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Cutting sleep down to 6, or 4, or 2 hours per day sounds fantastic. It also sounds like something that should have evolved naturally if it were possible.

From the Polyphasic Society:

Humans are naturally polyphasic sleepers. Depending on the culture, humans will either have segmented night sleep, or nap throughout the day.
The reason humans sleep polyphasically is to improve sleep density, sleep stability, and for the warriors out there decrease overall time asleep. Humans need sleep, but only certain stages of sleep are important for us to recover each night.

Has any serious research been done into polyphasic sleep and its side effects?

Polyphasic sleep involves sleeping more than once per day at regular intervals and for regular amounts of time. There are different specific regiments, but the overall goal is usually to reduce the total time spent sleeping.

Ben Lerner
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  • I seem to recall a study where it was found that if people were living in a constricted environment where they did not notice the rise and setting of the sun, they reverted to sleeping twice over a 24h period. I haven't found the research, though (hence the comment, and not an answer). I'm guessing that humans have evolved to be awake as much as possible of the time when we can make good use of the daylight. My cat has evolved to sleep pretty much all the time. etc. – David Hedlund Mar 18 '11 at 14:24
  • @David I think I read that study as well, and recall that they also found the the people starting living more of a 26 hour day. – morganpdx Mar 18 '11 at 17:16
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    Anecdotal: When I have more work to do than time, I slip into an "everyman" schedule - a 3 hour core sleep, then 20 minute naps every 5 hours (4 hours total sleep daily). The first time I did this for an extended period (more than several days in a row) it took about a week to get to the point where my sleep urges again matched my polyphasic sleep schedule. During this time I wasn't as alert and mentally capable as I prefer to be when I'm awake. After the adjustment, though, I was as productive as during the day on a regular schedule. There were no other side effects. – Adam Davis Jun 25 '11 at 18:11
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    For this to evolve naturally, it would have to have considerable advantage, and a lot of luck. What point is there to be awake when you can't really do anything since it's dark everywhere? Evolution is extremely limited - there's plenty of things we can do that evolution can't :) – Luaan Sep 23 '15 at 08:16
  • Interesting concept, but I'm not willing to try it after seeing [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_No_More_%28Doctor_Who%29). – hudsonsedge Dec 06 '15 at 21:35
  • Your first sentence is false. As noted right below in your definition of polyphasic sleep, you wouldn't be cutting down to 6, 4, or 2 hours *per day*. You'd be cutting down to that *multiple times per day*. – WakeDemons3 Jan 29 '18 at 21:01
  • This old question had a close vote. Don't do that please. [Read this](https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3307/what-should-be-done-about-properly-answered-non-notable-old-questions) and improve the question. –  Aug 29 '18 at 07:26
  • Do you want to check out how "polyphasic sleep" works on a very large share of the population? Ask any parent with a baby how their sleep schedule is and how productive they are during the day. – T. Sar Aug 29 '18 at 11:45
  • @T. Sar: I suspect that the idea for polyphasic sleep is to work with natural sleep cycles. My son had no regard for our sleep schedules as a baby, so I don't think my quasi-zombie state is typical for polyphasic sleep. – David Thornley Aug 30 '18 at 17:54
  • @DavidThornley That is the point! The polyphasic sleep is even more extreme than the regular sleeping habits than new parents, so if we as humans have an extreme difficulty to adapt to a regimen of "any number of short naps you can get while baby is asleep", I seriously doubt that one is able to stick to such an extreme sleep schedule and still be productive. – T. Sar Aug 30 '18 at 20:12

2 Answers2

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There is little research published in scientific journals about conscious adoption of extreme sleep patterns.

In 2000 PureDoxyk proposed the Uberman schedule: Every four hours you sleep 20 minutes.

It takes a lot of willpower to adopt a sleep pattern like Uberman that only allows 2 hours of sleep per day. People need a deep inner desire to adopt such a schedule or there will be no compliance with the experimental setup.

Most people who try to adopt the Uberman schedule fail very soon. There are some such as Steve Pavlina or Tynan claim to have followed the schedule and produced a detailed account of the experience at their website. Steve Pavlina quit the schedule after 5 1/2 months. Tynan quit after 4 1/2 months. PureDoxyk quit after 6 months. They all cite impracticality of having to sleep every 4 hours as reason for quiting.

There's a Time article from 1943 that reports Buckminster Fuller to have spent two years on a polyphasic sleep shedule with two hours per day he called dymaxion sleep.

To my awareness there's no contemporary person who upheld the schedule for multiple years.

Even if it's possible to keep up with the Uberman schedule it doesn't seem to worthwhile or those people would probably have continued with it.

As far as short term side effects goes there seems to be mental effects. We unfortunately don't have much more than self reporting about most of the polyphasic sleepers. I will therefore write a bit which is my own understanding from reading about polyphasic sleep.

A lot of polyphasic sleepers report to be more productive during the time they are on the schedule. Polyphasic sleep forces you to do detailed time management or you screw up. The forced time management might account for the gain in productivity.

It's my understanding that the mental state is similar to the state of calmness, that's reached through doing a lot of meditation. The sleepers might therefore perform better on some tasks.

On the other hand long deep problem solving such as making mathematical proofs might suffer.

In a lot of the polyphasic sleep writing you find the claim that those who practice the Uberman schedule are in the REM state when they sleep. It's my understanding that Claudio Stampi showed in Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep that this isn't what happens when people adapt to short nap based sleep.

What about sleeping 6 hours? There was a huge study that concluded that people who sleep 6 hours have a longer life span than those that sleep 8 hours. Correlation isn't causation and this doesn't mean that you will be healthier when you cut your sleep to 6 hours. It however makes it plausible that a 6 hour sleep schedule could be healthy.

If you want to understand more about polyphasic sleep cycles there's a mailing list and a forum. The forum is run by the Zeo guys who produce equipment to measure sleep states. With a bit of luck they will be able to gather enough data in the coming years to publish a bit on polyphasic sleep schedules.

it also sounds like something that should have evolved naturally if it were possible.

The ability to stay awake for 12 hours without pause is quite valuable. People who practice the Uberman schedule lose the ability. If you are a hunter gatherer you don't profit very much from being awake at night. It's harder to protect yourself when you don't stay near the fire that your tribe lighted during the night. I would note that the sleep practices of a person in the western world who sleep in a bed without a nearby fire are very different from the sleep practices according to which we developed.

Christian
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    Very nice answer. – Uticensis Mar 21 '11 at 04:08
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    Nice answer but polyphasic sleep covers any sleep pattern that is broken up in multiple (disparate) pieces. The [afternoon siesta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta) was a big part of culture for a very long time in Spain at least and therefore presumably people have safely practiced polyphasic sleep for large parts of their lives. The less severe versions like SPAMAYL seem more attainable. – w00t Nov 25 '11 at 10:17
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    @w00t: Technically, perhaps, but the question specifies these more severe types, and I think this is the common-sense interpretation of "polyphasic." The siesta model is bi-phasic and has a massive core sleep; it's hardly in the same ballpark as uberman or dymaxion. Also of interest might be [Piotr Wozniak's](http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm) work, which finds that when people engage in free running sleep, they converge to a ~7.5hr core with a ~20-25min afternoon nap. Neat. – Hendy Jan 12 '12 at 01:24
  • @Hendy looks like we both agree on the same things :-) – w00t Jan 13 '12 at 13:54
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    I agree about evolution: electricity is the only thing that allows people to be useful at night, and it's been enough for too little time. – coverback Feb 14 '13 at 20:14
  • My personal experience is similar to @Christian's post, on extreme Uberman where I'd live on 1h sleep a day for weeks at a time (and switching back and forth between 1h and 4h a day of regular naps for 3-6 months at a time), I would function normal, be calm, work 7 days straight in a lab with 20 minute naps at certain times of day and get boat-loads done but unable to grasp difficult mathematical concepts until I broke my sleep patterns and went back to monophasic (one deep sleep) of 4-6h a day after which the math became doable. – Jan Vladimir Mostert Aug 13 '15 at 19:32
  • I want to also point out that "Uberman" is not the only polyphasic sleep schedule and moreover many of those who advocate for polyphasic sleep do not recommend it at least as far as I am aware. Even a hyposleeper - genetically gifted 1%ers that sleep significantly less than normal without ill effect naturally - can only get to ~4 h (~15 ks) per night, I believe. – The_Sympathizer Sep 05 '18 at 08:24
  • This answer just seems a little too heavy focused on Uberman. The asker mentioned dialing it down in 2 h (7.2 ks) increments, including up to 6 h (equiv. ~22 ks) per "night" but split up. – The_Sympathizer Sep 05 '18 at 09:22
  • @The_Sympathizer : Feel free to write an additional answer that has a different focus. – Christian Sep 05 '18 at 15:49
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The Wikipedia article on polyphasic sleep gives some interesting pointers such as this study for the NASA:

NASA, in cooperation with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, has funded research on napping. Despite NASA recommendations that astronauts sleep 8 hours a day when in space, they usually have trouble sleeping 8 hours at a stretch, so the agency needs to know about the optimal length, timing and effect of naps. Professor David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine led research in a laboratory setting on sleep schedules which combined various amounts of "anchor sleep," ranging from about 4 to 8 hours in length, with no nap or daily naps of up to 2.5 hours. Longer naps were found to be better, with some cognitive functions benefiting more from napping than others. Vigilance and basic alertness benefited the least while working memory benefited greatly. Naps in the individual subjects' biological daytime worked well, but naps in their nighttime were followed by much greater sleep inertia lasting up to an hour.

But David Dinges (major American sleep researcher) concludes:

Dinges notes another finding of their study: Naps are a short-term fix, offering only temporary boosts in mental acuity. "They cannot replace adequate recovery sleep over many days," he says. In the end, there's no substitute for 8 sweet hours of shut-eye.

Franck Dernoncourt
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