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Sleep is for babies
Captain Awesomeftw
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Registered User regular
I just read The Game, and this whole concept of the uberman sleep regimen, I must say, looks pretty appealing. Has anyone experimented with alternative sleeping patterns? Are they something that's really feasible to implement in a normal lifestyle? What different schedules are there, and which work the best? And is it something that's healthy to do?
Jesus I'm full of questions today.
Jesus I'm full of questions today.
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I've tried the 20 minute and 30 minute power naps throughout the day/night never giving my body a proper "long" sleep. It works really well for short periods of time. A few days for example. For me at least, it starts to catch up with me after that and I really need a good rest.
I've tried the "sleep whenever you can" method. You nap when you feel like it, you get up when you feel rested, you don't pay any attention to length of sleep or time of day. I ended up walking around like a Zombie, never waking up totally.
For me, work controls my sleep. I don't really get much choice. If your job/lifestyle allows you to try out new sleeping patterns, I would give it a shot. You might find something that works well for you.
I'm under the impression that it doesn't work too well even if you stick to it...
I found this one when I had to work intermittant graves, and it seemed simpler than losing my sanity. It also cured my insomnia temporarily, because I was always tired when I went to bed.
But the thing about Winston Churchill is that he is sometimes - sometimes - really full of shit.
I used to do mediation retreats where you would only sleep 5 or six hours a night.
You definately weren't at your peak, but then again, meditating for seven or eight hours per day calls on self discipline more than mental dexterity anyway.
But yeah, 4 hours is probably not doable, even for the demi-god Churchill. That may have been a slight exaggeration (but only for dramatic effect). The lowest amount of sleep I've heard healthy adults can function with is 5 hours, but even that isn't really recommended. I haven't seen much credible info on alternative sleep schedules that shows they are any better than a normal sleep schedule, so I personally don't see the point unless you're working graveyard shifts or something. For most people, they're not going to do anything productive for that eight hours at night anyway, so why not get a good night's sleep in?
The main thing to keep in mind is that, whatever your sleep schedule, you need to make sure you're getting a good amount of REM sleep in (about 2 hours a day). And considering that REM sleep usually comes at the end of a normal sleep cycle (and lasts for longer amounts of time the longer you stay asleep), this is tough to do if your sleeping is very irregular. It isn't known why REM is so important exactly, but most would agree that it does have some important function, and you need plenty of it to function well.
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My guess is this probably wouldn't work all that well, but I do see where they are coming from. If you're tired when you're driving and fighting to keep your eyes open, you should take a 30 minute nap or whatever and continue on - the little bit of sleep will leave you feeling refreshed and you can keep going.
However, you are not receiving the full benefits of sleep; your brain isn't completing the whole chemical process. Long term, I don't see this going too great. A day or two because you didn't study enough for finals, ok. But even then I don't think it'd work that great.
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Actually, this does explain his fondness for big plans also.
Yeah we and the Brits handed those things out like candy in WWII.
That being said, there's a reason that the sleep schedule for many animals is based on being asleep for a long period of time, and if you've ever seen charts showing how the sleep cycle works, you'll see that short-changing your sleep cycle can make you seriously tired.
I've got a guy at work that unconsciously brags about sleeping only 5 hours a day (unconsciously because he'll bring it up whenever anyone talks about sleeping 8 hrs, as if he's normal). He claims he's fine, and doesn't drink coffee or anything... but he falls asleep all the damn time. I had to train the guy and I couldn't talk for more than 10 minutes without him nodding off -- with me sitting there talking to him. He nods off at meetings, as well, and the only way he's able to get any work done is by switching back and forth between actual work and online poker
Anyway, regarding the polyphasic stuff, I've read about it occasionally over the past 6-7 years, and it seems to go in cycles of people saying it's great followed by people saying they tried it for a few months but never felt rested. See, REM sleep is the most important sleep for your mental acuity and memory. Missing REM sleep is what turns people into "zombies" where they're slow to react to conversation and are unable to really process information. However, sleep also allows your muscles to relax and rebuild, your tendons to do their thing, immune system does its job, whatever. It's why after a full day of physical activity you feel exhausted and need to sleep, and sleep a very long time and wake up a little achey. Without that sleep, your body would not have a chance to recuperate.
So it's theoretically fine if you don't really do much physical activity, but that doesn't jive with the idea of it being an "uber-man" thing.
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Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths
Sorry for the pre-liming but I actually did a metric ton of research about this about 3 weeks ago and pretty much found that everything on the internet about it is opinion. This was the only instance of factual data I found.
The main argument out there for why Polyphasic Sleep works is that your body over time learns to compress the sleep cycle and goes into REM sleep immediately. Now in cases of serious sleep deprivation your body will go into REM very quickly, but as for compressing the entire sleep cycle into 30 minutes that is simply not achievable. Now you can survive without REM sleep or the other stages of sleep but you sacrifice a lot. From the article:
And the conclusion of the article for those who don't want to read the whole thing.
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Just sayin' is all.
I've done the "sleep when you want, as long as you want" My sleeping fluctuated too wildly and I couldn't seem to organize and complete tasks properly.
Currently, I'm doing this 3am-11am thing and it's working really nicely. My energy level went up, I was much more alert and on the ball. I think perhaps once you discover your body's prefered clock, things really perk up.
I do the 3am-11am thing. I've always been a night owl/late riser. It helps being in college since I can schedule my classes to accomodate this. I don't have a class earlier than noon and that's just twice a week. Otherwise I can pretty much sleep in until 2 or 3 o'clock if need be. I've found I naturally gravitate to the 3 or 4am-11am though.
The odd thing about myself is when I reach a certain level of sleep depravation, but not dead on my feet; I begin to feel as though I have greater levels of alertness and intellectual capacity. Or perhaps it is just my own false perception. But I feel relaxed in a way without worry or consideration that I would normally feel if I were rested. Although not in a reckless sense, but a witty, devil may care attitude - If that makes any sense.
My problem is that whenever I go to sleep, that becomes my new sleep schedule. If I accidentally stay up too late (like now..) I'll sleep for 8 hours and start wanting to go to sleep at the same time the next day. The only way for me to fix it is to force myself to go to sleep early (hard) or stay up later to fix it (easier)
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Insomnia is kind of a catchall term I believe. Given that the causes can vary quite a bit, I would suspect that symptoms would as well.
In my case, it's kind of like the things running through my head deal except it happens every single night unless I'm dead on my feet tired.
Back to the original topic, it's worth remembering that some people basically are mutants when it comes to sleeping and can get away with much shorter sleep periods. I recall that when Thomas Edison was working on the light bulb, he had hopes that having light at night would allow other people to adopt the same extremely low sleep schedule he was able to function on. Obviously most people simply can't.
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That is pretty much how I react to staying up too late, too. The only way I can break it is to torturously stay up even longer and break that cycle before it begins.
My future line of work is going to require a great deal of creative thinking, and sometimes the craziest things and best ideas come to me in a dream.
I don't know if it's really possible to get to REM faster, but a good idea is to get at least 9 hours of sleep a night.
I think that reading just before bed can give you pretty strange dreams, depending on what you were reading. I used to read fantasy books just before lights-out and then get as much sleep as possible to try and trigger interesting dreams and it usually worked pretty well.
Interesting - for me, I've found that reading for half an hour-to an hour, then going to sleep, actually gives me a better nights sleep. In fact, my sleep has been suffering greatly from not reading before bed... because I have no books to read.
It's this whole overactive mind thing - million things going through your mind, and reading is very relaxing/mind clearing.
most of all, most of all
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