Polyphasic Sleep Challenge Schedule Explained

Greetings, new and returning readers. As many of you will know, I'm an avid personal growth enthusiast, so my latest challenge is adapting to polyphasic sleep. I've alluded to this challenge in the last two days, but some people may not know what polyphasic sleep is and people won't know what form I've elected to take. So today, just before my last night of monophasic sleep, I shall spell it out. This should also help by serving as a primer for people new to the concept, as well as explaining my polyphasic sleep schedule.

What is polyphasic sleep?

The best way to understand polyphasic sleep is to compare it to monophasic sleep: the standard sleep that most of you undergo each night. Monophasic sleep is typically 7-9 hours of sleep, in a single phase, per day. This allows for 5 or 6 complete 90-minute sleep cycles, which contain NREM, the gateway to REM, and deep sleep. But as humans, we don't need NREM except to prepare us for REM, and we get more deep sleep than we actually need. So therefore, we're literally wasting time every day while we sleep. So how do we remedy this?

The answer is polyphasic sleep. By sleeping in 20-minute increments more-or-less evenly spaced throughout the day, one can force the body to adapt: going into REM immediately, and then transitioning into deep sleep, all within 20 minutes. However, this is tough, because until the body adapts,l you get no REM sleep from the naps: so it feels like you haven't slept at all during them. Of course, just 20 minutes is only one sleep cycle, and we need five or six. So how do we get all the cycles? This is where scheduling comes in.

Polyphasic Sleep types: Everyman and Uberman.

The difference between the Uberman schedule and the Everyman schedule is simple. Everyman includes core sleep: Uberman does not. Core sleep is when, despite adapted to polyphasic sleep, you get at least one full 90-minute sleep cycle daily. For convenience, and for space, I shall only describe the two most common. A link to a polyphasic sleep website that has information on all the different schedules is at the bottom of this page.

The Uberman schedule is simple to read. In the Uberman, you sleep 6 times a day for 20 minutes, getting six sleep cycles. In the Everyman, you sleep for 3 hours per night of core sleep, plus 3 naps throughout the day.

Uberman = 2 hours per day of sleep.

Everyman = 4 hours per day of sleep.

Monophasic = 8 hours per day of sleep.

So 4 hours per day extra is all well and good, but why would anyone pick Everyman over Uberman? Well, as the name might suggest, Uberman isn't remotely easy. The advantages of Everyman over Uberman are:

• Slightly shorter period of adaptation
• Much easier adaptation
• Less sense of 'time dilation'. Uberman followers, once adapted, are forced to deal with the fact that they no longer 'go to sleep for the night' and need to learn a whole new way of living. Everyman followers still go to sleep for the night, just for less time.
• More flexibility. You can stretch an Everyman nap by an hour or two, but you don't want to do that with Uberman too often.

Both Uberman and Everyman are good ideas.

My Schedule

With a mere 8 days to adapt, and with little preparation, I have decided to do the Everyman. Tonight will be my last night of monophasic sleep: I shall begin the naps at 11 pm tomorrow, and then continue until I am adapted. My schedule will be:

• Core sleep: 4 am - 7 am
• Nap at 1 pm
• Nap at 6 pm
• Nap at 11 pm

This allows me to do my TAFE courses around the naps. The main issue is Saturdays, where I'll often be out of the house, and busy, from 10 am to 7 pm. For this strategy, I shall core sleep from 6 am - 9 am before the Saturday, then proceed to take an extra 3-hour core sleep when I get home. Within 24 hours, I'll be back on track. It's not ideal, but I enjoy my Saturday activities and am willing to pay the price. (Note: this would be impossible on Uberman)

I may, during the next holidays, upgrade to the Uberman schedule, but I'll need to analyse it's effect on my lifestyle versus having an additional 10-15 hours per week.

My friend Rowland is also doing the Everyman, and apart from Saturdays where he has no such difficulty, we will follow the same schedule. I also intend to do several projects from my list during the adaptation, such as purging my room of clutter, and sorting out my card collection according to the system I have devised (similar to my local card shop's system). The extra time should also make me more productive, as I intend to start a to-do list to be working on during my 20 hours of waking time per day.

Bibliography (a.k.a Further Reading)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep. The Wikipedia article. This is fairly scientific and not all of the data is up to date, but it's the first thing a lot of people will search for.

www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/. This is an article that leads to a series of articles about a popular personal development blogger's adventures into the Uberman schedule of polyphasic sleep, until his return 5 1/2 months later, because of the fact that the rest of the world was monophasic. He had no health problems and even reported increased creativity and alertness. This was also the blog series that first taught me about what polyphasic sleep was.

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-portal/. This is a list of articles written by PureDoxyk, one of the two people who discovered the Uberman schedule in 2000. It has a lot of info on Everyman (that's where I found Everyman) and PureDoxyk is one of the greatest experts on polyphasic sleep in the world.

Thanks for bearing with me through this unexpectedly long blog. I'll be blogging about my polyphasic experiences starting Monday (Sunday won't be too interesting since I won't have hit the flow of it yet). Remember to follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Salivanth: I'll be Twittering around the clock. If you don't have a Twitter account, you can sign up at www.twitter.com

Until next time, may you take the time to research your goals.