Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Ok. Nuevo cronograma, me tomé una siesta extra larga en medio, son varias cosas las que voy a analizar en estos días, por ejemplo:

• Como funciona el nuevo cronograma de Dymaxion en cuanto a facilidad de adaptarse y facilidad de mantenerse en el
• Que tan bien me adapto a las ocasionales siestas de 4~6 horas
• El estado mental y físico a lo largo de cada día
• Las implicaciones sociales

15:30
Por ahora solo dormí la primera siesta del nuevo cronograma, una hora después de haberme levantado del reset.
Costó dormir y fue un sueño muy liviano, sigo bien tanto física como mentalmente y hasta ahora hemos tenido más vida social de lo usual.

23:00
Hasta ahora sin problemas, parecido al día 1, dormí sin tener sueño, pero fue incluso más suave. En general estuve muy despierto y en perfecto estado (gracias a que dormí anoche).

Estamos pensando que everyman probablemente no es lo mejor que podemos hacer.
Una rápida explicación sobre los cronogramas de sueño polifásico:

Dymaxion: El cronograma más duro y extremo, siestas de 30 minutos cada 6 horas. Poca gente puede adaptarse a este cronograma y el período de adaptacion es horrorosamente horrible. Es lo que hicimos los primeros 5 días.

Uberman: Básicamente, dormir entre 15 y 20 minutos cada 4 horas. Mucha gente usa este cronograma, y muchos fallan. El período de adaptación es duro, como dymaxion, aunque quizá menos ya que las siestas están mas cerca una de otras.

Everyman: Variación de Uberman para hacer más facil el período de adaptación, 1 siesta de 3 horas y 3 de 20 minutos o alguna variante de una siesta larga y varias cortas. Es más fácil pero más lento adaptarse (1 mes es lo que dicen).

Uberman es, para mi, imposible de mantener. Necesitar dormir cada 4 horas es simplemente demasiado.

Everyman rompe la costumbre de siestas homogeneas y el cuerpo no sabe para que lado ajustarse. Dudo que sea lo mejor.

El principal problema que tenemos con Dymaxion es el eterno cansancio (de nuevo, solo lo hicimos bien por 4 o 5 días) y el horario entre las 2am y las 8am.

Despues de pensar alternativas, decidimos probar con Dymaxion modificado (no everyman, al final cambiamos de nuevo) que quedaría de la siguiente forma:

4 Siestas de 25~30 minutos cada 6 horas (2am - 8am - 2pm - 8pm).
2 Siestas de 25~30 minutos entre las siestas nocturnas (entre las 2am y 8am,  será a las 4am y 6am)

Con esto tenemos una hora más de sueño, no dormimos más de media hora, y la fase nocturna se hace mucho más llevadera.
Vamos a probar a partir de hoy (9 de febrero) así que el día 6 es el primer día de este nuevo cronograma.

Ok, se descontroló todo a partir del jueves a la noche. Aunque el viernes yo me sentía perfecto, decidimos cambiar nuestro cronograma de sueño a “Everyman”, esto es: dormir  1 siesta de 3 horas  y 3 siestas de 20 minutos. Supuestamente el período de adaptación no es tan brutal, y es mucho más flexible.

Es una lástima que lo único que pude conocer de Dymaxion es el horrible período de adaptación, el cual soporté casi hasta el final.

Anoche dormimos entre las 2 y las 5am y nos despertamos demasiado cansados. La constumbre de 30 minutos esta más arraigada de lo que pensamos. LLegué a duras penas a la siesta de las 8am. y a las 8:30 estaba destruido. Asi que decidí hacer borron y cuenta nueva.

Recién me levanto de dormir algo asi como 4 o 5 horas que parecieron eternas. Con la energía recargada y fresco como una lechuga.

I found my first article written by a scientific researcher in January 2005 called Dr Piotr Wozniak

Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths
This article compares polyphasic sleep to regular monophasic sleep, biphasic sleep, as well as to the concept of free-running sleep

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

The article is very thorough… however is VERY biased against adoption of Polyphasic Sleep. The tone was very negative and offputting to me, but was very worth the 2o minute read and I would highly suggest people who are considering polyphasic sleep read it to get perspective from a researcher who has put a lot of time into fact checking and existing medical data. However, keep in mind it reads like an opinion piece — flatly in favor of free-running sleep.

I think that there still is a LOT of room for research in this field and that in general he is the type of person who may lack mental flexibility to be curious about future developments. This said, he welcomes more data, and has made an effort to make it easy for people to submit data to his studies. He invites people who are doing polyphasic sleep to contribute research by using a free sleep chart/program (sorry windows only). Below is the page about the sleep chart, the download link for the program zip file is on the bottom of the page. I will send and email to him to find out if he has any recent data that has invalidated any of his opinions, or if there are any interesting trends, how many people have sent him data etc.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleepchart.htm

Once again, here is the link to the article.

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

There are quite a few points he addresses including:

- He claims that polyphasic sleeping does not induce a more productive/creative state. He sites Stampi the major sleep researcher out there. “Stampi has shown that polyphasic sleep can improve cognitive performance in conditions of sleep deprivation as compared with monophasic sleep: 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. Many use this as the argument for the superiority of polyphasic sleep, while silently skirting around the fact that Stampi also notes that the performance on polyphasic schedule is still far less than that in free running sleep conditions.”

- He also debunks most of the info on various famous people such as da Vinci, Edison, Tesla, Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and even Bruce Lee. Also notable is information from Buckminster Fuller’s biographers who claim he didn’t have a regular sleep plan but rather a hectic lifestyle. Yet I think I read a quote that he did it for 2 years…will have to hunt that up. He also doesn’t mention dymaxion which I find strange if he had done good research. Here is the quote from his article: “Only the biographers of Buckminster Fuller who I managed to get in touch with seem to confirm that his sleeping habits were quite unusual and that he experimented a lot with various sleeping patterns. In particular, while traveling and lecturing extensively, he would enter what he called a “dog sleep”. That sleep, however, had nothing to do with polyphasic sleep. It was a sort of improvised mix of free-running sleep confounded by jet lag, meetings and deadlines. In other words, Bucky would catnap whenever he was tired and had an opportunity. However, if he could squeeze a sound 6 hours here and there, he would not miss the chance. This “dog sleep” did not fit any fixed alarm-clocked schedule. It was just a compromise between circadian rhythms and Bucky’s hectic lifestyle.”

Another medical point I saw was this:

Your health will suffer. Sleep restriction in healthy volunteers causes multiple physiological abnormalities. This includes increased inflammation, activation of the sympathetic nervous system, hypertension, and glucose intolerance. Epidemiologic research suggests that people who report short sleep duration have more symptomatic diabetes, more ischemic heart disease, and decreased survival. Source.

http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/davak/2005/10/17/ubersleep-hacking-sleep-stupid/

Here is a good overview found at: http://groups.google.com/group/Polyphasic/web/what-is-polyphasic-sleep

What is Polyphasic Sleep? In short, it’s sleeping multiple times per day, aka taking naps.

• Monophasic = sleeping in one large chunk, usually 6-9 hours at night.
• Biphasic = sleep hours at night; take a nap during the day. Think Latin American siesta.
• Triphasic, siesta version = sleep hours at night and take two naps during the day.
• Triphasic, equiphasic version = sleep 90 minutes every 8 hours (three times per day).
• Polyphasic = take several naps per 24-hour period. Technically, biphasic and triphasic schedules are polyphasic, too, though usually the term “polyphasic” refers to 4 or more periods of sleep per 24 hours.

There are a variety of polyphasic sleeping schedules — Dymaxion, Uberman, and Everyman are a few of those.

Dymaxion: The most hard-core of these three is called Dymaxion, with 30-minute naps every six hours. As far as I know, very few people have successfully adapted to this schedule.

Uberman: On the Uberman schedule, people sleep 15-30 minutes every four hours. Many (possibly most) polynappers strive for this schedule. The adjustment period is rough, and many, many people fail to get through it. (I’d imagine that the adjustment period for Dymaxion is even rougher.) However, those who have successfully adjusted enjoy 21-22 waking hours per day and fairly even energy levels. If you stick to the schedule and don’t oversleep, you can adjust in 7-12 days.

Everyman: The term “Everyman” was coined by PureDoxyK. Her thinking is that this schedule is one that many people could adapt to. On an Everyman schedule, you’d sleep 1.5, 3, or 4.5 hours at night and take three to five 20 minute naps during the day. The adjustment is easier to handle, but takes much longer. According to PureDoxyK, it takes over a month to adjust, and as far as I can tell from her blog, she was still tweaking the schedule and fighting early morning drowsiness at the two month mark. At six months, she reported being thrilled with how well it works.

Adjusting to the Uberman Schedule—If you’re used to sleeping 6-9 hours per night, switching to 2-3 hours spread over short naps during the day takes some getting used to. With a monophasic sleep schedule, we generally don’t reach REM sleep until we’ve been out for 90-120 minutes. Deprive your body of what it needs, and eventually it’ll adjust, but before it adapts, it’s rough! The reason Everyman takes so much longer than Uberman to get used to is that with a core sleep, your body is still getting one to three cycles of REM sleep.

Many people have theorized that polyphasic sleepers go straight to REM sleep and only get REM sleep, but in Claudio Stampi’s book “Why We Nap,” Stampi claimed that his polynapping volunteer still got the same proportions of each phase of sleep.

Another interesting note is this: Stampi’s volunteer took performance tests at the beginning of the experiment when he was still monophasic. Two to four weeks into the experiment, his scores were good, but slightly less than they had been before he became polyphasic. After four and a half weeks, Stampi had him sleep for as long as he wanted. The guy slept for 10 hours, and afterwards, his performance tests exceeded what they had been when he was monophasic. These results suggest that polyphasic sleepers should have a long sleep every 4-5 weeks.

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

We moved to the new schedule against Lucas’ wishes. He thought it would be a mistake to switch from one system to another, and he was right. We slept a 3 hour core from 2 to 5am and when we woke up feeling like a train wreck. I guess we kind of figured this would happen, but it was bad. We took a walk around the city trying to stay up and tried to last until our 8am nap which was only 3 hours away. We took a nap at 8am for 30 minutes and when we woke up felt really terrible again. You can’t even stay awake on the edge of the bed waiting to take a shower. You can’t stay awake in a chair. Very very uncomfortable. Lucas has decided to let his body reset and then adjust again. They say that the adjustment to this rythum only takes two days. But this is probably going to be much longer when we are starting in a major state of sleep deprevation. Never the less, I will try to hold on for fear of even greater pain getting started again. But not sure I will last.

Well, we ran into a few hitches. The 5 days with only 2 hours of sleep per day finally took its toll. We invited friends over to help us stay up during the dreaded and at this point very difficult night shift.

Unfortuately I have not had much of an appetite since I started the project and Thursday and I didn’t eat all of my lunch. I snacked on popcorn and mellon but by the time we ate around 1am, I was green in the face. I felt feverish and like I was going to throw up. I think my blood sugar level was extremely low. I had a cramp in my side that lasted 2 plus hours and the sum of all of it mixed with sheer exhaustion, shut me down. We tried to regroup. We decided to take our 2am nap early, but by the time our shocked friends left, it was 1:50. We slept until 2:35…this was 15 extra minutes and we woke up a bit nausiated.

We found it almost impossible to stay up. I tried to sit down and organize some papers but we were nodding off. By 5am we decided that we needed to add an extra interval nap time to get us through the 2am 8am shift. We had heard that some people do this during the period of adjustment. We kept the nap to 30 min. This seemed like it worked fairly well. We made it to our regular nap at 8am, but we woke at 8:30 and then layed in bed half awake half alseep until 9:30.

This mistake, along with my low blood sugar meltdown hurt our esteem. We felt so sad that our system had been derailed and once again considered abandoning the project. Lucas was still feeling pretty good. We began to consider our options for the 99th time around.

We looked on the internet and to my surprise we couldnt’ find anyone who had really successfully been able to do the Dymaxion and wrote about it. I got the feeling that what we were attempting was very extreme and I began to think that we needed to down shift in the short term as we acclamate our bodies.

We still go back and forth but the plan is to stay as is, but add a core to our 2am nap and reduce our naps by 10 min. to 20 min. We stay on the same 8am, 2pm, 8pm, 2am schedule, but we give our bodies a 3 hour core in the short term to help us with the night times. We are going to pay for it after the first core, because I am sure our bodies will be very confused, over sleeping is what really makes you feel badly.

It is now Friday at 6pm. We have been awake now for 5 days, or around 105 hours and only slept 9.5 hours…

I felt fine all day today. I really look forward to the transition being over so we can enjoy our hard work…

Todos los pioneros del sueño polifasico reportan tener problemas tarde o temprano con dormir de más. Para no quedarnos afuera, la noche de anoche (dia 4/ 5) fue un desastre total.

Dormimos de más en la siesta de las 2, unos 40~45 minutos. Y eso nos dejó peor que zombies para el resto de la noche.

Dormimos de más de nuevo en la siesta de las 8… nos despertamos a las 9 y media con cansancio extra.

En resumen: Estamos super cansados, avergonzados, arrepentidos y con mala onda. Dormir de más es malo.

Espero que no haya arruinado demasiado nuestro esfuerzo previo. En este momento estoy con un café gigante, y dispuesto a volver de a poco al punto que habíamos llegado.

Nos planteamos seriamente si seguir con el experimento y casi abandonamos (de nuevo) o cambiamos a un cronograma Everyman, pero la verdad que es demasiado normalucho y se pierde el espíritu de Dymaxion/Uberman. Y nos falta muy poco para llegar al período “bueno” como para abandonar.

Asi que despues de esos problemas (y de una buena ducha) y con una taza grande de café en mano, me dedico a terminar con lo que empezamos. O hacer mi mejor intento.

Llegamos al cuarto día, y no sin haber considerado varias veces dormir una larga y placentera siesta de 12 horitas. Es una idea cada vez más tentadora, pero conseguimos mantenerla a raya.
La sensasión general de el día 3 es un deseo de dormir horas y horas de un tirón, acompañado de oleadas de cuestionamientos, y replanteo de por que estamos haciendo lo que hacemos.

02:30 - Nos levantamos un tanto cansados. Tomé coca cola antes de dormir (y comimos pizza y creo que fue demasiado), conclusión: dormí mal y casi paso de largo (por primera vez). Vamos a salir a pasear por la ciudad, pero estoy hecho un escracho. Hasta ahora este suele ser el período más doloroso de adaptación, entre las 2 y la salida del sol.

05:00 - Volvemos de nuestro paseo, funcionó, no nos dormimos, pero seguimos cansados.

05:40 - Despues de intentar ver un episodio de una serie y casi dormirnos en las sillas, decidimos jugar a uno de los juegos que el fora dejó en casa. Y yo agrego unos mates a la ecuación.

07:55 - Lo del juego de mesa funcionó de maravilla, el tiempo pasó volando. Hora de la siesta. Hacer alguna actividad es muy buena idea para pasar las noches.

09:09 - El mate tan cerca de la siesta no fue muy buena idea. Hoy me levanté con las ultimas dos siestas mal dormidas. La de las 8 fue particularmente alarmante, me costó dormir(unos 5 minutos desperdiciados) y me costó levantarme. Pero estoy (relativamente) bien.

Mucha gente a esta altura ya abandonó el experimento. Los entiendo, yo casi lo hago más de una vez, pero realmente quiero tener esta experiencia, y ya estamos a mas de mitad de camino, asi que si llegamos hasta acá, vamos a seguir un par de días más. Pero confirmo que el “horrible período de adaptación” es, sobre todo, horrible.

14:00 - El cacho de la mañana estuvo durisimo. Fuimos al centro a hacer
trámites y pagar impuestos y casi nos dormimos en la cola del banco. Llegamos justo para la siesta de las 14, de más está decir que directamente a dormir.

15:20 - Nos levantamos de la siesta de las 14 un tanto aturdidos y cansados. Se esta poniendo pesado esto de estar todo el tiempo con sueño, cansado, e intentando no dormirnos en la silla. Intentar evitar la cafeína es el problema más grande.

15:25 - Pongo el agua para unos mates.

18:35  - El mate realmente ayudó, un poco mas de medio termo sin recargar la yerba. Dejé de tomar a las 18 como para que no me afecte el sueño de las 20. Espero que funcione. Jenny no está tomando mate ni café asi que si ella se adapta antes que yo al horario, ya se a que hecharle la culpa…

20:45 - Tarde en dormirme un poco más de lo normal, tuve un sueño un poco más liviano, pero me levanté de maravilla, sin sueño ni fatiga. 15 minutos después  está apareciendo una sensación de cansancio (no sueño).