Hack Your Brain with Polyphasic Sleep

Today I'm talking about my 2-month experiment sleeping only 5 hours a day with Polyphasic sleep

🖊️ Corrections are in the pinned ERRATA comment.

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My name is Tris Oaten and I produce fast, technical videos.

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[NoBoilerplate]

ERRATA
- Ugh, military time was not the right choice. After the fact, I realised I should have settled on "7 o'clock, 23 o'clock" etc, as a good mix of natural-sounding and precise.

- I should have mentioned i was weightlifting during this experiment, and found no change in my recovery, probably due to the fact I sit at my desk for 16 hours a day! 😂
- I stopped after 2 months because I had an injury that kept me in bed for a while. I was sad, but my sleep schedule had been fixed!
- Some folks asked "is it memory safe" which 1. is a solid pun, and 2. I think E2 is. I felt totally fine cognitively, I was still getting a solid 4:30 core sleep with my two siestas. I felt great!

[malicemike]

Laying down for 20 mins and actually getting 20 mins of sleep is completely different

[Spookyhoobster]

I did polyphasic sleep 12 years ago. I was 16 and in the middle of a summer break. I loved the extra time and enjoying the peace and quite of night-time. Only thing I love more than that is how stubbornly inflexible our society is :^). Always wished I could go back to it, but the only thing harder than adjusting to polyphasic sleep is having an opportunity to put it into practice.

[potapotapotapotapotapota]

Biphasic sleep is easily the easiest way to sleep. Go to bed when the sun sets, wake up in the middle of the night, go back to bed for round two and then wake up when the sun rises. This is also much easier to do if you are living in the equator or during spring and autumn everywhere else in the world. That's because the sun rises and sets as close to about 6am/pm respectively.

[shnx]

Without realizing it, this was my sleep schedule for a bit, 6 hours of core sleep and a 20-30 minute nap in the after noon. It worked great until one day my schedule was nicked out of place and I felt exhausted.

[friendlybear]

I just realised I have attempted polyphasic sleep in the past without realizing. Every day I spend about 30 min on the bus to school and back. And often times I would have a nap during the ride. And now that I come to think about it, I always felt really fresh and awake after my bus-naps

[energyman]

I'm about to oxidize my sleep schedule

[rtsa]

I was listening this without watching in bed for no reason in particular and realised that you would be great at audio only based content too like podcasts. Great voice and audible and visual presentation of ideas.

[CJMattias]

Having watches in the navy meant sleeping 2-3 times per day. I was always really surprised to learn that my combined sleep time was even below 6 hours, yet I was feeling very fresh a lot of the time.
There's something to that idea.

[Joe-smmf]

Not telling others your goals can be backed by some studies. Not seeking praise, letting others talk you out of your goal or even questioning your intentions can give one a reason to stop when it becomes difficult.

[joey]

Didn't work for me and I've tried every sleep system out there because I was also suffering from chronic sleep deprivation, which I feel is extremely common among software developers (which is your target demographic).

The thing that helped me is to set an alarm clock at the same time 7 days a week and forcing myself to wake up at that time. Sometimes I only slept 3 hours sometimes I woke up before the time but was forced to lay in bed without grabbing my laptop. But over months and eventually years it eventually resulted in my body just deciding on its own when to want to sleep and never feeling tired when waking up because my body already knew inherently when I was going to wake up and my circadian rythm just adapted the REM sleep in accordance with when it expected me to wake up, which was always at the exact same time so that my biological clock realized this.

It's been 7 years since I started it and my quality of life is a lot better now. My wife doesn't complain about me looking like a zombie with black rings around the eyes anymore. I actually feel tired before going to sleep and I'm a more consistent worker instead of having sudden bouts of high performance and moments of brain fog which I usually had throughout life and everyone with insomnia can recognize.

[clintbustwood]

This took a lot of practice. Grew up working with my dad and his lawn care company which were big into naps at noon. Afterwards I went college and went back to “monophasic” and then joined the army and became a master at naps. I’ve started an office job now and I’ve struggled a lot with adjusting back to the socially acceptable style of rest

[SirHobben]

As a narcoleptic this interests me because it takes me about 5-10 mins into sleep to reach REM compared to the average time of 90 mins. Something like the Uberman is like subjecting your body to the quantities of stage 3 sleep of that a person with narcolepsy has. Not experiencing enough stage 3 sleep is really rough on your body. You will feel tired. Stage 3 sleep is where your body releases growth hormone and where a lot of other appetite regulating hormones are released. There is data that indicates that a lack of deep sleep leads to a lot of physiological problems. Also for narcoleptics there is a significant correlation with anxiety and depression. Who knows if that correlation is caused by a lack of deep sleep or the possible autoimmune disorders that also cause narcolepsy. In the end quantitative data surrounding sleep is hard to gather. If you are going to experiment with your sleep schedules I implore people find a purpose for wanting to sleep less other than simply" having more time to be awake". From a small sample size of my friends I can certainly say that the the people that tend to get the most work done/do the most, in a day, also tend to sleep the longest.

[pali]

Really like the concept, but Id be interested in reaction time and cognitive ability tests comparing Monophasic and Polyphasic sleep. Sometimes the way you feel doesnt line up with the way you actually are, it would be really interesting if the brain is just adapting to the new scedule and making you feel normal while not actually working well.

[avithedev]

Its my first time hearing this and I've actually been living it all a long. I sleep 2-3 hours in the day and 2-3 hours during the night. And I feel very active and I'm productive throughout the day.

[gasgano]

Polyphasic is utopian in our society, but biphasic is compatible with many life situations. My early shifts start at 7am and end at 2pm, allowing me to have 3-6 sleep both am and pm. I do think that its sustainable, not a huge adjustment and still gives you 1-2h each day for most people. Sadly i also have sporadic late shifts which fuck it up.

[SangokuKing]

I find that siesta in generals are simply a great way of recovery.

When i was an intern, i saw a big pattern of sleepiness after lunch. I knew about post-prendial effect on the body, but that was true for everyone around me, but it seemed i was the only one to struggle that much.

I tried to do a 20min siesta, in a sitting position, head on my desk, brown noise in my earbuds. For me, clos8ng my eyes are enough to fall asleep, even in a lit and noisy environement.

After those 20 minutes, i felt like i had taken 5 coffee, and the feeling stayed for the afternoon.

People were not very enthousiast at the idea of the somewhat new intern sleeping on his desk, but it was during lunch time and it did help with productivity, so they could not say anything about it.

As of today, i converted some people to the 20-min-sitting-down siesta at work. It never stopped working for me. The only downside is missing social gathering during break, but my prodoctivity is worth it and people now understand.

The weird thing is, if i do the same thing but laying down (at home, not at work) it completely reverses the effects. I get tired, i am foggy, i feel like a truck hit me. But sitting (even at home), that 20min sleep instantly wake me up feeling ready to run a 4km sprint.

[rtnjo]

Well done; I tried this method 2 years ago.

24 y.o. Programmer. Goal: I was in the process of switching my professional field. This required extensive studying. So I wanted to increase my learning speed by increasing amount of waking hours.

Result: I gave up on the 5th month as I became less productive and felt tired. Overall decreased motivation and mood. I caught myself many times sleeping while waking or reading comprehension decreased, had to reread some things 2-3 times. Hallucinations, I was staring at the carpet, was awake, but had a dream with sounds. Part of me still thinks I have damaged my brain because of this experiment.

I tried this experiment 5-6 times, but it was only a short time, 2-3 weeks, until I found my schedule, 2 hours at night: 11pm - 1am. And 2 1-hour naps during a day; I am trying to remember which time exactly, but I planned to have a qual time gap to recover. I asked my little brother to wake me up no matter what I say or do or how tired I look because I believed that after some time, I would adjust.

Possible failure reason: I was living with my parents, and sometimes I had guests, kids especially, who sometimes woke me up during my daily nap. Yeah.

It could have compounded to the point that I needed more sleep, but my strict sleep habit was my priority, so I couldn't adapt and return to the net zero.

Also, lots of stress at that time. Some personal stuff.

BTW: Would I try it again? No. Don't even think about it. It's not even short-term beneficial.

The best is to stick to 8 hours of sleep + workout + eat well, + WORK HARD to have more freedom than more slave hours, and the MAIN thing, have love and peace with yourself and your family. It's not even negotiable because It's the foundation for your future. The most frustrating part about this guidance is that folks don't wanna listen, believing there are still easy ways out. As a result, nearly everyone discovers the truth the difficult way, just like I did.

[mllenessmarie]

I was obsessed with the polyphasic sleep when I was a teenager, but unfortunately in my case it doesn't quite work. What works however, is this biphasic sleep - one late afternoon, then I wake up extremely rested (and I clean, eat, study, read, have fun), the second sleep is a night one, however this one is shorter. Apparently this process has been way in the past as people back then have "two sleeps" - I highly recommend googling this phenomenon.

[SergioPSC]

1 coffee and that sleep schedule is gonna crumble like a house of cards