using a computer metaphore written by Dr Piotr Wozniak.

“During the day, while learning and experiencing new things, you store your new data in RAM memory. During the night, while first in NREM, you write the data down to the hard disk. During REM, which follows NREM in the night, you do the disk defragmentation, i.e. you organize data, sort them, build new connections, etc. Overnight, you repeat the write-and-defragment cycle until all RAM data is neatly written to the disk (for long-term use), and your RAM is clear and ready for a new day of learning. At waking up, you reboot the computer. If you reboot early with the use of an alarm clock, you often leave your disk fragmented. Your data access is slow, and your thinking is confused. Even worse, some of the data may not even get written to the disk. It is as if you have never stored it in RAM in the first place. In conclusion, if you use an alarm clock, you endanger your data. If you do not care about your intellectual performance, you may want to know that there are many biological reasons for which using alarm clocks is basically unhealthy. ”

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm#Polyphasic%20sleep