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Polyphasic Sleep

Saw this interesting post about polyphasic sleep on stevepavlina.com. The idea of sleeping for 30 minutes every 4 hours, which in effect means a total sleep time of 3 hours, seems appealing to me (It is another matter that I am sleeping around 7 hours per day right now, and cannot get to reduce it :( ).

A couple of nice things about this schedule, once a person adapts to it, is :

  • More work/activities can be done during the night time, what with the calm and serene environment

  • Could talk to US counterparts at their day time, or attend late-in-the night conference calls without any irritations.

  • Combined with Pranayama/Meditation and exercise (all of which I should be doing, but am not), this would definitely give better energy levels, once the initial pains associated with this schedule has gone and the system has become a habit.

A lot of people have tried this technique and failed, mainly, it seems, due to the inability to maintain the sleep routine. Read more about it from people who have tried it, here.

Comments closed — Trackbacks closed RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Sunday, October 23, 2005, at 9:14 am by abhinav. Filed in Uncategorized.

7 Comments

  1. yodha

    I sleep 8+ hours/day!

    Posted on 24-Oct-05 at 9:50 am | Permalink
  2. yodha

    Anyway, I strongly believe that the body needs atleast one period of long rest. Not short bursts.

    Posted on 24-Oct-05 at 9:51 am | Permalink
  3. abhinav

    We’re in the same boat :) Though, I somehow feel that this can be easily reduced to 6 hours without affecting the efficiency and productivity of the person.

    Posted on 24-Oct-05 at 6:34 pm | Permalink
  4. yodha

    Yup. This year I’ve been able to reduce it to 6-7 hours. Not many problems.

    Posted on 24-Oct-05 at 6:38 pm | Permalink
  5. abhinav

    Anyway, I strongly believe that the body needs atleast one period of long rest. Not short bursts.

    Yep, this is what conventional thinking indicates. The idea of sleeping for 30 minutes, even if done 6 times a day, is a bit dicey - people need 30 minutes to get to sleeping !

    Still, meditation and pranayama can reduce the sleeping time even while ensuring that the body gets enough relaxation and restoration of energy. Siddha Samadhi Yoga (http://www.ssy.org) is one such course which I did and it was great.

    Posted on 24-Oct-05 at 6:42 pm | Permalink
  6. yodha

    Anything of those will help as long as the sleep involves going through all its stages (REM etc). If the person wakes up before he reaches one of the deep stages, his mind and body wouldn’t have refreshed and the sleep would have been futile.

    Posted on 24-Oct-05 at 6:48 pm | Permalink
  7. abhinav

    Well .. Steve seems to have adjusted to it, atleast for the short term ..

    http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep-log-day-7/

    Posted on 31-Oct-05 at 3:33 pm | Permalink