少睡多眠--多相睡眠

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Polyphasic Sleep

October 20th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

A couple days ago, I saw a post about polyphasic sleep on LifeHack.org. Since then I’ve been emailed about this topic as well, probably because I’ve written previously about becoming an early riser.

Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular form of polyphasic sleep, the Uberman sleep schedule, suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you’re only sleeping 2-3 hours per day. I’d previously heard of polyphasic sleep, but until now I hadn’t come across practical schedules that people seem to be reporting interesting results with.

Under this sleep schedule, your sleep times might be at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and 10pm. And each time you’d sleep for only 20-30 minutes. This is nice because the times are the same whether AM or PM, and they’re consistent from day to day as well, so you can still maintain a regular daily schedule, albeit a very different one.

How can this sleep schedule work? Supposedly it takes about a week to adjust to it. A normal sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and REM sleep occurs late in this cycle. REM is the most important phase of sleep, the one in which you experience dreams, and when deprived of REM for too long, you suffer serious negative consequences. Polyphasic sleep conditions your body to learn to enter REM sleep immediately when you begin sleeping instead of much later in the sleep cycle. So during the first week you experience sleep deprivation as your body learns to adapt to shorter sleep cycles, but after the adaptation you’ll feel fine, maybe even better than before.

It requires some discipline to successfully transition to this cycle, as well as a flexible schedule that allows it. While you’ll be sleeping a lot less, apparently it’s very important to sleep at the required times and not miss naps.

It was interesting to read some of the posts from people who’ve tried this sleep cycle. They reported higher alertness and energy, more vivid dreams and more lucid dreams, and of course lots of extra free time. I also read of failures, but in each case the person wasn’t strict about the nap schedule and overslept on occasion. A side effect of this sleep schedule is that you need to eat more, since you’re spending more time moving around. It appears that the long term health effects of this sleep pattern aren’t well known. That’s irrelevant to me though because I find that being a long-term vegan, I can’t rely much on long-term studies done on non-vegans anyway. Some say that hormones in animal products negatively affect sleep patterns, and more restful sleep is commonly reported after making dietary improvements. So long-term studies on people eating average diets wouldn’t be of much use to me personally.

The downside to this sleep schedule is that it can be inflexible. I’ve read that you can delay naps by an hour if necessary, but missing a nap can cause a rapid crash that takes a while to recover from. This means you only have about 3.5 hours of waking time between naps, 4.5 hours if you push it. So this can restrict your options a bit. Of course, you have to balance that sacrifice against the gain of many extra hours per day, every day. Interesting trade off…. It reminds me of something you’d find in The Book of Questions.

Plus it’s just plain weird. So naturally I want to try it.

Since I work from home and have control over my schedule, I’ve decided to test polyphasic sleep to see what it’s like. I’m already good at falling asleep fast (within a few minutes), and I often have dreams during 15-20 minute naps, so I wonder if I’ve partially conditioned myself to enter REM rapidly. This test obviously requires a bit of adjustment, but I’ve managed to work things out with my wife to make it practical enough. Since I’ve read that energy and alertness plummet during the first week, I’ve kept next week’s schedule very light mentally (no meetings, speeches, or major projects). Depending on how functional and coherent I am during the adjustment period, I’ll be doing mostly domestic projects like organizing the garage — nothing involving power tools.

I’m starting this polyphasic sleep schedule today, so last night was my last night of “normal” sleep for a while. I still got up at 5am this morning, and then I’ll begin doing the naps every 4 hours starting this afternoon. I’ll use a countdown timer alarm set for 30 minutes, so I won’t oversleep. I’ve decided that my sleep times will be 1am, 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, and 9pm. I aim to continue at least until Halloween… or death, whichever comes first. If it seems to be going well and I retain basic functionality, then I’ll decide whether I want to continue with it.

My main motivation for trying this is curiosity, and it seems like it would be a fun test of self-discipline. Plus it meshes nicely with my own general weirdness. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, it should be an interesting learning experience.

Of course I’ll be sure to blog about this experience, but if I start making posts about seeing dead people, then you’ll know I’ve become delusional due to sleep deprivation.

What would you do with an extra 30-40 hours of free time per week?

Edit 4/14/06: For your convenience, here are links to all of my polyphasic sleep log entries in order (each link will open in a new window). This is a treasure trove of free information for anyone interested in learning about my trial of polyphasic sleep. To my knowledge these are the most detailed polyphasic sleep logs you’ll be able to find anywhere on the web.

Sleep well!

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Polyphasic Sleep Log - Days 23-24

Polyphasic Sleep Log - A Wife’s Perspective

Polyphasic Sleep Log - Day 3

Polyphasic Sleep - One Year Later

Polyphasic Sleep: The Return to Monophasic

Polyphasic Sleep Log - Days 25-30 (Final Update)

Polyphasic Sleep Update - Day 90

少睡多眠--多相睡眠

少睡多眠 -- 多相睡眠

几天前，在LifeHack.org网站上，我看过一篇多相睡眠的文章。自从那以后，就有一些关于这个主题的邮件发送给我，可能是因为我写过关于“如何成为早起的人”的文章吧。

多相睡眠是指，在一天中用多次短暂的睡眠代替一个长时间睡眠。Uberman睡眠计划，是一个很流行的多相睡眠。他建议你把一天按4小时平分，就可以有六次打盹，每次20-30分钟。这意味着，你每天只睡2-3个小时。我以前就听说过多相睡眠，但到目前为止，我还没有听说过谁去实施多相睡眠计划，并同时发表由此带来的有趣结果。

按照这个睡眠计划，你可以在2点，6点，10点，14点，18点，22点开始睡觉，每次只睡20-30分钟。这样非常不错，因为不管白天黑夜时间都是相同的，每天的安排也都十分一致，你就可以维持一个有规律的时间表，虽然看起来与众不同。

这个睡眠计划如何工作的呢？估计我们需要花一周的时间去调整适应它。一个正常的睡眠周期是90分钟，REM(指眼球快速运动的睡眠阶段)发生在这个周期中比较晚的时段。REM就是你正在做梦，它是睡眠中最重要的一个阶段。如果长时间剥夺REM，你将会遭受严重的负面影响。多项睡眠可以引导你在刚睡着时，就快速地进入REM阶段，而不是在睡眠周期的末期。所以在第一周，你将体验到缺乏睡眠的感觉，因为这时，你的身体正在学习如何适应缩短的睡眠周期，过了适应期，你就没事了，可能感觉比以前更棒呢。

当然，需要遵循一些原则，以及一个灵活的时间表才能顺利地转换到新的周期。因为睡眠比以前少了很多，很显然在规定的时间睡觉，不错过打盹的时间尤为重要。

看到一些尝试过多相睡眠的人发表的帖子，感到十分有趣。他们感觉更活跃，精力更充沛，他们的梦更加生动和鲜明，更不要说获得了许多空闲时间。当然也有一些失败者，他们不是在假期睡过了头，就是没有严格遵守时间表。这个时间表还有一个副作用，你吃的比以前多了，这是因为你有很多的时间跑来跑去。这种睡眠模式对健康的长期影响还不得而知。不过无所谓，做为长期素食主义者，我知道不能信任那些非素食者的长期研究。还有人说，动物荷尔蒙产品会对这种睡眠模式产生负面影响，还有什么调整饮食也会改善睡眠。这些平衡饮食的长期研究对我个人来说，用处不大。

这个睡眠计划不好的地方就是不灵活。如果有必要，你可以将打盹时间推迟一个小时，但是错过一次睡眠就会导致崩溃，并需要相当长的时间才能恢复。这意味着，在两次打盹之间，你只有3.5小时是清醒的，如果你推迟打盹的时间，就会有4.5小时，所以你的选择就会受到限制。当然，你需要在这种牺牲和每天额外获得的几个小时之间取得平衡。嗯，很有趣的权衡，它使我想起“The Book of Questions”提到的一件事。

只是稍微古怪了些，我还是可以尝试一下的 :-)

自从开始在家工作，并能控制自己的时间表之后，我就决定尝试多相睡眠。现在我能够快速地进入睡眠状态（几分钟的时间），并且在15-20分钟的小睡中经常做梦。不知道是不是说明我早就开始调节自己快速进入REM。显然，这个测试只需要一点点调整而已。不过，我还是与妻子一同把事情都安排好了。因为精力和敏锐度在第一个星期会急剧下降，所以下一周的安排都是很少动脑子的事（没有会议、演讲、主要项目）。在调整期间，依据我的体能和协调性，我会多做些家务活，例如整理车库，但不会去碰电动工具。:-)

今天，正式实施多相睡眠，所以昨晚是我正常睡眠的最后一个晚上。我依然早上5点起床，下午就开始每4个小时打一次盹。为了防止睡过头，我会用一个30分钟的倒计时器。我计划的睡眠时间是1点，5点, 9点, 13点, 17点和21点。我的目标是至少坚持到万圣节，或者死掉，管他哪个先实现呢！到时，如果我感觉良好，身体保持基本机能，在做决定是否继续下去。

好奇是我做这件事的主要动机，并且也是对自律性的一个很好玩的测验。另外，也比较适合我古怪的性格。无论成败与否，都会是一个有趣的学习经历。

当然，我会在博客上记录整个过程。如果我的帖子中出现看见死人的内容，就意味着由于缺乏睡眠，我开始出现幻觉了。:-)

如果一个星期多出30-40个小时，你会做什么？

在Wikipedia上读取更多关于多项睡眠的内容。

编辑于2006/04/14：为了方便起见，下面是我多相睡眠日记的链接，按顺序排列（每个链接将打开一个新窗口）。对任何感兴趣了解我多相睡眠试验的人来说，这是一个宝库。就我所知，你也可以在网络上找到更加详细的多相睡眠日记。

好好睡觉！

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