Having stumbled across a thread on a forum I frequent on polyphasic sleep, I decided to look into it. What I’ve stumbled upon sounds rather interesting, and for more reasons than I care to get into right now (ironically, I’m tired).
I will soon post information on what exactly polyphasic sleep is, as well as the details of my own little experiment for all of you to enjoy. To put it briefly, you are just breaking sleep up into many chunks rather than one solid block. There are MANY theories from sleeping 20 minutes every hour to breaking your sleep down into two phases. This biphasic sleep is what I will be trying. I will also try to convert myself to become an early riser. My desired shedule will be to fall asleep around 12:30, rise at 5 AM and then take a 90 minute nap at 1:30 PM (perhaps earlier, depending on how I feel and how things evolve.) I got these numbers from the theory that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes. I will probably end up taking a nap and timing the length of it to attempt to figure out what my personal cycle actually is. To make things more interesting, it appears they change over time.
Anyways, look foward to next week when I’ll throw some links up here and detail my plans.
Here is a quote from Glen Rhodes‘ site in which he desrcibes his method, from which I derived mine:
“Studies show that the length of sleep is not what causes us to be refreshed upon waking. The key factor is the number of complete sleep cycles we enjoy. Each sleep cycle contains five distinct phases, which exhibit different brain- wave patterns. For our purposes, it suffices to say that one sleep cycle lasts an average of 90 minutes: 65 minutes of normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement), sleep; 20 minutes of REM sleep (in which we dream); and a final 5 minutes of non-REM sleep. The REM sleep phases are shorter during earlier cycles (less than 20 minutes) and longer during later ones (more than 20 minutes). If we were to sleep completely naturally, with no alarm clocks or other sleep disturbances, we would wake up, on the average, after a multiple of 90 minutes–for example, after 4 1/2 hours, 6 hours, 7 1/2 hours, or 9 hours, but not after 7 or 8 hours, which are not multiples of 90 minutes. In the period between cycles we are not actually sleeping: it is a sort of twilight zone from which, if we are not disturbed (by light, cold, a full bladder, noise), we move into another 90-minute cycle. A person who sleeps only four cycles (6 hours) will feel more rested than someone who has slept for 8 to 10 hours but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed… ”
2 Trackback(s)