Talk-Polywell.org

A while ago I came across this http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/1 ... asic-sleep which is one individual's very positive experience with polyphasic sleeping - where he slept only 3 hours a day - spread through the day in six 30 minute sessions - for five months.

Its not very scientific, but I found it fascinating for the personal experiences. I'd love to try it myself since I need more hours in the day. Perhaps one day when I've got a couple of weeks I can kill if it doesn't work out.

[Edit: Fixed the link]

I sleep 4 hours and stay up 10 to 12. I get more hours but I don't keep a regular schedule.

BenTC wrote:In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

Wonderful tag line!!!

MSimon wrote:I sleep 4 hours and stay up 10 to 12.

It's easy to adjust if you come from a faster rotating planet, but you just try coming from a slower rotating planet!

(Not sure I've heard of a 15hr siderial-day planet in the local neighbourhood? Where's that? Or are you a quadrant-traveller?)

(hah! You earthlings think travelling across the Atlantic is tough going, west-to-east?!!)

Human free running internal clock is about 28 hours.

2*(10+4)=28

MSimon wrote:Human free running internal clock is about 28 hours.

2*(10+4)=28

I think you're just indicating your own sleeping behaviour, that has been corrupted by Navy watch system timings (or whatever the USN call it). My body clock has ended up needing 20hrs on + 10hrs standby, but simply results in 20 + 4 + chronic sleep deprivation!

MSimon wrote:I sleep 4 hours and stay up 10 to 12. I get more hours but I don't keep a regular schedule.

Interesting. My personal ratio seems to be 1:2 instead of the ~1:3 (4hr down, 12 up) you indicate here.

MSimon wrote:Human free running internal clock is about 28 hours.

2*(10+4)=28

There were circadian rhythm studies in caves some decades back. Researchers sent into fully sealed underground habitats for several weeks without any indicators of time, artificial lights on all the time, etc. IIRC the research subjects' internal clocks all reset to approx 17 hours.

MSimon wrote:I sleep 4 hours and stay up 10 to 12. I get more hours but I don't keep a regular schedule.

You have 16 hour days? What a terrible universe you live in! (j/k)

I admit that I sleep a lot. I like sleeping, or sometimes only snoothing.
But my waking times are also longer than those of "ordinary" people.
I just can not sleep if I am not totally beat down tired. Then I lie in bed keep pondering over problems or some technical question. I often find solution too, problem is I usually dont remember in the morning and my wife would kill me if I got up to write them down (thus waking her up in the process).
She is actually very much like me, but her job, which requires her to be up timely in the mornings, does not allow her to assume a sleep pattern that fits her (and me... ) better.
I found that I can work much more effective, if I dont have to commit to any society prescribed rythm of sleep, wake, shopping (things close at 7.30 pm here) and so on. It may be egocentric, but I much prefer the world to turn arround me than the other way round. I found that the unregulated store opening times in the US are much more fitting to my style of living... and sleeping than the more tighly regulated times here in Europe.
Before anyone shouts: "The socialists wont keep the stores open!". Nope, here it is the store owners (capitalists, if you want) that dont want it. They would much rather have everyone come in during set hours. Their argument (and I have to admit that there is some logic to it) is that people do have to shop and having open longer does not somehow create more people that will buy more stuff. It just spreads the available frequentation over a longer period of time. I dont like that fact, but it does make sense.
Anyway, one of the freeing things (where I really felt the big freedom of the US) was the liberty to go shopping, dining, consuming whenever I wanted to, pretty much. I could truly live my personal rythm. I was feeling much healthier, more relaxed and much less stressed after a couple of weeks...

My sleep patterns are almost completely random. Good to see lots of other people have odd sleep patterns too.

Rather like Skipjack, I have to be exhausted to fall asleep. Otherwise, just like him, I lie there thinking of things, working out problems etc.

Once asleep I sometimes will myself to keep sleeping as a form of procrastination - usually if the project I'm working on seems tedious somehow. Then eventually I wake up with a mild over-sleep headache.

The one common theme is that I am not a morning person. If I have to wake up in the morning I usually feel like complete crap. If I have to be somewhere early, I often just don't go to sleep - I feel fine in the morning if I just go through to it without sleeping during the night. Then when I get home late afternoon (4 or 5pm) I just fall asleep then.

If I have to wake up in the morning I usually feel like complete crap. If I have to be somewhere early, I often just don't go to sleep - I feel fine in the morning if I just go through to it without sleeping during the night. Then when I get home late afternoon (4 or 5pm) I just fall asleep then.

Dude, I could have written that, to the point

One way to think of sleep cycles is to consider it a resetable multivibrator.

To synchronize with an outside clock (day/night) the multivibrator has to have a longer period than the controlling frequency.

I worry a lot about falling into irregular sleep cycles. Lack of sleep increases the incidence of so many chronic diseases.

I try hard to get 7 in every 24. If I didn't worry about it, I'd probably go 36 - 48 hours without sleeping on a regular basis.

Melatonin is helpful, and fun too.

TallDave wrote:I worry a lot about falling into irregular sleep cycles. Lack of sleep increases the incidence of so many chronic diseases.

I try hard to get 7 in every 24. If I didn't worry about it, I'd probably go 36 - 48 hours without sleeping on a regular basis.

Melatonin is helpful, and fun too.

I have been keeping schedules like I posted above and my health is fine (for an old man).

I don't lack sleep - when I'm tired I sleep and when I wake up I'm awake. What I lack is regular cycles.

I don't know how many read the whole log, it is long [actually the link was broken by a comma - now fixed], but some interesting points are:

• Normally REM sleep occurs in the last 20 minutes of about a 1.5 hour cycle.
  
• After a week of adjustment (and feeling sleep deprived) his REM sleep changed to begin immediately on laying down
• When sleeping only 20 minutes he woke totally refreshed. When he slept longer than 30 minutes, he left REM and entered deeper sleep, so he felt groggy when he woke.
• It increased the clarity of his writing - he felt like it he was rebooting every four hours.
• Speculation about his vegetarianism making it easier - since meat takes more digestion
• He experimented with the effects of delaying or skipping naps

  Delaying individual naps, however, does work. I’ve been doing that for months with no serious problems. I can stretch the time between two naps to 6-7 hours, but when I do that, I need more frequent naps later to make up for it. So I still end up getting 6 naps in a 24-hour period. I just have the freedom to slide them around a bit, as long as I don’t overdo it