Polyphasic sleep: A guide to sleeping only 2-3 hours a day!

Warning: I cannot be held responsible for any permanent mental or physical damage that may be inflicted upon trying the methods I will be explaining below.

Sleep, it’s a basic human need.  Everyone’s body gets tired eventually and will need to recharge. We achieve this by lying snugly in our beds (some might prefer the couch) for approximately eight hours a day as recommended by researchers and scientists. But I know that there are times when there just isn’t enough time to sleep in the busy schedule that comes with being in school. I’ve wondered to myself in the past how much more productive (depending on how you define this term) my days would be if I hadn’t spent a third of it unconscious.  Recently I have been surfing on the internet and discovered that there are many different types of sleeping patterns.  The most common sleep patterns are the ones that normal everyday people would use: monophasic and biphasic.

But these sleeping patterns requires a total sleeping time of at least six to eight hours everyday, which can easily be cut down by switching to the Uberman (cool name, right?) sleeping schedule.  This sleeping pattern involves taking 20 minute naps six times a day (every four hours) for a total sleeping time of only two hours!  For example: if you went to sleep at midnight, you would wake up at exactly 12:20 a.m. and not sleep again until 4:20 a.m. Then wake up at 4:40 a.m. sharp and wait until 8:40 a.m., and so on.  This may be hard, but imagine the six extra hours of free time that comes with this!  Now some may be sceptical of how its possible to achieve this, rest assured I will explain.

So how does it work? To explain how this method works, I must first explain the different stages of sleep.  There is NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) and REM (Rapid Eye Movement), and the REM stage is responsible for producing dreams, and the feeling of being well rested.  Now in a normal eight hour sleeping pattern, REM sleep occurs about four times (for a total of 1.5 hours), however, it does not occur right away due to NREM. What the Uberman method does is that it trains your brain to immediately fall into REM sleep every time you fall asleep.  This means that two hours of REM sleep is actually achieved throughout the day, more so than sleeping for eight hours straight!  However, attempting this method is also not easy. Your brain will feel very deprived of sleep for the first few days, which is how it will be trained to instantly fall into REM stage sleep.  Punctuality is also of the essence, since missing one nap out of the entire day can mess everything up, and same with sleeping for longer than required.

With that I wish the best of luck to those of you that will consider trying this for fun, or are actually in desperate need of extra homework hours!

For the 99% of the others that probably won’t, I hope this was a fun read and that I’ve passed down a new piece of knowledge!