Article 1. Polyphasic Sleep

Polyphasic sleep

It is a conventional wisdom that we all should sleep as it helps us to recover our body from a long exhausting day or get things memorised in the brain, recall that if you study long for your exam the night before, the next day you probably remember it better. People who don't get enough sleep are at a higher risk for high heart disease, diabetes, obesity. Psychologically, people are at a much higher risk for anxiety and depression. We all know that when you are sleep-deprived, you lose focus,you lose the ability to pay attention. In the nutshell, sleep is a very substantial thing for us. The standard for most adults is a 7-9 hour monophasic sleep, monophasic means that you go to sleep at night and wake up only in the morning. But it wasn’t always like that, our ancestor has actually poly (or even more) phasic sleep. It was divided into several phases, thus you wake several times and go to sleep once more. For instance from 11:00 pm you sleep till 3:00 am you wake up for next 3 hours and then go to bed again. Perhaps they do it because they felt insecure as ancient human beings lived in the caves and they didn’t have much protection from the savages when they were asleep. As we now have more protected environment without any menace, this paradigm of sleep becomes the monophasic one. There’s a high level of interest among people who wants to burst their productivity. Modern people could use a polyphasic sleep to upgrade their ability to work harder(as they will get more time) and this alternative pattern won’t affect their social life as it goes against regular day-night cycles of others.

    As it was mentioned before, polyphasic sleep means that you sleep several times in 24 hours. There are several patterns of how you can divide your wakefulness and sleep. The most common one is Everyman 1,when you sleep six hours from 11 pm till 03 am and gets at the middle of the day powerful nap of 20 minutes. But it is not a very interesting case for us now. For instance, a triphasic sleep as it goes from its name is separated into three time periods. One segment from 05:30 to 07:00, one segment from 14:00 to 15:30, another segment 22:00 to 23:30. All the rest time you are supposed to be fully in your mind. Moreover, it said that there’s a pattern which is called Uberman. It is the most severe one as you have to sleep 20 minutes six times throughout the day. But how does it work practically? 

             

    As I don’t want to interfere to my habitual schedule, I won't do it myself, so I choose this video on YouTube to study how people adopt new samples of their routine. In the video the man used a triphasic sleep for 100 days that went from 11 pm till 02 am, then he woke up in the middle of the night and started working, he also had 2 naps for 30 minutes at 7 am and at 10-11 am. In total he slept for 4 hours during a 24-hour period. As it was his senior year at college, he definitely had loads of work. He actually adopted to this pattern in 5 days. Of course, it wasn’t an easy way to do, and he sometimes felt slightly offbeat. The most significant difference he noticed was that the recovery from workouts was slow and it had a negative impact on his strength. Fortunately, his productivity didn’t have a side effects, and he was very productive those days. The person also noticed that he become more focused and alert but it was only for 1 month and might be because off high level of adrenalin. In the end of this video the man decided not to use this sleep because it’s kind of hard to maintain and his muscles didn’t grow as they did previously. 

But it surely has a negative outcome on a social life. In this article the student from Oxford University tried to have a 30 minute nap  for every 6 hours. “Problems began after 36 hours. I was finding it hard staying awake at night, and Alex (his friend who also wanted to try new schedule) wasn’t able to wake up in time after naps despite many alarms.” It was a five-week adaptation until he can perform in this new way of life more or less vigorous. It was difficult for him to keep up with others’ people schedules, as they all slept monophasically. Sometimes he had to reschedule his meetings, events as they coincided with his naps. To sum it up, we have studied that a straight 8 hour sleep wasn’t always satisfactory in our history. The alternative way of our regular sleep is a polyphasic sleep. We learnt from practice that it could gain you a lot of productive hours but it has negative sides on your health (as the example of a muscle recuperation). As for socialising during this aberrant sleep cycles, now everything is built according to a monophasic sleep and it will be a real struggle to sleep another way because you can face lots of misunderstanding with others. To keep up with a new pattern you really should have incentives to do it.

Additional Sources:

1. Inspired Article https://time.com/5063665/what-is-polyphasic-sleep/

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep#Organization_factors_and_example_schedules%5Bcitation_needed%5D