Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Is I ready more from Jeffery Seely I realized that his Uberman attempt was 10 days and that due to his job issues he had to go back to another form of sleeping, it is also interesting to note that he experienced the natural desire to bounce back and forth between the various states…one night sleeping 7.5 the next back to Uberman, the next 3 hours. And that he retained vivid dreams. He also states that his habit of a 20 minute nap a few times a day greatly increased his productivity and outlook on life. Here is an excerpt of his post:

http://jseely.com/category/polyphasic-sleep/

“For about two weeks following the Uberman adaptation period, I took all of my daytime naps (noon, 4pm, 8pm) — every day. My nocturnal sleeping habits followed a different pattern. For each nocturnal episode, one of three things happened:

• I slept for 7.5 hours, or
• I required only a 3-hour core, in which case I would fit in an extra 20-minute nap during the night, or
• I followed Uberman completely, taking 20-minute naps at the usual time slots.

I could never predict which of the three would occur at any given night. But if I had a 7.5 hour sleep one night, it was very likely that I could do Uberman the next night with little to no loss in energy.

Another interesting point was that I would sometimes set the alarm for 3 hours and would wake up after 20 minutes.

I estimate that for those 2-ish weeks I slept an average of 4-5 hours a day — quite admirable for a haphazard quasi-polyphasic schedule.

My energy levels followed my circadian rhythm, it seemed. During many nocturnal waking episodes, I felt functional, but didn’t possess the concentration to read a book. Nighttime was at first a source of frustration. My body was deciding for itself that it wanted to be awake, but I still wasn’t focused enough to get work done. I eventually focused my nighttime tasks to cooking, movies, and video games — all worked well to pass the time.

Above all, the most interesting aspect of the post-adaptation period was the beneficial qualities of the daytime naps. Again, despite my nocturnal habits, I stuck with Uberman naps during the day. I took every noon nap in a super comfy chair in my school library. I usually woke up from that nap in a feeling of bliss. It’s hard to describe this bliss. It’s sort of like the just-woke-up feeling we all experience on occasion from monophasic sleep, but it’s much more intense. It borders more on euphoria and ecstasy and a feeling of oneness. But at the same time the feeling was subtle. Not subdued, but not overpowering. I often would wake up from that nap with a sudden urge to go outside and simply indulge in the beautiful sights summer.

It was not uncommon for me to experience this bliss two or three times in a day. My 4:00pm and 8:00pm naps often had this quality.

This was great news for my job. I usually reserved most of my working time to the hour or so following a nap. The post-nap state of mind was especially effervescent and unconstrained. My thoughts would flow faster than normal. If you have ever attempted difficult math proofs before, then you’re probably familiar with the frustration of hitting a mental block. It’s like writer’s block for mathematicians. I found that if I worked on my math problems after a nap, I usually experienced more lucrative thought processes, which helped get past mental blocks.

Another quality of my naps: I had dreams. Let’s review why this is a good thing. During the first several days of cold-turkey Uberman adaptation, your body is mainly getting SWS (slow-wave sleep). SWS is critical, but you also need REM, and probably the other stages as well. Your body eventually figures out that you’re only taking 20-minute naps, so it changes its sleep architecture to fit in non-SWS stages as well. When you have a dream, that usually indicates that you’re in REM sleep — a good sign for people adapting to polyphasic sleep.

Because I’ve been having dreams during many of my naps, this means that I’ve retained the altered sleep architecture from my “failed” Uberman adaptation. It’s common for me to recall 3-4 dreams a day. It’s also common to have REM-onset naps, where dreaming kicks in immediately upon falling asleep (lucid dreams, anyone?). I can’t predict which naps will give me dreams and which ones will be mostly — as far as I can tell — SWS. But I’ve noticed that both seem to leave me feeling good upon waking up. That state of bliss I described does not seem to depend whether I had a REM nap or a SWS nap, if I had a dream or not.

(Note that polyphasic naps are not compressed versions of monophasic sleep cycles. One nap might be mostly SWS with no REM, while another might be mostly REM with no SWS. The other sleep stages remain in use as well. A fully adapted polyphasic sleeper will experience overall sleep-stage ratios very similar those of monophasic sleep.)

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Like I said, I went through 10 days of Uberman adaptation but started a full time job on day 11. My body was almost adapted, but wasn’t quite there yet, so I had to focus my efforts away from maintaining this schedule. Interestingly, my body didn’t want to revert to monophasic sleep. At first I went for a couple 7.5-hours sleeps, but currently my body tends to sleep for no more than 3 hours at a time. I listen to my body and have taken 20-minute naps whenever I feel tired, which occurs about 3-4 times a day. I often remember vivid dreams from my naps (writing in my dream journal is starting to get very tedious!). I almost always spend every other night on a full-Uberman schedule. I’m not forcing my body to do this either. On the other nights my body tends to want a couple 3-hour sleeps. I sometimes set my alarm for about 3 hours and instead wake up 15 minutes later feeling totally rejuvenated. I have also noticed that there are a couple naps each day that leave me feeling euphoric upon waking up. Essentially, I’m on some sort of free-form quasi-polyphasic sleep schedule. I’ll write more about these post-adaptation experiences later.

I’d like to finish by saying that polyphasic sleep adaptation was a worthwhile experience. It was difficult and almost felt unbearable at times. But in retrospect I see all the benefits of putting myself through the challenge. Succeed or fail, I think there are several benefits to attempting polyphasic sleep:

• You become more conscious of how your energy levels work throughout the day.
• You become conscious of how you spend your free time. During Uberman adaptation you are awake for 22 hours a day, albeit a bit nonfunctional at times. You get a taste of life with extreme amounts of free time. Even if you revert to monophasic sleep, having tasted the life of the Uberman, you become highly aware of how you spend your free time. And I suspect you feel motivated to make better use of it.
• Even if you don’t succeed at Uberman, you open the door to several other polyphasic sleep possibilities. I’m currently on a free-form quasi-polyphasic schedule, where I gain anywhere from 2 to 5 hours of free time a day. I am having a blast experimenting with various schedules, and I’m experiencing little to no sleep deprivation. Hopefully I’ll settle in on either Uberman or Everyman soon.
• Lucid dreaming — although I’ve been working on having lucid dreams for several weeks now, it was only until polyphasic sleep that I had one. Lucid dreams have lots of therapeutic benefits. I’m always in a state of ecstasy after having one.
• The best benefit: adaptation tests your limits. It tests your self-discipline and your ability to control your conscious and subconscious mind. What better tool can you imagine for personal growth?

He doesn’t seem to write again after this as for now, but I think he may be onto something, some kind of schedule might be cool. Maybe week days vs. weekends etc. not sure.

I have been reading more about gradual adaptation and Claudio Stampi’ research from two good new blogs.

Jeffery Seely also mentioned that Stampi said that gradual adaption seed critical for the success of the subjects.

“So I got to thinking that adapting gradually would be easier. I noticed that in Claudio Stampi’s studies, he made his polyphasic sleeping subject adapting gradually, and Stampi even noted that adapting gradually seemed critical to the subject’s success (I’d cite the exact quote, but I returned Why We Nap to the library… I’ll recheck it soon). I’m sure that Stampi’s decision to adapt his subject gradually was based on his own intuition, but I’d trust a sleep researcher’s intuition over my own.”

http://jseely.com/2007/09/how-i-successfully-adapted-to-polyphasic-sleep/

Also Shakkun, now on day 11 of Uberman, used a gradual approach. From what I can tell he went through the same harsh adaptation we did from day 1 to day 7, and on day 11, he said he will try for three more days before switching to Everyman.  Still I think gradual is better.  I like that we have kept our nap times from Dymaxion the same, making it easier to reduce my core if desired in the future.

http://shakkun.blogspot.com/2008/01/gradual-adaptation.html

I found it interesting that Steve Pavlina actually did a planned experiment, he did each duration 8-10 times“25 Minutes. So far I’ve tested countdown alarm times of 20, 22, 25, and 30 minutes for my naps, trying each one for about 8-10 cycles. I begin the countdown timer as soon as I lie down. 25 minutes seems to work the best so far. With shorter times the alarm sometimes cuts my sleep too short, and I don’t feel fully refreshed. With longer times I often feel groggy upon awakening if I sleep until the alarm goes off, probably because I’ve slipped beyond the REM phase. 25 minutes seems to be the sweet spot that gives me enough time to fall asleep, have a dream, and wake up naturally if possible, with the alarm serving as a safety net to prevent me sleeping past REM. I notice that even if the 25-minute alarm wakes me up (which is about 1/3 of the time now), I usually wake up feeling relaxed and refreshed and remembering a dream.”

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/11/polyphasic-sleep-log-days-12-18/ 

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/