Polyphasic Sleep Cycles

[ysabetwordsmith]

This article explains about different sleeping patterns.  If you have the kind of insomnia where you can only sleep for a few hours at a time, then you're exhausted trying to stay up all day -- try something different.  Your body may be wanting more periods of sleep that are shorter.

Comments

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I've noticed that I seem to be naturally geared towards sleeping 4 to 5 hours at night and then grabbing a 2 hour nap once I get home from work. It might be worth trying one of the other methods, however. Maybe I'll give the Everyman cycle a go, just to shave off another hour or two of sleep time.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. Explore and see what works for you.

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

It's worth reading the comments as well, since most of them note that extreme polyphasic sleep cycles aren't something that most people can do without suffering harm.

Having said that, I read an article a couple of years ago on biphasic sleep (two sleep periods) that suggested this was the dominant pattern in the Western world prior to the Industrial Revolution: sleep 3-4 hours, get up for a couple of alert hours, then go back to sleep for another 3-4 hours. This is what my body does naturally, not all the time but quite frequently, and I spent most of my life fighting it, and believing I suffered from terrible insomnia because I'd so often wake up in the middle of the night and lie awake. After reading that article, I decided to treat it as normal for me and just roll with it. So now I get up, do some sort of quiet activity until I'm sleepy again, and then go back to bed, and I feel more productive and a lot less frustrated with my body.

My husband, on the other hand, needs at least 10 solid back-to-back hours of sleep or he's dragging all day.

So it's definitely worth experimenting around with one's own sleep cycle and finding what works best. I suspect that most people have an optimal cycle that works best for them, which may or may not be the standard 8-hour night cycle that is strictly standard in the modern western world. But if you are, say, a 10-hour night sleeper, then you're probably never going to be able to shift yourself onto a polyphasic cycle without being sleepy and unhappy.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

It's really all about paying attention to your own body, and not trying to force it into a preconceived pattern if that's not working. It helps to know that there are different options out there. So if you notice that your body doesn't easily mesh with a monophasic sleep pattern, see if any of the polyphasic ones look similar to the pattern when you feel alert/drowsy.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I keep waking up early lately, so maybe I should give something like that a try. I have trouble "napping", though, since I usually need at least an hour to relax enough to sleep.

The whole "Everybody can adjust to that if they want to!" thing bothers me a bit, since if it became generally accepted it'd seem to work for the idea that having to work two jobs to make ends meet would be all right ("anybody who sleeps for more than 3 hours a day is just not trying hard enough!"), but spreading the idea that different people have different needs when it comes to sleep is definitely a good idea.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I tend to discount anything that says "everybody/all" or "nobody/never" etc. Those are very likely to be overgeneralizations. It is no more true that everyone could adapt to a polyphasic sleep cycle than a monophasic sleep cycle. Humanity is diverse. Consider the options, don't leap to conclusions.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I've experimented a few times with different sleep patterns, though never any as extreme as these. Unfortunately, the ones that worked best for me (A bi-phasic similar to what laylalawlor describes below, a "4 down, 8 up" biphasic, and an extremely late-starting monophasic that bordered on being nocturnal) aren't really compatible with my current work schedule, which itself depends on UPS/USPS pickup times, and so has only a limited amount of flexibility.

[natalief.livejournal.com]

My sleep "lack-of-pattern" is roughly biphasic, often totally random and dictated by the MonSter and its fatigue.