I’ve had polyphasic sleep on the brain for the past week. I’m going to finally post about it and get it out of my system.

Polyphasic sleep is a system that involves taking several short naps each day instead of sleeping for eight hours each night (which is known as monophasic sleep). Like most things, I first heard about polyphasic sleep via a link on the web — this one led to Steve Pavlina’s website. Steve opted to try polyphasic sleep for 30 days. He enjoyed the experience so much that he is still living that way.

So what exactly is polyphonic sleep? As I said, it’s a system of taking several naps a day instead of sleeping throughout the night. The normal system involves taking a 30 minute nap at regular four-hour intervals — so, for example, you could decide to nap at 1pm, 5pm, 9pm, 1am, 5am, and 9am. While it sounds like a lot of naps, each of them are only 30 minutes in length, giving you 3 hours of sleep per day (and 21 waking hours). Once people adjust to the sleep cycle, most of them shorten their naps to 20 minutes in length, giving you 22 waking hours each day. Of course, the term “day” becomes relative, as your life experience becomes broken up into several shorter days (some of them just happen to be when it’s dark).

Problems? Well, for starters you have to have six naps a day, which for those of us who work 8 hour days, means having two naps a day at work. Most people who missed more than one nap or overslept for great periods of time completely crashed and had to start all over (or never tried it again). There’s a week-long adjustment period where people have reported everything from complete exhaustion to waking hallucinations (your body trying to compensate for the lack of REM sleep in the beginning). And then of course there’s that whole thing where this has never been scientifically tested for any long term physical or mental effects on people.

Me? I’d love to try it, although I doubt I ever will. The nap schedule sounds too rigid and unforgiving for the average “8-to-5” type of person. Still, the lure of having an additional 5-6 waking hours each day sounds tempting.

Links:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic