Polyphasic sleep

splitting sleep

Polyphasic sleep is the practise of splitting your sleep into different sessions, to reduce the overall time spent asleep.

The Theory:

The main idea is that normal sleep contains a lot of ‘light sleep’ (NREM) that isn’t particularly restorative. By restricting your sleep, the body adapts by compressing sleep cycles and entering REM/deep sleep almost immediately.

Pros:

• More time

  • You get more time to live, complete tasks/chores, etc. This is the biggest pro (and lowkey the only one I can think of) of polyphasic sleep, you effectively live more of your life.

Cons:

• Unsustainable

  • Uni schedules, placements, social events etc don’t align with rigid polyphasic schedules.

• Long-term safety

  • There is a lack of rigorous, long-term studies on polyphasic sleepers, mostly because most practitioners abandon it during the adaptation phase (first 1-2 weeks of polyphasic sleep). The function of sleep is still largely unknown, and NREM likely does play some restorative function that would be impaired by a polyphasic schedule.

  • It’d be interesting to see something like polyphasic sleep combined with sleep peptides like Epitathlon and Pinealon. Users of these grey market peptides report they experienced the ‘deepest sleep’ and this might help alleviate some of the long and short term effects of polyphasic sleep.

I’d be interested in trying this someday, I nap basically almost every day currently and this might make it easy to transition to a biphasic or 'Everyman’ schedule.

That’s about it for today guys, hope you enjoyed and learnt something new!