Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps

Please do mental benchmarking: Mnemosyne/Anki/spaced-repetition, dual n-back, http://www.quantified-mind.com/ , http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/ - something objective.

Prediction: Since you are making this significantly harder than what it needs to be most people will give up before they even do Everyman for a week. And nobody will sustain Uberman since you aren't even committing to trying to keep it up.

Unrelated: Bay Area rationalists seem to rely a lot on arguments from authority over everything else(I don't have any data but I just see comments like the one about Matt relatively often). I wonder if seeing awesome people that are right a lot of the time might be coming with a cost.

So, I've tried uberman twice, and failed both times. A report for the first time is here, and I thought I had written up the second time but I'm not finding it easily. The second time, one of my friends tried Everyman, and got the impression that it was physiologically similar to only sleeping 5-6 hours a night; he had more time to do stuff, but was less rested for that time.

I strongly recommend having someone else there to make sure you're awake when you should be. Otherwise, you very likely will crash and sleep for eight hours. Many people have the 'answering machine' wake up with their alarm, do whatever is necessary to shut the alarm off, and then go back to sleep, without remembering any of it. This is not an experience I had until I hadn't slept more than 30 minutes in ~five days.

Also, at some point my ability to make coherent sentences took a hit, and I would sometimes say word salad. Since the experiment, I have had occasional word recall problems, which I notice about once a month (though I think the frequency was higher closer to the experiment). Thinking they're connected may be post hoc ergo propter hoc (there are several other plausible explanations), but I'm trying to avoid the failure mode of "well, no one's reported detrimental effects yet, so I should discount my experience."

How social are the people trying this? Do any of you have jobs with scheduled anything? Go to classes or events that are 2 hours long? Having "more hours" a day, if works would be great but it seems to be insanely inconvenient for anyone who spends a lot of time driving or wants to watch a movie or go to a concert or needs to work with people. Assuming the final "quality" of the hours you have ends up on average unaffected by sleep deprivation, the extremely weird and disciplined schedule still seems terrible to me, and I don't even have a job that is particularly scheduled. This strikes as something that gives you more lonely hours at the cost of wrecking a lot of the hours you might have with people. This is less of a problem if you're in a community of people doing this but still seems pretty rough.

Having done Uberman in the past, I'd like to recommend a few tweaks and general advice.

1) Consider swapping from 20 minute naps to 24 minute naps. The optimal is 24 minutes asleep with 1-2 minutes to fall asleep. I can't seem to find the original article by NASA atm, but here's an article referencing NASA's original study on optimal naps.

2) Devise a program to get from part 7 to part 10 instead of "try to space out longer". I did a standard uberman schedule and going even 20 minutes past my appointed nap time would immediately put me into sleep deprivation which risked oversleeping an alarm. I'm not sure how you plan to soft adjust to longer spaces between naps, but just winging it while sleep deprived seems like a recipe for danger.

3) Stock up on food. Expect to eat 50% more.

4) Make a list of things to do while sleep deprived at 4am for the adjustment period. I thought I was going to learn a new language with Rosetta Stone; I ended up reading fanfiction and watching through TV series. I simply didn't have the mental juice to do anything until after I'd adjusted.

5) Set up a sleep cycle calendar so you'll know what you're going to do every wedge, and what you're doing every day. It's very easy to lose track of days on a polyphasic schedule.

6) Buy a sleep mask. It's so much easier to sleep during the day with one.

I hope none of you polyphasers drive to school/work, or we are likely to be a few rationalists short by the time this experiment is over.

Fantastic! Illuminating an evidence-based path to an extra 4 hours of productive work or play time per day would do much to help mankind. Even if you have only, say, a 5% chance of success, the expected value of what you are doing is enormous.

I'd like to see study comparing the above approach to regular modafinil use at whatever dose allows alertness with that amount of sleep on an ongoing basis.

It would be cool if people doing this kept a journal, and wrote down changes in the way they think and feel during this. I tried it twice, and lasted a solid two weeks during one of the attempts, but it wreaked havoc on my ability to store and/or recall memories. I would have a lot of trouble telling you what I did a few days ago, and I would be irrationally angry/upset for about 15 seconds at the person who woke me up.(I did this with a group of three.) A few times I yelled angry nonsense at them for this short time. We had a "safe word" that was supposed to prove we were awake, ours was "alligator". After one nap I was woken up, angrily hissed "ARMADILLO" and tried to go back to sleep. It was pretty funny even at the time, but I decided to stop since I figured it wasn't good for me, and I was pretty miserable. I was definitely micro sleeping at times as well, so I'll echo Petruchio's warning about looking out for that.

Best of luck, hope it works out for you better than it did for me.

Here are two articles quite skeptical of polyphasic sleep that might be of interest.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic2010.htm

I don't necessarily agree with the author, but I guess it's good to be aware of arguments on both sides of the debate.

I've a few questions about those "atypical sleep patterns" :

1. Are there studies about their long-term effect on health, lifespan, IQ, ... ?

2. How do they cope with sickness/wounds ? If you get the flu, will you be able to heal as fast using a Uberman or Everyman sleep pattern ? People doing monophasic will tend to sleep much more when sick, both increase the size of the monophasic sleep and doing naps. What happens if you follow Uberman/Everyman ? Can you get this additional sleep when sick, without breaking the whole adaptation ?

3. How do they cope with various kind of schedule/social constraints ? With monophasic sleep, you can relatively easily adapt your sleep schedule (staying awake late, waking up early) to cope with any event, from a family dinner to a RPG night to a plane to catch, what happens when you disturb the sleep pattern of Uberman/Everyman ? Do they handle such "transgression" as well ass monophasic ?

The data collection period is now over. How did it go?

I have a work schedule and no willing buddy in the area. Could you keep the data form up indefinitely? I'd love to submit to the study at a later date.

I suppose modafinil should be in the same boat as caffeine for the purposes of this experiment.

Would this be advisable/possible for someone who does moderate to heavy physical activity (lifting heavy at the gym, dancing) almost daily?

I wanted to get to a point where I get REM sleep during naps and tried doing this during my summer vacation. Didn't have a friend to keep me awake. Stayed up one night and napped through the next day fine. The next night I got into a state where I'd start constantly nodding off when sitting down even with the naps every two hours, and was feeling completely out of it. I couldn't figure out how to keep going. I'd been planning on watching TV, which was now right out as I'd completely stopped being able to focus on what's going on, and playing twichy action videogames, which also didn't work that well since I couldn't stay focused more than seconds at a time. (Also, worryingly, it took me hours just now to remember what the TV show I watched was (Leverage), despite this being only four weeks ago.)

Since I felt I had run out of things I can do without falling asleep, I just went and slept the rest of the night. Later I thought I'd forgotten to at least try a cold shower to make myself more awake. Still, I see why a lot of the adaptation guides recommend you to have hours and hours of brainless work that engages your body to do during the adaptation. I haven't come up with very good ideas for what that would be for me.

Also, what's the point of the fasting, exactly?

I don't know how you did your calculations, but:

4 extra hours of productive work or play time per day, or a whole month per year. (Or a decade over 60 years.)

The last two are inconsistent. An extra twelfth of every year, and an extra sixth of every sixty years?

Do you expect to reach a point where you don't need an alarm clock?

(People already doing this: do you need an alarm clock? How long have you been doing this for?)

Brienne, my roommate and I would like to do this, but our schedule won't match yours because we're time constrained. (We already started taking baseline data, but we're doing the adaptation this weekend as opposed to on Monday.) Should we still fill out your form or will the timing mess things up?

Also, my PMV score gets about ~50ms lower when I use a mouse as opposed to a trackpad. Hopefully this isn't an issue, but people should make sure they're using consistent hardware.

Steve Pavlina on going back to monophasic-- summary: he found that polyphasic was generally good for him mentally and physically (including that he didn't need to cut back on exercise), but he couldn't find a satisfactory way to live with the required tight scheduling.

This article includes a list of all his posts about polyphasic sleep.

Steve Pavlina found that he retained the ability to fall asleep quickly.

I tried to get onto the Uberman sleep schedule twice while at university, but ended up failing around 5 days in. Your plan of easing into it may significantly improve the probability of success, so I am very excited for you.

One thing to watch out for is the increase intake of food. When doing it the first time, I did not think to connect a 37.5% increase in waking time with an increase in calories. I ended up having bouts of extreme coldness in the middle of the night because of this, which added one more thing to the unpleasantness of being awake.

Be careful of micro sleeping, where you fall asleep for a fraction of a second at a time. I do not know how to avoid it except powering through. You may experience hallucinations, or more accurately, you'll fall asleep, have a vivid dream, wake up and not realized you fell asleep in the first place. Again, this occurs over a half a second or so.

There might be some supplements that will assist with the schedule, but I do not know which. Omega-3 fatty acid probably will help. A multi-vitamin wouldn’t hurt either. Soylent, if it works, would be perfect for this project.

I do not have an accommodating job for the Uberman or even the Everyman schedule, but I wish the best of luck.

I've failed Uberman twice myself. You have pretty much an optimal plan, except for the naptation.

"Cut your naps down to 6 as quickly as you can without it hurting too much".

From my own knowledge, which may or may not be trustworthy, naptation doesn't need to be ended prematurely - the whole point is to get a huge number of naps in a short timeframe in order to learn to get REM in a 24-minute interval (which dreaming is a sign of). Getting a few more will just decrease your REM dep. The way I would do it is, get 12 naps a day until you find yourself unable to fall asleep for a nap at all - the critical thing is, you stay in bed until the alarm; you don't just get up after ten minutes - and also take care that some people may have trouble falling asleep for naps at all, which is a separate issue. When you fail to fall asleep for a nap, that's a sign that you've had enough and can't sustain 12 a day any longer; either cut two naps or go straight down to 6 a day. I'd choose the latter.

Also, um, give beds a wide berth outside naptime. And get more than two alarms, preferably with one placed more than 10 meters away from the bed - the long walk to it and back will ensure you actually wake up in the process of turning it off.

What is the point of fasting?

What's the point of fasting exactly?

Going to ditto Khoth and hoping for a separate alert - this seems really tempting for me, but I have a strict enough schedule that I don't think I can afford to experiment on low-confidence possibilities.

(Though the recent FB post about switching to lucid dreaming is probably a bad sign...)

I feel I should point out that mindfulness meditation is not something you want to be doing if you're trying to get to sleep. For many people, myself included, doing it before bed can ruin a night's sleep. You want to do something like autogenics if you're trying to nod off, although if you can't, mindfulness meditation might help mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation.

One thing you might want to take into account: your baseline might be bad. Some of the people taking part might already be chronically sleep deprived or have a sleep disorder of some kind or another already.