Polyphasic sleeping

So I wasnt sure which board to post this on, but since you can argue that general self-improvement is a part of fitness I decided to post it here.

Is polyphasic sleeping just a meme or is it something one should seriously consider if you wanna increase productivity?

Does anyone here have any experience regarding polyphasic sleeping?

what possible benefits/risks does it have?

Im not really considering the uberman-schedule, and I wont be considering it in the forseeable future. But the everyman-schedule might be something to consider.

I've never tried it, but having to take a 20 minute nap every 4 hours doesn't seem very convenient. Maybe every 6 wouldn't be bad. Idk. Maybe if you're a student who doesn't work it'd be okay

It doesn't mean six naps per four hours, that would be 12 hours of sleep every day. It means one nap every four hours for a total of six naps per day. In other words two hours of sleep a day, in other words a completely retarded idea. And in response to Other than a small number of people with some weird gene thing who can feel completely rested with 1-4 hours of sleep (you'd know by now if you were one of them), anything past biphasic is a meme, and biphasic isn't ideal because you will feel tired until you have the nap in the middle of the day, and then you'll have trouble sleeping that night due to the nap. If there was actually a magic cycle to only sleep 4 hours a day and function normally, don't you think everyone would do it?

Not a sleep scientist, but getting no full sleep cycles doesn't sound like a good idea desu

Also, if it wasn't a meme, I'd think the military would be using it to maximize the performance of soldiers

At this point, just a meme. No formal studies done, no proof, only internet forum anecdotes from faggots that allegedly did it once and it totally worked but then they stopped for some reason...
>bullshit

Biphasic sleep is pretty normal though if you go to sleep at a normal time, but it won't be divided like your chart shows. It will just be two four-hour sleeps with a brief waking period between.

Soldiers do use this, though generally only the ones in the field.

When you polyphasic sleep your body only gets REM sleep, which helps rest your mind and is the type of sleep that makes you feel rested.

When you sleep polyphasic you cut out the other larger portions of sleep known as SWS(slow wave sleep). SWS is the portions of sleep where the body repairs physical damage, grows, and recovers from physical activity.

Polyphasic sleep is fine if you never work out. If you lift or cardio you are essentially never "sleeping" and will get no gains and very quickly injure yourself.

This

Also if you miss a single nap you will feel like shit for AT LEAST 4 days before your body resets back to monophasic pattern.And by feeling like shit i mean the worst you've ever felt

It's complete crap and bullshit. Sleep your 8 hours, 16 hours is enough time.

I've done biphasic 90-minute when working two jobs for about a year. Missing the naps or sleeping badly for the nap kills for days. I can't imagine trying it while working out heavy.

I did biphasic a couple days a week when I had 2 jobs and it was great. I would go to the second job fresh & not even tired after taking an hour nap.

biphasic is the norm where I'm from. Never really worked for me though

I know one guy that did uberman (although I always knew it as ironman), for at least a number of years. 4-5 maybe. Never in that time did he sleep longer than 15 minutes at a time, and at the very least he's not dead. He said that while he was on that sleep schedule he never felt tired, and everything always seemed really bright and colorful, but he had trouble concentrating or focusing.

Now, his health isn't very good, but his health has never been good. He's got any number of problems, and probably won't live to see 50, but that was the case pre-polyphasic-sleep too.

So... yeah, take that for what it's worth.

not true

better explanation

What wasn't true?

Any time you think about trying an alternate sleep schedule, think of this:
For every genius that did an alternate sleep schedule, there are hundreds of others that did not.

No athlete as far as I know has been even remotely successful with an alternate sleep schedule. They all heavily favor a giant block of sleep, some even sleeping 10-12 hours in one go on heavy training days.
All we can deduce from this is that it might not kill you.

Humans (and thus the physiology and psychology of their brains) have evolved mostly under the context of a mono-phasic or bi-phasic sleep cycle, with little evidence for anything else.

I'm not going to suggest that a tri-phasic or more sleep cycle is bad for you, but to suggest that it's not bad for you (especially considering we know so little about how the brain, and even less about how the mind works, grows, recovers, etc...) just because you're getting the same volume of sleep is premature and potentially deleterious. There are many processes that take place in biology in general that definitely suggest that a single 8-hour sleep cycle is not the same as 4 2-hour cycles, and that sleeping during the day is not the same as sleeping at night, never mind how these two unknowns might interact.

If it's absolutely necessary you could probably do it for a little while and see no problems, even if it is dangerous. But long-term, personally I wouldn't take the risk.

I've felt incredibly rested by short afternoon naps before, but other times I just wake up feeling like shit.

I try not to take naps anymore, and just go to bed earlier.

But when I do take naps, it's usually because of exhaustion and I immediately enter REM sleep (because I dream), so I think napping several times a day to get those extra REM cycles makes some sort of sense. I don't know how that would work if you never had an extended sleeping period, though. I don't know, the whole thought of intermittent sleeping always sounded intriguing to me, but the problem is it would never work for someone who has an actual schedule.

>All we can deduce from this is that it might not kill you.

Yeah, pretty much. Or at least it might not kill you if your body is already on the verge of outright failing. Seriously, the guy is about 7'2" and he weighs like, 150lbs max. I can OHP him without much trouble. I'd call him a skeleton but I'm not sure he actually has bones.

I only mention him because at the very least he's proof that the extreme version of polyphasic sleep is *possible*. For everyone? Probably not.

You can't die from sleep deprivation unless you're literally physically stimulated to not sleep (Like you're being tazed at random intervals or something). Your body will literally shut down and force you to sleep before you get anywhere near that point.

>what are indirect effects, alex.

I wouldn't trust driving or any sort of high risk activity if I was doing something like that.

my point exactly.

Considering quite a few koreans have died from gaming for 3 days straight or so I'd have to think that sleep deprivation played a big part in their deaths

People have stayed up a lot longer than 3 days straight.

Give me one example of someone dying due solely to sleep deprivation.

Most of them die from heart failure due to exhaustion which I'm sure would have been avoided had they slept

I do this I sleep 4 hours and later in the day I sleep 2,5 hours. If I dont do this I need 8,5 hours to be rested the same as I am now ao I'm saving 2 hours.
I've been doing this for a year now and it works really well. On the off occasion I can't sleep mid day I got to bed 1 hour and 45 mins earlier in the night. I will get sleepy around 14.00 (when I usually take the 2,5 hour nap) but this ends by 15.00 and if this is the case it usually means I'm active so my body and mind stays alert. I think this works for me because my sleep cycles are around 1 hour and 15 mins so I get 3 full sleep cycles at night and 2 during the day resulting in 5 everyday. Also when I miss a day by going to sleep 1.45 hours earlier at night I still get 5 sleep cycles in that night making up for the lost sleep. And consistency is importabt aswell, if I can't sleep during the day for 3 days straight or for 2 days and then again 2 days my biorythm does get disturbed.