Seen today in the weekly summary of my UP activity tracker:
A quick siesta can improve mood, alertness and performance. Take it from notable nappers Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and JFK, who boosted their brains with an afternoon nap.
It is not easy to change your sleep pattern!
Most of us are used to have a long sleep during the night, well, during the weekdays the night could vary between 5 and 8 hours for most of the active persons I’d say, for Laetitia and me we were around 5 and 6 according to our stats (using the Activity Tracker but we’ll come back on that another day) and longer sleeps during the weekend, where you would be luxuriating until you finally decide to go to brunch 😉 This way you get your average of 7 to 9 hours of sleep a day but even if you feel you need to sleep more during the weekend to catch-up on sleep after a busy week, you don’t necessary feel rested, and you might feel drowsy during the day. It’s probably not true to everyone or all the time, but I think it’s accurate for us.
So when we decided to switch to polyphasic we read a few articles on how you can do the transition. And we found an app on iOS, called Smart Sleep. It’s not perfect but well designed and there is not too much choice anyway 🙂 It has an adaptation mode, first there is an initial stage where your 7-8 hour sleeping period is split up into two 3.5-4 hour intervals with a 1.5-2 hour break in between. The idea is to change your sleeping habits.
Then you learn to nap, it is the tricky part. First, you reduce the length of your second sleeping interval to two hours and try to take a half hour nap during the day. Generally, falling asleep for a daytime nap requires some patience and determination. You might start by just closing your eyes and trying to relax. Since you are sleeping less at night you may feel a bit sleepy in the middle of the day. Within a short period you’ll discover that you’re regularly falling into a deep restful sleep at exactly the time programmed for your nap.
Then the last phase is the polyphasic sleep. Once you’ve learned how to nap, you can easily save even more time by converting your second core sleep interval into two 30-minutes naps. After another brief period of adjustment you should be able to cut your standard nap down to just 20 minutes.
This adaptation mode seems very nice, but after a couple of night we felt that splitting the core sleep was really not easy and seemed a bit useless because our objective was the Everyman 2 pattern, with a core sleep of 4.5 hours, and learning how to nap was also useless for us because we were already napping regularly (more me than Laetitia though).
So we decided to switch to Everyman 2 just after 2 or 3 nights! And it was not easy… 😉
Because in the previous post I just gave you a very simple summary on the polyphasic sleep pattern, among all the articles I’ve read I think the following is a very good one, written by a family practice physical assistant: Become Uberman & Sleep like Da Vinci: The Polyphasic Sleep Cheat Sheet
The sleep pattern that we are doing is called “Everyman 2”, with 4.5 hours major sleep episode and two 20-minute power naps, for a total of 5.2 hours of sleep.
Note the biphasic pattern, it’s 6 hours major sleep episode and one 20 minute power nap. It is often referenced as the “siesta” because it’s popular among Latin countries like in Spain. The pattern is the closest to the natural rhythm of the human body, and like it is said in the article:
[About Biphasic Sleep] It’s the best of both worlds, to remain an early riser while also being able to stay up later at night.
But I’ll talk more about it another day!
There is also the uberman, with only six 20 minute naps, one nap every 4 hours, for a total of only 2 hours of sleep!! Yes that’s very extreme! Too extreme, at this point we are not interested to go that far.
And a very important warning:
There is little scientific research into polyphasic sleep and most information about it comes from independent researchers without peer review.
At last, I’m taking the time to write the first article of this blog! It took me something like 3 weeks to start it because Laetitia, my lovely wife, wanted me to define an editorial line… Why me, I don’t know, I’m not the one with the literal background, I’m the one with a scientific background, I just wanted to post our feedbacks and comments about our polyphasic sleep experience, like a journal. But we agreed to start it anyway, without a clear editorial line (thank you my love), and see how it goes!
First I should explain what is the polyphasic sleep. But just a very simple summary, with my words 🙂 Most of us, as adults, have learned to sleep for 7 to 9 hours approximately during the night, this is the monophasic sleep. Then there is the popular biphasic sleep, where the sleep time during the night is shorter but you add a nap during the day. And by extending this model, there are the polyphasic sleep patterns, where the night sleep, often called core sleep, is even shorter but you have multiple naps during the day. This way you can reduce the total sleep time, and thus increase the total awake time, by keeping the sound sleep time only. I’ll post some links later with more detailed explanation of those patterns.
The challenge is to change the sleep habits from a long sleep to a core sleep plus the naps. And the key is to be very regular for the time of the core sleep and the naps, and to never skip a nap.
Now you are probably going to ask: but why?! Well it’s easy, it’s to get more time awake in a single day! But what for? Well, because we love doing a lot of things and we always feel that we don’t have the time to do all those things, but still have time to work, to do some sport, or just to enjoy being together, awake!
Every Man, Every Day 