Since 2015, I've been experimenting with polyphasic sleep— and since early 2017, I've only been sleeping polyphasically.
My first taste of polyphasic sleep was the Uberman, in the summer of 2015. Uberman has a total of two hours of sleep every day— one 20-minute nap every four hours. Let me tell you— it was brutal. I started it because I wanted more free time to play games and work on projects, and that's what I got.
For the first few days, adaptation was painful, but bearable. I was able to get so much done, have fun, and the days felt endless. It was like a dream, almost. The days blended together, each one meshing and molding with the next. It was surreal, and I loved it. Sure, there were pangs of tiredness sometimes— but they weren't anything I couldn't bear.
By week two, the pangs were bad. I started to oversleep consistently— my 07:00 nap always became a three-hour nap— and I was more tired at night, unbearably so. Instead of getting things done while the world was quiet and asleep, I was useless. I was too tired to do anything, but not tired enough to sleep. Those nights, I watched reruns of old TV. I still remember those Golden Girls and Columbo episodes, as if they'd been burned into my retinas.
By week three, I was done. I made my decision partly because the
oversleeping (07:00 — 10:00), but mainly because of the
loneliness. It felt like I only saw people for a very small part
of the day. Most of the time, everything was quiet and I was left
alone, tired and watching shitty TV.
Two years later, I decided to give polyphasic another shot. Instead of going on the extreme “hacker” side of the spectrum, I decided to go for a happy medium— something between “natural” and “hack.” That was the Everyman. Sleeping for 3.5 hours, awake for 3 hours, asleep for a 30-minute nap— then, toward the early evening, another 30-minute nap. A total of ~5 hours a day,but pretty-well spread out.
This one was actually really easy to adapt to— it was effortless and painless, unlike the Uberman. I slipped right into it with ease. I was awake more, slept less, yet, surprisingly enough, I felt more awake and alert than I ever did on monophasic.
In fact, I loved it so much, I kept it up for seven months— up until last month (2018-01). I started getting sloppy with the schedule, and my early-morning 30-minute nap became a three-hour core. My single-core Everyman cycle accidentally became biphasic! I suddenly realized that trying to stick to the Everyman might fighting human nature, or at the very least, my own.
I stopped fighting it.
I slipped seamlessly into the biphasic
schedule, and kept it up for a few months. The schedule had two core
sleeps (22:00 — 01:30, 04:30 — 07:00) with a short nap
in the afternoon (16:30 — 16:50). A total of 6.3 hours.
I felt really good on this cycle.
Ultimately, though, I broke off from it in late 2018. My everyday schedule just started becoming a little too unpredictable. I started missing my naps, and started regularly getting home around midnight or one. Yea, that was incompatible with my cycle.
But now it's a new day! Things've settled down, and I'm opting for a
slightly tweaked biphasic (23:30 — 03:00, 06:00 — 08:30).
I shifted everything forward about an hour and ½, and intend to nap
in the afternoons whenever I can.
Will this work out? I dunno, but I'll keep this page updated!
lmao it really didn't!
IIRC, I kept it up for a few days before not caring anymore.
I'm trying again, though. I think it's worth noting that when I slip into monophasic, it's really unhealthy monophasic. Like six-hours-of-sleep literally-no-consistency-at-all monophasic. So a perfectly valid explanation as to why I feel better on polyphasic might be that it's better than shitty monophasic. Is it better than good monophasic? I do believe it might be more natural, but I can't necessarily vauch for whether or not it's better.
Anyway, polyphasic cycles are the only mostly-healthy to unhealthy-but-consistent sleep-cycles I can get any motivation to be consistent at. So here's to another round of biphasic!