9 ms·

Alternate Sleep Cycles

74 points by googletron 15y ago

lambada 15y ago
Everything I hear about these sleeping patterns is anecdotal. As far as I'm aware there haven't been any serious studies done of people on these sleeping patterns, and most especially on the health effects (if any) it causes.
- Killah911 15y ago
  I agree, these so called "models" in the article are based on anecdotal evidence. However, I know that there are a number of sleep studies/experiments out there... From what I've read, only 8-hour or nap in the afternoon sleep patterns were scientifically proven to be adequate.
gurkendoktor 15y ago
I have tried überman for fun two years ago, mostly to practice napping. It did not work at all, people on IRC didn't have success either, but hearsay and wishful thinking were plenty. It's crazy that Steve Pavlina's series of blog entries is still the #1 reference even though he turned his back on it afterwards. That said, sleeping less at night and taking a deep nap or two after lunch is awesome. I wish it would've been socially acceptable in my German university. There is a lot of progress to be made (flux et al) without drastic and dangerous sleep cycles.
- Afton 15y ago
  I'm deeply skeptical about these massively shortened sleep cycles too, but to be fair, Steve Pavlina gave it up for the same reason Dyson did; it's too hard to interact with the 'awake-during-the-day, asleep-during-the-night' crowd, not because "it didn't work" for him.
  - stinkytaco 15y ago
    I never bought that excuse. There's zero scientific evidence for breaking a habit humans and our ancestors have been doing for literally millions of years. "Social interaction was hard" seems like a face saving excuse for "I wasn't able to beat evolution."
    - gwern 15y ago
      FWIW, evolution actually is telling us to do biphasic, not the current monophasic. We slept biphasic right up until a century or three ago, and the literature documents this pretty well. Let's see, to pull my canned refs from my melatonin article (http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin); we have Stampi in _Why We Nap_: > “It is worth mentioning that anthropological studies conducted in tribes active at night show that human sleep can be highly polyphasic in certain cultures. Although they have different cultures and ways of life, both the Temiars of Indonesia and the Ibans of Sarawak have similar polyphasic sleep-wake behaviors (Petre-Quadens, 1983). Their average nocturnal sleep episode duration ranges between 4 and 6 hr, and nighttime activities (fishing, cooking, watching over the fire, rituals) at any one time involve approximately 25% of the adult members. Daytime napping is very common in both tribes: at almost any time of day, about 10% of the adult members are asleep. Whatever the cause of these polyphasic sleep patterns,whether the expression of an inborn ultradian rest-activity tendency or other factors, such populations exhibit extremely flexible and fragmentary sleep-wake cycles. The minimal contact with modern civilization could be one of the reasons for the preservation of this possibly ancestral sleep pattern.” There's http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/10/what_is_a_natural_sleep_patter.php http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/10/what_is_a_natural_slee... And then, for all the European examples, see http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ah000343.html http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ah00034... The author apparently has a book on the same topic which I really ought to read, but the preceding is the article mentioned on his profile-page: > _At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past_ (W.W. Norton, 2005), a sweeping study of nocturnal culture before the Industrial Revolution, which garnered four prizes, including an award given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history. His article in 2001, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” in the American Historical Review, earned two awards, including the James L. Clifford Prize given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
- philwelch 15y ago
  I can't believe anyone takes Pavlina seriously. He's just more evidence that smart people can be marks, too. His wife and business partner was a telephone psychic, of all things.
coldarchon 15y ago
after being 5 years in research for brain activity during sleep and being a natural lucid dreamer and short sleeper myself, I can only warn anyone about polyphasic sleep if you never had a tendency for this in your life before. It will literally turn off your Mojo ..
lee 15y ago
The fact that these sleep cycles have been used by "bloggers" for a few months and that they are still "healthy" does not give me the warm fuzzies. It would take a much longer experimental time frame, under more rigorous scientific study, to convince me that any of these alternatives are safe and worthwhile.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  I can almost detect the disdain in your "voice" as you use the word "bloggers". Was there something wrong with the article?
  - fullmoon 15y ago
    It wasn't published in Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine. Otherwise, good article.
  - jerf 15y ago
    The fact that if you travel further down the blog stream for almost any of these practitioners, they always give it up for not working. (Giving it up because "everybody else is on a monophasic sleep cycle" is just a social-face-saving excuse. If it worked, you wouldn't give it up. You've got six extra hours a day to make up whatever the problem is!) The evidence that I've seen suggests that alternative sleep cycles are basically persistent urban legend more than anything else. And yes, failing to mention the little tiny detail of it not working at this date is a reason to be "disdainful" of an article like this; it encourages one to wreck weeks or months of ones life on something that we pretty much know doesn't work. Negligent at best, evil at worst. (Excepting "siesta", which there is some evidence for, but isn't the promised miracle, either.)
    - billpatrianakos 15y ago
      I agree with you but youre going to upset a lot of people with that. They're going to demand you show them scientific studies and hard proof. Even if you did it wouldn't be good enough for them. This belief in polyphasic sleep reminds me of a guy I used to know who was a huge conspiracy theorist. He used to tell me that you could build a perpetual motion machine and generate unlimited energy from home and that he was doing it. I tried to reason with him and let him know that stuff was bunk but he never changed his mind despite his machine not working (for which he made some dumb face-saving excuse about not using the right material or something). No matter how much evidence and reasoning you present someone with beliefs like this they refuse to change their mind. The absence of evidence is not evidence for something. We know polyphasic doesn't work not only because of all the failed attempts and what you talked about in your comment but also because of what we know about how the brain and human body works.
ry0ohki 15y ago
Even if one of these other cycles is incredibly effective, they seem very hard to use and be social. I don't know what I'd do with my extra time at 4am when no one else is awake (on a consistent basis).
- fullmoon 15y ago
  Reading a book, playing a game, Medidate? It is a very nice time to be awake
- sp332 15y ago
  Talk to people in a different time zone :)
jmilloy 15y ago
http://www.amazon.com/Why-we-nap-STAMPI/dp/0817634622 http://www.amazon.com/Why-we-nap-STAMPI/dp/0817634622 I always link to this source; in a subject full of anecdotes and misinformation, this book is essential for providing substantial and concrete scientific results.
- botker 15y ago
  I was prepared to buy until the page loaded. Yikes. 1 used from $314.52 I hope there are some other publications on the subject of greater or equal quality that have yet to go out of print.
  - jmilloy 15y ago
    You can easily find a pdf to download, if you're comfortable with that.
  - skore 15y ago
    The comments here[1] suggest ahem alternatives. [1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R3W1ZLVUQ1N867/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0817634622&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode=#wasThisHelpful http://www.amazon.com/review/R3W1ZLVUQ1N867/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...
  - gregwebs 15y ago
    get it from your library. But actually, if you read it you the #1 point is simply that sleep patterns are not a well understood concept - there is little evidence to say that any pattern is a good or bad concept. The author sleeps for 6 hours at night and takes a siesta.
- mashmac2 15y ago
  An excellent read, yes. It includes a couple of chapters specifically dedicated to polyphasic, and the entire book focuses on different sleep cycles. For those still in/at college in the US, interlibrary loan has several copies available around the country. That's how I got to read a copy.
egypturnash 15y ago
I tried uberman a while back. It was a royal pain to deal with the intermittent day job I had at the time, and it really didn't work well with my home life either - I just didn't have a comfortable place to sit around and slack off for some of the awake cycles. I was definitely adapting to it after a couple weeks but the only place to lay around lazily in an underheated apartment was in a bed full of sleeping boyfriend, which was a pretty powerful argument for just curling up and going to sleep! Now that I have a very inviting living room in my home wih a comfy couch, I might try it again once spring hits. Or maybe the Everyman schedule. The big problem, IMHO, is interfacing with the entire rest of the Western world, which is on the one big sleep schedule.
- egypturnash 15y ago
  More thoughts. One commenter here snarked about this article for linking to Steve Pavlina's writings on polyphasic sleep, which he gave up after about six months. This is an old article so I kinda feel that's okay, it's from around 2010 - though Pavlina did it in '06 or so. That said I was thusly looking at Pavlina's blog. And at the entry where he looks back on it, one year later (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-one-year-later/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-on...) and talks about how it's transformed his sleeping, even when he's gone back to "normal" sleep. And I think my month or so doing polyphasic left me with a little something, too: I now have a very well-tuned alarm clock in my brain. I don't have to get up for a day job any more, so I don't have to use it very often - but as I'm going to sleep, I can tell myself "I'm getting up at 7:00" or whatever, and I will be awake when the alarm goes off. (I still set alarms, though, because they give me that extra boost of HEY YOU HAVE A REASON TO GET UP!) In fact, I'm taking a plane trip tomorrow. Flight's at 7:40 so I basically need to be up and moving by 5:40 or so. I did those calculations and told myself when I was going to be getting up, and I could FEEL my body going through... something. Some adjustment of my cycles to get me to be tired in time to be up and moving then, these weird little waves of... levels of awakeness kind of cycling in me for a few minutes. As to people saying that "we evolved for the eight hours sleep and trying anything else is fighting against evolution" - no, no we didn't. Babies basically do polyphasic. It was considered completely normal in the pre-industrialized days to go to bed around sundown, then wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night and do some stuff by candlelight. It's only since the adaption of massive industrialized society that we've been expected to be up ALL DAY, EVERY DAY. (And hell, right now I'm visiting my mom. She basically does the Everyman schedule since she's retired - it's not formalized, her throughout-the-day naps are kind of randomized - but she's got one biggish core sleep at night, and several midday naps.)
skore 15y ago
To add my own anecdotal evidence: Yes, it works, but not in the way most would want it to work. And hell yes, it's a serious strain on your connection to reality and community (family, friends etc.). A couple of points from my own blog post on this ("Cheating the brother of death" http://sk.or.at/p6YBXf http://sk.or.at/p6YBXf ): - This is mostly about mental strength and perseverance, not so much about just following plan X and having more free time. - Having more free time is not as simple as you'd like it to be. You do have to have something to fill that time. And it has to something actually meaningful that you care about. - It is a good idea to have something to wake up to so you don't have to search for an answer to the "why do I have to get up now?" question when you're in it. - The hardest part is setting the right boundaries and anticipating how bad your mental situation will be - so you can deal with it appropriately even if your experiment means that you might not be in the right state of mind at that moment. Because you were before, when you started it and that's when you need to make the right plans.
beagle3 15y ago
From collecting others' anecdotal evidence, it seems that it technically works for some people (though not for a large percentage), but socially it works for no one. I wonder if there's a way to make this become socially acceptable. People always think these things take a lot of time, and sometime they do (e.g. phone use that would have been considered obnoxious 15 years ago is not impolite today. Today's obnoxious would have been casus belli 15 years ago). However, there are cases of nearly spontaneous social change - In many places in the world (a lot of countries in Europe, not sure about the US), chewing gum after a meal is considered an acceptable and healthy practice; This change was brought on within 3 years thanks to an ingenious Wrigley Orbit campaign.
cbs 15y ago
I thought this was worth putting somewhere people would actually see it. coldarchon 49 minutes ago | link [dead] after being 5 years in research for brain activity during sleep and being a natural lucid dreamer and short sleeper myself, I can only warn anyone about polyphasic sleep if you never had a tendency for this in your life before. It will literally turn off your Mojo ..
billpatrianakos 15y ago
Guys, there's a ton of evidence for polyphasic sleep just not working out. We're actually built for biphasic sleep though we can get away without a nap. As humans we are always trying to cheat nature but there are just some things we cannot control. I saw this on HN before and I think it's a great read if you have the time. It really goes in depth and debunks these sleep cycle myths. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
- zyfo 15y ago
  This again? As mentioned in those HN threads, it has been rebutted: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-polyphasic-sleep/ http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p... Fact is there's not a ton of evidence for it not working out. There has been virtually zero research on it, despite plenty of polyphasic people volunteering for research.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    Assuming you're right, the absence of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. The article that you say rebuts it, certainly argues for polyphasic working but that article isn't a good rebuttal at all. It actually mocks facts! The author rails against the anti-polyphasic article's author for saying that people who need an alarm clock are sleep deprived and that people shouldn't need one. Well, sorry to break to him but that's true. Any doctor or sleep expert will tell you the same thing. This rebuttal just sounds like typical Internet ranting against something a person disagrees with.
    - zyfo 15y ago
      Indeed it's not evidence to the contrary. How about leaving the question open until proper research has been done? The fact that there are anecdotal reports of people sleeping polyphasically should at the very least hint at the possibility of it working, rather than, as Wozniak takes it, dismiss it with what's in essence a very non-scientific approach. To me it seems obvious that Wozniak has a clear agenda with the article considering his general advocacy of free running sleep as the Only Path.
ryanewing 15y ago
If anyone is interested, Puredoxyk has been doing it for nearly seven years and even wrote a book about it: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-portal/ http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-portal/
hammock 15y ago
This is a post on a blog where the sidebar poll asks, "Do aliens exist?" (In case you were wondering, 63% said "Yes.")
- kapitalx 15y ago
  People have varying definitions of aliens. What you see in the movies vs. single/multi cell organisms?
- sp332 15y ago
  Isn't most of NASA acting like the answer is "yes"? All the research into earth-like exoplanets, and the expeditions to Mars to look for water etc?
kapitalx 15y ago
Since alot of us consider ourselves as having "Delayed sleep phase syndrome" I'll also share my sleep cycle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome I sleep at about 2-3am every night. On weekdays I'll sleep 5-6 hours. On saturday, around 10 hours, and on sunday around 8 hours. That averages to around 6 hours per night. I've been on this cycle for over 10 years, and even though I always feel bad about it and want to "fix" it, it works quite well.
- jrockway 15y ago
  What's the problem with this? You're still up at 9 after sleeping 6 hours, which is not too shabby. My natural cycle seems to end at around 6AM, and then I need 8 hours of sleep, so I'm not up until 2PM. This make social obligations a bit more difficult.
- th0ma5 15y ago
  I recently went through treatment (melatonin + lightbox) and I'd say I feel like a million bucks compared to when I basically just slept only when I was tired and woke up naturally. I'm not sure how long I can stay on the treatment, and if I'll snap back afterwards, but so far (about a month and a half into it) it's pretty great, and I feel way more rested and in sync with the world.
  - cowpewter 15y ago
    Can you elaborate on 'treatment'? I'm pretty sure I have delayed phase sleep syndrome or something like it. I also have fibromyalgia syndrome. I feel like I'm constantly fighting my body's natural cycle. When I had school/a job that required a specific schedule, I used an alarm clock to get up, and had constant fms flareups and frequent insomnia. When I switched to my current job (at a startup, and no longer required to stick to a specific schedule as long as I'm getting my stuff done), I ditched the alarm clock, and my fibromyalgia pain has vastly improved, just from not trying to force my sleep schedule. But the problem with that, is left to my body's own devices, I tend to want to be awake for about 20 hours, then sleep around 7. Then I start feeling guilty about coming in later and later every day, and there's still a limit to how many hours straight you can work and be productive, and even as flexible as my schedule is, there's still a bit of pressure to work 5 days a week for 8+ hours, not 4 days a week for 10+ hours. And coming into to work between 10pm-4am just never feels right. Once I get to the point where I'm waking up at 8-9pm, I usually have to waste a weekend forcing myself to stay up 24hrs or more to "flip" my schedule back to something reasonable. I hate doing that, because then my entire weekend is spent feeling like a zombie and then it's straight back to work again. So if you've got some more details on how melatonin and a lightbox worked for you, even just a blog post you could point me at, I'd be really appreciative.
adrianpike 15y ago
Another round of anecdotal evidence: I did the everyman for about three months when my startup was doing a big pivot a few years ago. It took about two weeks of being completely blurry to transition, but once I did, it was very effective. I would wake up ~7AM and get to work, have my first ~1/2 hour nap at 11AM, next nap at 6 in the afternoon, and then a nap at midnight. I'd be totally awake and aware until ~3:30AM, and then I'd go to sleep. After the transition, once my body got settled, I'd usually be awake a few minutes before I set an alarm, and my caffeine needed to stay alert went way down. Like most of the other anecdotal evidence, I stopped for social reasons - my girlfriend wasn't a fan of me coming home from work at 6, immediately snagging a nap, and then be up rattling away until 3 in the morning every day. Also I wasn't able to fill the day - I'd be burnt out on work after 12+ hours of grinding away on some Rails code, and have to do something else, so I'd either tinker in the garage, cruise the web, or play games. Once I started up with the video games, I decided it wasn't worth it, and flipped back to a "normal" sleep cycle. It took ~2 nights to go back to a normal cycle.
knodi 15y ago
I tried überman couple months back. I started of by not sleeping for 2 days so when I do start to sleep I go right in to rem sleep. It was really rough for the first week and then I started getting the hang of it 30mins of sleep every 4 hours. The problem was that around the 3 hour 30 mins mark my brain would just shutdown, I couldn't think straight until I got that 30mins of nap in. If I was driving it become really dangerous. I did it for about 3 week and gave up on it as it become really hard to keep social interaction on this sleep cycle. I also had to stop drinking alcohol and coffee just to maintain this sleep cycle and avoid high in suger food before my naps as they always led to be not geting into rem sleep right away. All in all I will not be doing this again, I'm happy with my 7 hours a night of sleep.
jrockway 15y ago
I was won over by a recent article that said 7.5 hours of sleep wasn't as good as 8 hours, but 8.5 hours was. I started setting my alarm clock for 8 hours from when I go to bed, and I try not to get up until the alarm goes off. It has gone really well; I never feel tired and I can easily stay up for 24 hours if I need to. If you're permanently "maxed out" on sleep debt, you can function, but you can't take on any more debt. If you're always all paid up, then you can function the one time when you need to sleep for three hours and then be up for an entire day. That's my theory, anyway. (One key to this is not going to bed too early. Sometimes I'm tired in the middle of the day, and then sleep from, say, 6 to midnight. This fucks everything up.)
JohnQPasserby 15y ago
I would not be surprised to find posts about healing crystals on that site.
furyg3 15y ago
I really think people need to change their perspective on sleep. People wake up, do thing A,B,C,D,E ... "shit... I really wanted to do F-J today too, but I have to sleep!" Sleep is not the enemy. Sleep is fantastic. I'm no expert on sleep in general, but a good nights sleep makes me feel great upon waking up (usually for the rest of the day). I can remember things from the day before with much more clarity and recall, giving me a tremendous edge over those who didn't. Plus, I'm pretty sure it feels fantastic nearly the whole time I'm doing it... I just happen to be unconscious for that part. :) It certainly must be better than a good deal of the things I do while I'm awake. A close relative of mine is on the uberman cycle. He's narcoleptic. He sleeps nearly instantly upon his head hitting the pillow (seconds, not minutes) and wakes up 15-20 minutes later, unable to continue sleeping. It's literally a nightmare, not only because the world is 'monophasic', but also because he's in a fog, can't focus/falls asleep when not moving (e.g. driving a car), and has a hard time distinguishing reality from dreams (since they all run together). Thanks, but I'd rather continue hacking the other parts of my lifestyle to make room for more fulfilling activities, like sleep.
- vorg 15y ago
  The uberman (or everyman) schedule would be convenient to go on if you lived in a Middle Eastern country. You could just coordinate your 5 sleep times with the 5 daily minaret calls, and use a prayer mat to sleep on so you could blend in.
- skore 15y ago
  To be fair - that's a problem of narcolepsy (if he indeed has that) and not polyphasic sleep. I have not tried uberman yet, but from my own experiences with everyman and from what I have read of others, it can actually help give you focus and clarity. Whatever floats your boat, I guess?
jsilence 15y ago
The obligatory xkcd reference: https://www.xkcd.com/320/ https://www.xkcd.com/320/
forkrulassail 15y ago
I've done Uberman for 2 months at a time. I've found I can be highly effective in certain areas - like coding. However, the brain needs quite a bit of sleep for memories to stay longer term - so this isn't ideal for students or study. Another caveat is that your metabolism increases but you usually overcompensate consumption-wise. A lot of people that persisted with this for longer periods of time, gain quite a bit of weight - so if you're ready for that. Good luck with surviving the first two hell weeks. :)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
polychrome 15y ago
Can we add something next to article denoting whether it comes from a scientific peer reviewed source or just a blog?
Cl4rity 15y ago
Biphasic and/or polyphasic sleep doesn't seem to work...even on monks who have been doing it for several years: http://mindhacks.com/2011/11/17/the-dreams-and-hallucinations-of-cloistered-monks/ http://mindhacks.com/2011/11/17/the-dreams-and-hallucination...
jacques_chester 15y ago
The simplest evidence against the thesis that all you really "need" is REM sleep is obstructive sleep apnoea. I have OSA. I had it for years before it was diagnosed. I would go to bed and dream more or less non-stop for 10, 12, 14, 16 hours. All the REM sleep a man could ever want. And I was still tired as buggery. My idea of a good night's sleep is the deep dreamless kind. Not to mention sleep's centrality to recovery from physical exercise.
echaozh 15y ago
Stop talking about "natural" sleep cycles or "natural" diet. Stop talking about how the homo sapiens evolved into sleeping or eating like this. I personally think our unwillingness to move away from our evolved instincts is the reason why we're not a more advanced species. Sleeping at night is obviously a result of lack of light during the night. I don't believing sitting/lying consciously will be that different from sleeping unconsciously as to providing rest for our bodies. It's just a learned habit and we should be able to get over it. Slavery and dictatorship is more natural, see how monkeys or any other animals group their society? Why don't we give up democracy for something more natural?

74 points by googletron 15y ago

Everything I hear about these sleeping patterns is anecdotal. As far as I'm aware there haven't been any serious studies done of people on these sleeping patterns, and most especially on the health effects (if any) it causes.

Killah911 15y ago
I agree, these so called "models" in the article are based on anecdotal evidence. However, I know that there are a number of sleep studies/experiments out there... From what I've read, only 8-hour or nap in the afternoon sleep patterns were scientifically proven to be adequate.

gurkendoktor 15y ago

I have tried überman for fun two years ago, mostly to practice napping. It did not work at all, people on IRC didn't have success either, but hearsay and wishful thinking were plenty. It's crazy that Steve Pavlina's series of blog entries is still the #1 reference even though he turned his back on it afterwards. That said, sleeping less at night and taking a deep nap or two after lunch is awesome. I wish it would've been socially acceptable in my German university. There is a lot of progress to be made (flux et al) without drastic and dangerous sleep cycles.

Afton 15y ago
I'm deeply skeptical about these massively shortened sleep cycles too, but to be fair, Steve Pavlina gave it up for the same reason Dyson did; it's too hard to interact with the 'awake-during-the-day, asleep-during-the-night' crowd, not because "it didn't work" for him.
- stinkytaco 15y ago
  I never bought that excuse. There's zero scientific evidence for breaking a habit humans and our ancestors have been doing for literally millions of years. "Social interaction was hard" seems like a face saving excuse for "I wasn't able to beat evolution."
  - gwern 15y ago
    FWIW, evolution actually is telling us to do biphasic, not the current monophasic. We slept biphasic right up until a century or three ago, and the literature documents this pretty well. Let's see, to pull my canned refs from my melatonin article (http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin); we have Stampi in _Why We Nap_: > “It is worth mentioning that anthropological studies conducted in tribes active at night show that human sleep can be highly polyphasic in certain cultures. Although they have different cultures and ways of life, both the Temiars of Indonesia and the Ibans of Sarawak have similar polyphasic sleep-wake behaviors (Petre-Quadens, 1983). Their average nocturnal sleep episode duration ranges between 4 and 6 hr, and nighttime activities (fishing, cooking, watching over the fire, rituals) at any one time involve approximately 25% of the adult members. Daytime napping is very common in both tribes: at almost any time of day, about 10% of the adult members are asleep. Whatever the cause of these polyphasic sleep patterns,whether the expression of an inborn ultradian rest-activity tendency or other factors, such populations exhibit extremely flexible and fragmentary sleep-wake cycles. The minimal contact with modern civilization could be one of the reasons for the preservation of this possibly ancestral sleep pattern.” There's http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/10/what_is_a_natural_sleep_patter.php http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2006/10/what_is_a_natural_slee... And then, for all the European examples, see http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ah000343.html http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ah00034... The author apparently has a book on the same topic which I really ought to read, but the preceding is the article mentioned on his profile-page: > _At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past_ (W.W. Norton, 2005), a sweeping study of nocturnal culture before the Industrial Revolution, which garnered four prizes, including an award given by the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta for the “best subsequent book” in all fields of history. His article in 2001, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” in the American Historical Review, earned two awards, including the James L. Clifford Prize given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
philwelch 15y ago
I can't believe anyone takes Pavlina seriously. He's just more evidence that smart people can be marks, too. His wife and business partner was a telephone psychic, of all things.

coldarchon 15y ago

after being 5 years in research for brain activity during sleep and being a natural lucid dreamer and short sleeper myself, I can only warn anyone about polyphasic sleep if you never had a tendency for this in your life before. It will literally turn off your Mojo ..

lee 15y ago

The fact that these sleep cycles have been used by "bloggers" for a few months and that they are still "healthy" does not give me the warm fuzzies. It would take a much longer experimental time frame, under more rigorous scientific study, to convince me that any of these alternatives are safe and worthwhile.

Karunamon 15y ago
I can almost detect the disdain in your "voice" as you use the word "bloggers". Was there something wrong with the article?
- fullmoon 15y ago
  It wasn't published in Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine. Otherwise, good article.
- jerf 15y ago
  The fact that if you travel further down the blog stream for almost any of these practitioners, they always give it up for not working. (Giving it up because "everybody else is on a monophasic sleep cycle" is just a social-face-saving excuse. If it worked, you wouldn't give it up. You've got six extra hours a day to make up whatever the problem is!) The evidence that I've seen suggests that alternative sleep cycles are basically persistent urban legend more than anything else. And yes, failing to mention the little tiny detail of it not working at this date is a reason to be "disdainful" of an article like this; it encourages one to wreck weeks or months of ones life on something that we pretty much know doesn't work. Negligent at best, evil at worst. (Excepting "siesta", which there is some evidence for, but isn't the promised miracle, either.)
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    I agree with you but youre going to upset a lot of people with that. They're going to demand you show them scientific studies and hard proof. Even if you did it wouldn't be good enough for them. This belief in polyphasic sleep reminds me of a guy I used to know who was a huge conspiracy theorist. He used to tell me that you could build a perpetual motion machine and generate unlimited energy from home and that he was doing it. I tried to reason with him and let him know that stuff was bunk but he never changed his mind despite his machine not working (for which he made some dumb face-saving excuse about not using the right material or something). No matter how much evidence and reasoning you present someone with beliefs like this they refuse to change their mind. The absence of evidence is not evidence for something. We know polyphasic doesn't work not only because of all the failed attempts and what you talked about in your comment but also because of what we know about how the brain and human body works.

ry0ohki 15y ago

Even if one of these other cycles is incredibly effective, they seem very hard to use and be social. I don't know what I'd do with my extra time at 4am when no one else is awake (on a consistent basis).

fullmoon 15y ago
Reading a book, playing a game, Medidate? It is a very nice time to be awake
sp332 15y ago
Talk to people in a different time zone :)

jmilloy 15y ago

http://www.amazon.com/Why-we-nap-STAMPI/dp/0817634622 http://www.amazon.com/Why-we-nap-STAMPI/dp/0817634622 I always link to this source; in a subject full of anecdotes and misinformation, this book is essential for providing substantial and concrete scientific results.

botker 15y ago
I was prepared to buy until the page loaded. Yikes. 1 used from $314.52 I hope there are some other publications on the subject of greater or equal quality that have yet to go out of print.
- jmilloy 15y ago
  You can easily find a pdf to download, if you're comfortable with that.
- skore 15y ago
  The comments here[1] suggest ahem alternatives. [1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R3W1ZLVUQ1N867/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0817634622&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode=#wasThisHelpful http://www.amazon.com/review/R3W1ZLVUQ1N867/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...
- gregwebs 15y ago
  get it from your library. But actually, if you read it you the #1 point is simply that sleep patterns are not a well understood concept - there is little evidence to say that any pattern is a good or bad concept. The author sleeps for 6 hours at night and takes a siesta.
mashmac2 15y ago
An excellent read, yes. It includes a couple of chapters specifically dedicated to polyphasic, and the entire book focuses on different sleep cycles. For those still in/at college in the US, interlibrary loan has several copies available around the country. That's how I got to read a copy.

egypturnash 15y ago

I tried uberman a while back. It was a royal pain to deal with the intermittent day job I had at the time, and it really didn't work well with my home life either - I just didn't have a comfortable place to sit around and slack off for some of the awake cycles. I was definitely adapting to it after a couple weeks but the only place to lay around lazily in an underheated apartment was in a bed full of sleeping boyfriend, which was a pretty powerful argument for just curling up and going to sleep! Now that I have a very inviting living room in my home wih a comfy couch, I might try it again once spring hits. Or maybe the Everyman schedule. The big problem, IMHO, is interfacing with the entire rest of the Western world, which is on the one big sleep schedule.

egypturnash 15y ago
More thoughts. One commenter here snarked about this article for linking to Steve Pavlina's writings on polyphasic sleep, which he gave up after about six months. This is an old article so I kinda feel that's okay, it's from around 2010 - though Pavlina did it in '06 or so. That said I was thusly looking at Pavlina's blog. And at the entry where he looks back on it, one year later (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-one-year-later/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-on...) and talks about how it's transformed his sleeping, even when he's gone back to "normal" sleep. And I think my month or so doing polyphasic left me with a little something, too: I now have a very well-tuned alarm clock in my brain. I don't have to get up for a day job any more, so I don't have to use it very often - but as I'm going to sleep, I can tell myself "I'm getting up at 7:00" or whatever, and I will be awake when the alarm goes off. (I still set alarms, though, because they give me that extra boost of HEY YOU HAVE A REASON TO GET UP!) In fact, I'm taking a plane trip tomorrow. Flight's at 7:40 so I basically need to be up and moving by 5:40 or so. I did those calculations and told myself when I was going to be getting up, and I could FEEL my body going through... something. Some adjustment of my cycles to get me to be tired in time to be up and moving then, these weird little waves of... levels of awakeness kind of cycling in me for a few minutes. As to people saying that "we evolved for the eight hours sleep and trying anything else is fighting against evolution" - no, no we didn't. Babies basically do polyphasic. It was considered completely normal in the pre-industrialized days to go to bed around sundown, then wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night and do some stuff by candlelight. It's only since the adaption of massive industrialized society that we've been expected to be up ALL DAY, EVERY DAY. (And hell, right now I'm visiting my mom. She basically does the Everyman schedule since she's retired - it's not formalized, her throughout-the-day naps are kind of randomized - but she's got one biggish core sleep at night, and several midday naps.)

skore 15y ago

To add my own anecdotal evidence: Yes, it works, but not in the way most would want it to work. And hell yes, it's a serious strain on your connection to reality and community (family, friends etc.). A couple of points from my own blog post on this ("Cheating the brother of death" http://sk.or.at/p6YBXf http://sk.or.at/p6YBXf ): - This is mostly about mental strength and perseverance, not so much about just following plan X and having more free time. - Having more free time is not as simple as you'd like it to be. You do have to have something to fill that time. And it has to something actually meaningful that you care about. - It is a good idea to have something to wake up to so you don't have to search for an answer to the "why do I have to get up now?" question when you're in it. - The hardest part is setting the right boundaries and anticipating how bad your mental situation will be - so you can deal with it appropriately even if your experiment means that you might not be in the right state of mind at that moment. Because you were before, when you started it and that's when you need to make the right plans.

beagle3 15y ago

From collecting others' anecdotal evidence, it seems that it technically works for some people (though not for a large percentage), but socially it works for no one. I wonder if there's a way to make this become socially acceptable. People always think these things take a lot of time, and sometime they do (e.g. phone use that would have been considered obnoxious 15 years ago is not impolite today. Today's obnoxious would have been casus belli 15 years ago). However, there are cases of nearly spontaneous social change - In many places in the world (a lot of countries in Europe, not sure about the US), chewing gum after a meal is considered an acceptable and healthy practice; This change was brought on within 3 years thanks to an ingenious Wrigley Orbit campaign.

cbs 15y ago

I thought this was worth putting somewhere people would actually see it. coldarchon 49 minutes ago | link [dead] after being 5 years in research for brain activity during sleep and being a natural lucid dreamer and short sleeper myself, I can only warn anyone about polyphasic sleep if you never had a tendency for this in your life before. It will literally turn off your Mojo ..

billpatrianakos 15y ago

Guys, there's a ton of evidence for polyphasic sleep just not working out. We're actually built for biphasic sleep though we can get away without a nap. As humans we are always trying to cheat nature but there are just some things we cannot control. I saw this on HN before and I think it's a great read if you have the time. It really goes in depth and debunks these sleep cycle myths. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

zyfo 15y ago
This again? As mentioned in those HN threads, it has been rebutted: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-polyphasic-sleep/ http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p... Fact is there's not a ton of evidence for it not working out. There has been virtually zero research on it, despite plenty of polyphasic people volunteering for research.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Assuming you're right, the absence of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. The article that you say rebuts it, certainly argues for polyphasic working but that article isn't a good rebuttal at all. It actually mocks facts! The author rails against the anti-polyphasic article's author for saying that people who need an alarm clock are sleep deprived and that people shouldn't need one. Well, sorry to break to him but that's true. Any doctor or sleep expert will tell you the same thing. This rebuttal just sounds like typical Internet ranting against something a person disagrees with.
  - zyfo 15y ago
    Indeed it's not evidence to the contrary. How about leaving the question open until proper research has been done? The fact that there are anecdotal reports of people sleeping polyphasically should at the very least hint at the possibility of it working, rather than, as Wozniak takes it, dismiss it with what's in essence a very non-scientific approach. To me it seems obvious that Wozniak has a clear agenda with the article considering his general advocacy of free running sleep as the Only Path.

ryanewing 15y ago

If anyone is interested, Puredoxyk has been doing it for nearly seven years and even wrote a book about it: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-portal/ http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-portal/

hammock 15y ago

This is a post on a blog where the sidebar poll asks, "Do aliens exist?" (In case you were wondering, 63% said "Yes.")

kapitalx 15y ago
People have varying definitions of aliens. What you see in the movies vs. single/multi cell organisms?
sp332 15y ago
Isn't most of NASA acting like the answer is "yes"? All the research into earth-like exoplanets, and the expeditions to Mars to look for water etc?

kapitalx 15y ago

Since alot of us consider ourselves as having "Delayed sleep phase syndrome" I'll also share my sleep cycle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome I sleep at about 2-3am every night. On weekdays I'll sleep 5-6 hours. On saturday, around 10 hours, and on sunday around 8 hours. That averages to around 6 hours per night. I've been on this cycle for over 10 years, and even though I always feel bad about it and want to "fix" it, it works quite well.

jrockway 15y ago
What's the problem with this? You're still up at 9 after sleeping 6 hours, which is not too shabby. My natural cycle seems to end at around 6AM, and then I need 8 hours of sleep, so I'm not up until 2PM. This make social obligations a bit more difficult.
th0ma5 15y ago
I recently went through treatment (melatonin + lightbox) and I'd say I feel like a million bucks compared to when I basically just slept only when I was tired and woke up naturally. I'm not sure how long I can stay on the treatment, and if I'll snap back afterwards, but so far (about a month and a half into it) it's pretty great, and I feel way more rested and in sync with the world.
- cowpewter 15y ago
  Can you elaborate on 'treatment'? I'm pretty sure I have delayed phase sleep syndrome or something like it. I also have fibromyalgia syndrome. I feel like I'm constantly fighting my body's natural cycle. When I had school/a job that required a specific schedule, I used an alarm clock to get up, and had constant fms flareups and frequent insomnia. When I switched to my current job (at a startup, and no longer required to stick to a specific schedule as long as I'm getting my stuff done), I ditched the alarm clock, and my fibromyalgia pain has vastly improved, just from not trying to force my sleep schedule. But the problem with that, is left to my body's own devices, I tend to want to be awake for about 20 hours, then sleep around 7. Then I start feeling guilty about coming in later and later every day, and there's still a limit to how many hours straight you can work and be productive, and even as flexible as my schedule is, there's still a bit of pressure to work 5 days a week for 8+ hours, not 4 days a week for 10+ hours. And coming into to work between 10pm-4am just never feels right. Once I get to the point where I'm waking up at 8-9pm, I usually have to waste a weekend forcing myself to stay up 24hrs or more to "flip" my schedule back to something reasonable. I hate doing that, because then my entire weekend is spent feeling like a zombie and then it's straight back to work again. So if you've got some more details on how melatonin and a lightbox worked for you, even just a blog post you could point me at, I'd be really appreciative.

adrianpike 15y ago

Another round of anecdotal evidence: I did the everyman for about three months when my startup was doing a big pivot a few years ago. It took about two weeks of being completely blurry to transition, but once I did, it was very effective. I would wake up ~7AM and get to work, have my first ~1/2 hour nap at 11AM, next nap at 6 in the afternoon, and then a nap at midnight. I'd be totally awake and aware until ~3:30AM, and then I'd go to sleep. After the transition, once my body got settled, I'd usually be awake a few minutes before I set an alarm, and my caffeine needed to stay alert went way down. Like most of the other anecdotal evidence, I stopped for social reasons - my girlfriend wasn't a fan of me coming home from work at 6, immediately snagging a nap, and then be up rattling away until 3 in the morning every day. Also I wasn't able to fill the day - I'd be burnt out on work after 12+ hours of grinding away on some Rails code, and have to do something else, so I'd either tinker in the garage, cruise the web, or play games. Once I started up with the video games, I decided it wasn't worth it, and flipped back to a "normal" sleep cycle. It took ~2 nights to go back to a normal cycle.

knodi 15y ago

I tried überman couple months back. I started of by not sleeping for 2 days so when I do start to sleep I go right in to rem sleep. It was really rough for the first week and then I started getting the hang of it 30mins of sleep every 4 hours. The problem was that around the 3 hour 30 mins mark my brain would just shutdown, I couldn't think straight until I got that 30mins of nap in. If I was driving it become really dangerous. I did it for about 3 week and gave up on it as it become really hard to keep social interaction on this sleep cycle. I also had to stop drinking alcohol and coffee just to maintain this sleep cycle and avoid high in suger food before my naps as they always led to be not geting into rem sleep right away. All in all I will not be doing this again, I'm happy with my 7 hours a night of sleep.

jrockway 15y ago

I was won over by a recent article that said 7.5 hours of sleep wasn't as good as 8 hours, but 8.5 hours was. I started setting my alarm clock for 8 hours from when I go to bed, and I try not to get up until the alarm goes off. It has gone really well; I never feel tired and I can easily stay up for 24 hours if I need to. If you're permanently "maxed out" on sleep debt, you can function, but you can't take on any more debt. If you're always all paid up, then you can function the one time when you need to sleep for three hours and then be up for an entire day. That's my theory, anyway. (One key to this is not going to bed too early. Sometimes I'm tired in the middle of the day, and then sleep from, say, 6 to midnight. This fucks everything up.)

JohnQPasserby 15y ago

I would not be surprised to find posts about healing crystals on that site.

furyg3 15y ago

I really think people need to change their perspective on sleep. People wake up, do thing A,B,C,D,E ... "shit... I really wanted to do F-J today too, but I have to sleep!" Sleep is not the enemy. Sleep is fantastic. I'm no expert on sleep in general, but a good nights sleep makes me feel great upon waking up (usually for the rest of the day). I can remember things from the day before with much more clarity and recall, giving me a tremendous edge over those who didn't. Plus, I'm pretty sure it feels fantastic nearly the whole time I'm doing it... I just happen to be unconscious for that part. :) It certainly must be better than a good deal of the things I do while I'm awake. A close relative of mine is on the uberman cycle. He's narcoleptic. He sleeps nearly instantly upon his head hitting the pillow (seconds, not minutes) and wakes up 15-20 minutes later, unable to continue sleeping. It's literally a nightmare, not only because the world is 'monophasic', but also because he's in a fog, can't focus/falls asleep when not moving (e.g. driving a car), and has a hard time distinguishing reality from dreams (since they all run together). Thanks, but I'd rather continue hacking the other parts of my lifestyle to make room for more fulfilling activities, like sleep.

vorg 15y ago
The uberman (or everyman) schedule would be convenient to go on if you lived in a Middle Eastern country. You could just coordinate your 5 sleep times with the 5 daily minaret calls, and use a prayer mat to sleep on so you could blend in.
skore 15y ago
To be fair - that's a problem of narcolepsy (if he indeed has that) and not polyphasic sleep. I have not tried uberman yet, but from my own experiences with everyman and from what I have read of others, it can actually help give you focus and clarity. Whatever floats your boat, I guess?

jsilence 15y ago

The obligatory xkcd reference: https://www.xkcd.com/320/ https://www.xkcd.com/320/

forkrulassail 15y ago

I've done Uberman for 2 months at a time. I've found I can be highly effective in certain areas - like coding. However, the brain needs quite a bit of sleep for memories to stay longer term - so this isn't ideal for students or study. Another caveat is that your metabolism increases but you usually overcompensate consumption-wise. A lot of people that persisted with this for longer periods of time, gain quite a bit of weight - so if you're ready for that. Good luck with surviving the first two hell weeks. :)

deleted 15y ago

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polychrome 15y ago

Can we add something next to article denoting whether it comes from a scientific peer reviewed source or just a blog?

Cl4rity 15y ago

Biphasic and/or polyphasic sleep doesn't seem to work...even on monks who have been doing it for several years: http://mindhacks.com/2011/11/17/the-dreams-and-hallucinations-of-cloistered-monks/ http://mindhacks.com/2011/11/17/the-dreams-and-hallucination...

jacques_chester 15y ago

The simplest evidence against the thesis that all you really "need" is REM sleep is obstructive sleep apnoea. I have OSA. I had it for years before it was diagnosed. I would go to bed and dream more or less non-stop for 10, 12, 14, 16 hours. All the REM sleep a man could ever want. And I was still tired as buggery. My idea of a good night's sleep is the deep dreamless kind. Not to mention sleep's centrality to recovery from physical exercise.

echaozh 15y ago

Stop talking about "natural" sleep cycles or "natural" diet. Stop talking about how the homo sapiens evolved into sleeping or eating like this. I personally think our unwillingness to move away from our evolved instincts is the reason why we're not a more advanced species. Sleeping at night is obviously a result of lack of light during the night. I don't believing sitting/lying consciously will be that different from sleeping unconsciously as to providing rest for our bodies. It's just a learned habit and we should be able to get over it. Slavery and dictatorship is more natural, see how monkeys or any other animals group their society? Why don't we give up democracy for something more natural?