Triphasic Sleep
Reason for Triphasic
This is the page detailing everything about my Triphasic sleep pattern. The main reason why I wanted to start this is out of curiosity and a life goal of living for the experience. I can benefit greatly from the extra time and I don’t mind getting sleep deprived during the holidays. However, because of my working schedule, I need to spend a big chunk of time in the day with uninterrupted consciousness.
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Relevant Research
To modify polyphasic sleep based on my life’s need, I checked up on some documents about REM sleep. Wikipedia has a good explanation of what REM sleep is and also a section on polyphasic sleep pattern. Steve Pavlina’s site contains the most detailed account of his attempt at polyphasic. sleep pattern that separates the day into 6 chunks of 4 hours and his later attempt at adjusting it. I took his advices to heart and adapted a few of his suggestions to help in mine. In short, the important part about the beginning of polyphasic sleep is to train your body to get to REM state sooner than you are used to and it is ok to have 30 minutes naps if you feel too tired between sleep schedules.
Supermemo, a site I later read after my experiment, claims that the benefit of polyphasic isn’t as glamorous as most claimed, saying that humen have internal sleep cycles that dictates when it’s best to sleep in order to hit that perfect REM state. I also looked up the web on previous researches that were done on sleep cycle and came up with this site that hosted this graph. Added later: Sleep is essential for memory formation. (Wiki backup)
Decisions
At first, a simple biphasic sleep seem to be the best option, but reading up upon it led me to believe that the benefit isn’t as great as it claimed because most of the people in the biphasic pattern tend to take some extra hours during weekends to catch up on sleep, which defeats the whole purpose of polyphasic sleep. The biphasic schedule invovles a short 1.5 hour nap in the afternoon and a core 4~5 hour sleep in the early morning. I’ve read quite a bit about polyphasic sleep now and decided to try my own experiment with Triphasic sleep pattern. The reason is numerous, but mostly because of my professional and my previous experience with biphasic sleep pattern. Back when I was still a competitive ballroom dancer, I had to separate my day into two chunks. The day time is for brain work, studying and working while the night time is for physical exertion that fine tunes the motor memories. It makes sense to nap in the afternoon and wake up as if facing a new day. Later, after I got the challenging job of being an engineer, I always collapse after I get home so my brain can shut down and regenerate The graph indicate that I will get through a complete cycle of sleep pattern in 90~110 minutes and will be the basis of my strategy. I decided to apply this with my “Boiling Frog Learning” strategy and slowly transition into the hard schedule to experience the least amount of rejection from my body.
The first stage will involve separating the sleep schedule to three different time with at least a 1.5 hour sleep (Hence 2 naps of 1.5 hours at 5PM, 12AM and a longer sleep of 4 hours at 4AM to 8AM). Once that is established I can then move on to reducing the amount of sleep that I take on each nap. For the impatient you Is polyphasic as good as everyone claims or is it just a hoax that people use to lure you to their site? Let me point out the fact that whatever I am saying is from my own revelation after my experiment. Polyphasic is not for everyone, it really depends on your life style choice. The one benefit that this gives you is more time and we all know that time is priceless. The drawbacks however are numerous.
What eventually stopped me is a simple inconvenience that almost everyone overlooked: sore eyes. I went at this with the wrong reason in mind, I wanted to have more time so I can get more work done. Little did I know that we have other physical limitations. It is however, great for new parents taking care of children, or people in weird shift work that doesn’t have to stare at a computer for long duration. It favors physical activity and reflex related actions while presenting a major challenge to those who travel the labyrinth of the mind to find a new idea, solve new problems. It’s like studying math in the Sunday morning with a hangover. You can still do it, but it takes longer.
Another major concern that is overlooked by many is a very basic human emotion: desire. Say that you have 6 hours to study after spending 8 hours to work. Can you study all those 6 hours even if you are not tired? Maybe if it’s in something you want to do, but what about a subject like history? This along with the sore eyes, are going to be two major roadblock that the future drug enhanced version will have to come face to face with. Yes we can all stay awake longer, but can we actually take advantage of it? One last advice before you charge headlong into it without reading anything else. WATCH OUT FOR THE COLD. During these time of adjustment, your immune system will be lower, making your more likely to catch a cold. Do the necessary preparations. Consume vitamin C, eat fruits, use mouth wash in the morning.
Daily Log
Here, details my log on a transition to Triphasic and training myself to induce REM state sleep right away.
Day 5: Temptation 1 Triphasic 0
Day 6: A glimpse of the future
Day 7: Hazards of sleep deprivation
Day 8: Guitar Hero 2 saves the day
Day 9: In comes the vegetarian diet
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