Alternate Sleep Cycles

http://www.highexistence.com/alternate-sleep-cycles/

by googletron • 15 years ago

74 66 15 years ago

lambada• 15 years ago

Everything I hear about these sleeping patterns is anecdotal. As far as I'm aware there haven't been any serious studies done of people on these sleeping patterns, and most especially on the health effects (if any) it causes.

Killah911• 15 years ago

I agree, these so called "models" in the article are based on anecdotal evidence. However, I know that there are a number of sleep studies/experiments out there... From what I've read, only 8-hour or nap in the afternoon sleep patterns were scientifically proven to be adequate.

gurkendoktor• 15 years ago

I have tried überman for fun two years ago, mostly to practice napping. It did not work at all, people on IRC didn't have success either, but hearsay and wishful thinking were plenty.

It's crazy that Steve Pavlina's series of blog entries is still the #1 reference even though he turned his back on it afterwards.

That said, sleeping less at night and taking a deep nap or two after lunch is awesome. I wish it would've been socially acceptable in my German university. There is a lot of progress to be made (flux et al) without drastic and dangerous sleep cycles.

Afton• 15 years ago

I'm deeply skeptical about these massively shortened sleep cycles too, but to be fair, Steve Pavlina gave it up for the same reason Dyson did; it's too hard to interact with the 'awake-during-the-day, asleep-during-the-night' crowd, not because "it didn't work" for him.

stinkytaco2• 15 years ago

I never bought that excuse. There's zero scientific evidence for breaking a habit humans and our ancestors have been doing for literally millions of years. "Social interaction was hard" seems like a face saving excuse for "I wasn't able to beat evolution."

philwelch• 15 years ago

I can't believe anyone takes Pavlina seriously. He's just more evidence that smart people can be marks, too. His wife and business partner was a telephone psychic, of all things.

lee2• 15 years ago

The fact that these sleep cycles have been used by "bloggers" for a few months and that they are still "healthy" does not give me the warm fuzzies.

It would take a much longer experimental time frame, under more rigorous scientific study, to convince me that any of these alternatives are safe and worthwhile.

Karunamon• 15 years ago

I can almost detect the disdain in your "voice" as you use the word "bloggers".

Was there something wrong with the article?

fullmoon2• 15 years ago

It wasn't published in Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine.

Otherwise, good article.

jerf2• 15 years ago

The fact that if you travel further down the blog stream for almost any of these practitioners, they always give it up for not working. (Giving it up because "everybody else is on a monophasic sleep cycle" is just a social-face-saving excuse. If it worked, you wouldn't give it up. You've got six extra hours a day to make up whatever the problem is!) The evidence that I've seen suggests that alternative sleep cycles are basically persistent urban legend more than anything else.

And yes, failing to mention the little tiny detail of it not working at this date is a reason to be "disdainful" of an article like this; it encourages one to wreck weeks or months of ones life on something that we pretty much know doesn't work. Negligent at best, evil at worst.

(Excepting "siesta", which there is some evidence for, but isn't the promised miracle, either.)

benjvi• 15 years ago

Well, blogging is generally not the most cognitively demanding of tasks. The fact that you are still able do tasks like this does not mean that you are not significantly sleep deprived. It may be worth experimenting with for bloggers just for the sake of doing something interesting. For everyone else, its not. And, there is no scientific evidence supporting the supposed benefits.

lee2• 15 years ago

Yes. You are advocating various alternatives, citing that they're safe and useful based on the anecdotal experience of a handful of bloggers.

The article would be much more credible if you backed it up with some solid science (has there been rigorous scientific studies on polyphasic sleep?). Without that, the credibility based on bloggers is no more than the credibility of snake oil salesmen.

polychrome2• 15 years ago

Did you read the article on HN a few months ago about the Indian CEO who dropped dead in the middle of a marathon? Why? Because he didn't sleep enough!

Always amazes me how CS students and hackers think they can defy biology ...

ry0ohki• 15 years ago

Even if one of these other cycles is incredibly effective, they seem very hard to use and be social. I don't know what I'd do with my extra time at 4am when no one else is awake (on a consistent basis).

fullmoon2• 15 years ago

Reading a book, playing a game, Medidate? It is a very nice time to be awake

sp3322• 15 years ago

Talk to people in a different time zone :)

jmilloy2• 15 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Why-we-nap-STAMPI/dp/0817634622

I always link to this source; in a subject full of anecdotes and misinformation, this book is essential for providing substantial and concrete scientific results.

botker• 15 years ago

I was prepared to buy until the page loaded. Yikes.

  1 used from $314.52

I hope there are some other publications on the subject of greater or equal quality that have yet to go out of print.

jmilloy2• 15 years ago

You can easily find a pdf to download, if you're comfortable with that.

skore3• 15 years ago

The comments here[1] suggest ahem alternatives.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R3W1ZLVUQ1N867/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...

gregwebs• 15 years ago

get it from your library. But actually, if you read it you the #1 point is simply that sleep patterns are not a well understood concept - there is little evidence to say that any pattern is a good or bad concept. The author sleeps for 6 hours at night and takes a siesta.

mashmac2• 15 years ago

An excellent read, yes. It includes a couple of chapters specifically dedicated to polyphasic, and the entire book focuses on different sleep cycles.

For those still in/at college in the US, interlibrary loan has several copies available around the country. That's how I got to read a copy.

egypturnash2• 15 years ago

I tried uberman a while back. It was a royal pain to deal with the intermittent day job I had at the time, and it really didn't work well with my home life either - I just didn't have a comfortable place to sit around and slack off for some of the awake cycles. I was definitely adapting to it after a couple weeks but the only place to lay around lazily in an underheated apartment was in a bed full of sleeping boyfriend, which was a pretty powerful argument for just curling up and going to sleep!

Now that I have a very inviting living room in my home wih a comfy couch, I might try it again once spring hits. Or maybe the Everyman schedule.

The big problem, IMHO, is interfacing with the entire rest of the Western world, which is on the one big sleep schedule.

egypturnash2• 15 years ago

More thoughts. One commenter here snarked about this article for linking to Steve Pavlina's writings on polyphasic sleep, which he gave up after about six months. This is an old article so I kinda feel that's okay, it's from around 2010 - though Pavlina did it in '06 or so.

That said I was thusly looking at Pavlina's blog. And at the entry where he looks back on it, one year later (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-on...) and talks about how it's transformed his sleeping, even when he's gone back to "normal" sleep. And I think my month or so doing polyphasic left me with a little something, too: I now have a very well-tuned alarm clock in my brain. I don't have to get up for a day job any more, so I don't have to use it very often - but as I'm going to sleep, I can tell myself "I'm getting up at 7:00" or whatever, and I will be awake when the alarm goes off.

(I still set alarms, though, because they give me that extra boost of HEY YOU HAVE A REASON TO GET UP!)

In fact, I'm taking a plane trip tomorrow. Flight's at 7:40 so I basically need to be up and moving by 5:40 or so. I did those calculations and told myself when I was going to be getting up, and I could FEEL my body going through... something. Some adjustment of my cycles to get me to be tired in time to be up and moving then, these weird little waves of... levels of awakeness kind of cycling in me for a few minutes.

As to people saying that "we evolved for the eight hours sleep and trying anything else is fighting against evolution" - no, no we didn't. Babies basically do polyphasic. It was considered completely normal in the pre-industrialized days to go to bed around sundown, then wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night and do some stuff by candlelight. It's only since the adaption of massive industrialized society that we've been expected to be up ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.

(And hell, right now I'm visiting my mom. She basically does the Everyman schedule since she's retired - it's not formalized, her throughout-the-day naps are kind of randomized - but she's got one biggish core sleep at night, and several midday naps.)

skore3• 15 years ago

To add my own anecdotal evidence: Yes, it works, but not in the way most would want it to work. And hell yes, it's a serious strain on your connection to reality and community (family, friends etc.).

A couple of points from my own blog post on this ("Cheating the brother of death" http://sk.or.at/p6YBXf ):

- This is mostly about mental strength and perseverance, not so much about just following plan X and having more free time.

- Having more free time is not as simple as you'd like it to be. You do have to have something to fill that time. And it has to something actually meaningful that you care about.

- It is a good idea to have something to wake up to so you don't have to search for an answer to the "why do I have to get up now?" question when you're in it.

- The hardest part is setting the right boundaries and anticipating how bad your mental situation will be - so you can deal with it appropriately even if your experiment means that you might not be in the right state of mind at that moment. Because you were before, when you started it and that's when you need to make the right plans.

beagle3• 15 years ago

From collecting others' anecdotal evidence, it seems that it technically works for some people (though not for a large percentage), but socially it works for no one.

I wonder if there's a way to make this become socially acceptable. People always think these things take a lot of time, and sometime they do (e.g. phone use that would have been considered obnoxious 15 years ago is not impolite today. Today's obnoxious would have been casus belli 15 years ago). However, there are cases of nearly spontaneous social change -

In many places in the world (a lot of countries in Europe, not sure about the US), chewing gum after a meal is considered an acceptable and healthy practice; This change was brought on within 3 years thanks to an ingenious Wrigley Orbit campaign.

cbs• 15 years ago

I thought this was worth putting somewhere people would actually see it.

coldarchon 49 minutes ago | link [dead]

after being 5 years in research for brain activity during sleep and being a natural lucid dreamer and short sleeper myself, I can only warn anyone about polyphasic sleep if you never had a tendency for this in your life before.

It will literally turn off your Mojo ..

billpatrianakos3• 15 years ago

Guys, there's a ton of evidence for polyphasic sleep just not working out. We're actually built for biphasic sleep though we can get away without a nap. As humans we are always trying to cheat nature but there are just some things we cannot control.

I saw this on HN before and I think it's a great read if you have the time. It really goes in depth and debunks these sleep cycle myths. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

zyfo3• 15 years ago

This again? As mentioned in those HN threads, it has been rebutted:

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...

Fact is there's not a ton of evidence for it not working out. There has been virtually zero research on it, despite plenty of polyphasic people volunteering for research.

billpatrianakos3• 15 years ago

Assuming you're right, the absence of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. The article that you say rebuts it, certainly argues for polyphasic working but that article isn't a good rebuttal at all. It actually mocks facts! The author rails against the anti-polyphasic article's author for saying that people who need an alarm clock are sleep deprived and that people shouldn't need one. Well, sorry to break to him but that's true. Any doctor or sleep expert will tell you the same thing. This rebuttal just sounds like typical Internet ranting against something a person disagrees with.

gwern4• 15 years ago

That's hardly a good rebuttal. Most of it is just disproving some overreaching by Wozniak and other anecdotal evidence, which leaves his basic point untouched, and the rest is lacking in actual science. For example:

> * Everybody who needs an alarm to wake up is “seriously sleep deprived”. No really, he says that outright. I feel bad for my parents — apparently they’ve never been well-rested in their entire lives. Of course, while I’m sure it’s a better sign if you don’t need an alarm at all (like I didn’t when I had Uberman down pat?), this guy is completely ignoring the known fact that people will sleep extra if they can, just like they’ll have a second helping of pie if you let them. The existence of a second piece of pie on your plate is hardly an indicator that you’re starving!

No, people don't oversleep 'normally', they oversleep as a result of sleep deprivation; this is the standard way to measure sleep deprivation, to see whether, given the opportunity, they sleep more for a while and then start sleeping less! And for that matter, the basic theory of polyphasic sleep - forcing very fast REM rebound to get the REM done within the 20 or 30 minutes - basically presumes constant deprivation because deprivation is what triggers REM rebound.

If a polyphasicer wanted to disprove that, they'd have to switch back to a monophasic or biphasic sleep without immediately incurring any excess sleep penalties compared to their normal monophasic/biphasic sleep lengths.

(I'd do this since I have a Zeo and that would give great data for this purpose, but unfortunately, neither time I tried did I succeed in adapting to polyphasic. Maybe one of the polyphasic sleepers using Zeos http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/forum/176 will do this at some point.)

ryanewing• 15 years ago

If anyone is interested, Puredoxyk has been doing it for nearly seven years and even wrote a book about it:

http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/polyphasic-sleep-portal/

hammock• 15 years ago

This is a post on a blog where the sidebar poll asks, "Do aliens exist?"

(In case you were wondering, 63% said "Yes.")

kapitalx2• 15 years ago

People have varying definitions of aliens. What you see in the movies vs. single/multi cell organisms?

sp3322• 15 years ago

Isn't most of NASA acting like the answer is "yes"? All the research into earth-like exoplanets, and the expeditions to Mars to look for water etc?

kapitalx2• 15 years ago

Since alot of us consider ourselves as having "Delayed sleep phase syndrome" I'll also share my sleep cycle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome

I sleep at about 2-3am every night. On weekdays I'll sleep 5-6 hours. On saturday, around 10 hours, and on sunday around 8 hours. That averages to around 6 hours per night.

I've been on this cycle for over 10 years, and even though I always feel bad about it and want to "fix" it, it works quite well.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

What's the problem with this? You're still up at 9 after sleeping 6 hours, which is not too shabby.

My natural cycle seems to end at around 6AM, and then I need 8 hours of sleep, so I'm not up until 2PM. This make social obligations a bit more difficult.

th0ma53• 15 years ago

I recently went through treatment (melatonin + lightbox) and I'd say I feel like a million bucks compared to when I basically just slept only when I was tired and woke up naturally. I'm not sure how long I can stay on the treatment, and if I'll snap back afterwards, but so far (about a month and a half into it) it's pretty great, and I feel way more rested and in sync with the world.

cowpewter2• 15 years ago

Can you elaborate on 'treatment'? I'm pretty sure I have delayed phase sleep syndrome or something like it. I also have fibromyalgia syndrome.

I feel like I'm constantly fighting my body's natural cycle. When I had school/a job that required a specific schedule, I used an alarm clock to get up, and had constant fms flareups and frequent insomnia. When I switched to my current job (at a startup, and no longer required to stick to a specific schedule as long as I'm getting my stuff done), I ditched the alarm clock, and my fibromyalgia pain has vastly improved, just from not trying to force my sleep schedule.

But the problem with that, is left to my body's own devices, I tend to want to be awake for about 20 hours, then sleep around 7. Then I start feeling guilty about coming in later and later every day, and there's still a limit to how many hours straight you can work and be productive, and even as flexible as my schedule is, there's still a bit of pressure to work 5 days a week for 8+ hours, not 4 days a week for 10+ hours. And coming into to work between 10pm-4am just never feels right. Once I get to the point where I'm waking up at 8-9pm, I usually have to waste a weekend forcing myself to stay up 24hrs or more to "flip" my schedule back to something reasonable. I hate doing that, because then my entire weekend is spent feeling like a zombie and then it's straight back to work again.

So if you've got some more details on how melatonin and a lightbox worked for you, even just a blog post you could point me at, I'd be really appreciative.

adrianpike• 15 years ago

Another round of anecdotal evidence:

I did the everyman for about three months when my startup was doing a big pivot a few years ago. It took about two weeks of being completely blurry to transition, but once I did, it was very effective.

I would wake up ~7AM and get to work, have my first ~1/2 hour nap at 11AM, next nap at 6 in the afternoon, and then a nap at midnight. I'd be totally awake and aware until ~3:30AM, and then I'd go to sleep.

After the transition, once my body got settled, I'd usually be awake a few minutes before I set an alarm, and my caffeine needed to stay alert went way down.

Like most of the other anecdotal evidence, I stopped for social reasons - my girlfriend wasn't a fan of me coming home from work at 6, immediately snagging a nap, and then be up rattling away until 3 in the morning every day.

Also I wasn't able to fill the day - I'd be burnt out on work after 12+ hours of grinding away on some Rails code, and have to do something else, so I'd either tinker in the garage, cruise the web, or play games. Once I started up with the video games, I decided it wasn't worth it, and flipped back to a "normal" sleep cycle.

It took ~2 nights to go back to a normal cycle.

knodi• 15 years ago

I tried überman couple months back. I started of by not sleeping for 2 days so when I do start to sleep I go right in to rem sleep. It was really rough for the first week and then I started getting the hang of it 30mins of sleep every 4 hours. The problem was that around the 3 hour 30 mins mark my brain would just shutdown, I couldn't think straight until I got that 30mins of nap in. If I was driving it become really dangerous. I did it for about 3 week and gave up on it as it become really hard to keep social interaction on this sleep cycle. I also had to stop drinking alcohol and coffee just to maintain this sleep cycle and avoid high in suger food before my naps as they always led to be not geting into rem sleep right away. All in all I will not be doing this again, I'm happy with my 7 hours a night of sleep.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

I was won over by a recent article that said 7.5 hours of sleep wasn't as good as 8 hours, but 8.5 hours was. I started setting my alarm clock for 8 hours from when I go to bed, and I try not to get up until the alarm goes off. It has gone really well; I never feel tired and I can easily stay up for 24 hours if I need to. If you're permanently "maxed out" on sleep debt, you can function, but you can't take on any more debt. If you're always all paid up, then you can function the one time when you need to sleep for three hours and then be up for an entire day. That's my theory, anyway.

(One key to this is not going to bed too early. Sometimes I'm tired in the middle of the day, and then sleep from, say, 6 to midnight. This fucks everything up.)

JohnQPasserby• 15 years ago

I would not be surprised to find posts about healing crystals on that site.

furyg3• 15 years ago

I really think people need to change their perspective on sleep. People wake up, do thing A,B,C,D,E ... "shit... I really wanted to do F-J today too, but I have to sleep!"

Sleep is not the enemy. Sleep is fantastic.

I'm no expert on sleep in general, but a good nights sleep makes me feel great upon waking up (usually for the rest of the day). I can remember things from the day before with much more clarity and recall, giving me a tremendous edge over those who didn't. Plus, I'm pretty sure it feels fantastic nearly the whole time I'm doing it... I just happen to be unconscious for that part. :) It certainly must be better than a good deal of the things I do while I'm awake.

A close relative of mine is on the uberman cycle. He's narcoleptic. He sleeps nearly instantly upon his head hitting the pillow (seconds, not minutes) and wakes up 15-20 minutes later, unable to continue sleeping. It's literally a nightmare, not only because the world is 'monophasic', but also because he's in a fog, can't focus/falls asleep when not moving (e.g. driving a car), and has a hard time distinguishing reality from dreams (since they all run together).

Thanks, but I'd rather continue hacking the other parts of my lifestyle to make room for more fulfilling activities, like sleep.

vorg• 15 years ago

The uberman (or everyman) schedule would be convenient to go on if you lived in a Middle Eastern country. You could just coordinate your 5 sleep times with the 5 daily minaret calls, and use a prayer mat to sleep on so you could blend in.

skore3• 15 years ago

To be fair - that's a problem of narcolepsy (if he indeed has that) and not polyphasic sleep. I have not tried uberman yet, but from my own experiences with everyman and from what I have read of others, it can actually help give you focus and clarity.

Whatever floats your boat, I guess?

jsilence• 15 years ago

The obligatory xkcd reference: https://www.xkcd.com/320/

forkrulassail• 15 years ago

I've done Uberman for 2 months at a time. I've found I can be highly effective in certain areas - like coding. However, the brain needs quite a bit of sleep for memories to stay longer term - so this isn't ideal for students or study. Another caveat is that your metabolism increases but you usually overcompensate consumption-wise. A lot of people that persisted with this for longer periods of time, gain quite a bit of weight - so if you're ready for that. Good luck with surviving the first two hell weeks. :)

polychrome2• 15 years ago

Can we add something next to article denoting whether it comes from a scientific peer reviewed source or just a blog?

Cl4rity• 15 years ago

Biphasic and/or polyphasic sleep doesn't seem to work...even on monks who have been doing it for several years:

http://mindhacks.com/2011/11/17/the-dreams-and-hallucination...

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

The simplest evidence against the thesis that all you really "need" is REM sleep is obstructive sleep apnoea.

I have OSA. I had it for years before it was diagnosed. I would go to bed and dream more or less non-stop for 10, 12, 14, 16 hours. All the REM sleep a man could ever want.

And I was still tired as buggery.

My idea of a good night's sleep is the deep dreamless kind.

Not to mention sleep's centrality to recovery from physical exercise.

echaozh• 15 years ago

Stop talking about "natural" sleep cycles or "natural" diet. Stop talking about how the homo sapiens evolved into sleeping or eating like this. I personally think our unwillingness to move away from our evolved instincts is the reason why we're not a more advanced species.

Sleeping at night is obviously a result of lack of light during the night. I don't believing sitting/lying consciously will be that different from sleeping unconsciously as to providing rest for our bodies. It's just a learned habit and we should be able to get over it.

Slavery and dictatorship is more natural, see how monkeys or any other animals group their society? Why don't we give up democracy for something more natural?

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