Comment by dgreensp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgreensp | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, there's some good technical knowledge here, and also some FUD.

I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long-term damage. So until better evidence comes along, I believe that maintaining schedules like Uberman is possible for the right person in the right place and time, and not trivially a bad idea. For all I know there are good reasons for most people not to bother with it -- like some gene you need to have to succeed -- but we don't know yet.

As drx points out, the author strays into arguments like "abnormal means unhealthy". Another bizarre argument is "it's not optimal because you're less creative etc". Putting aside my own anecdotal evidence that sleep dep makes you more "creative", look -- if Uberman is actually sustainable and gives you X more waking hours per day, I'll decide for myself if that's outweighed by hypothetical cognitive deficits! Arguments like "lots of people have tried and failed" are also sloppy.

"I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long-term damage."

Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't cause obvious, self-evident damage at the time, and it's not always obvious to the person who's experiencing it. But it can cause serious, serious problems over time. That is essentially the effect of sleep apnea. The effects are subtle enough that an enthusiastic confirmation-biased person would easily miss them over a period of "several months or more", but they're real and they get worse over time.

As I said in another one of my comments, sleep deprivation, in my opinion, isn't actually the key part of polyphasic sleep. You can sleep 6 or 7 hours polyphasically, too, and this will increase your productivity and creativity than sleeping the same amount monophasically.

Sleeping biphasically for 7 hours or so works because that's what humans are wired for. Maybe taking two or three naps instead of one is better than taking none at all, but without the sleep dep you might as well just go biphasic. The main selling point of polyphasic is the sleep dep.

Indeed... in a short period of time where you must do X, polyphasic makes a hell of a lot of sense. As a long term strategy, I can't believe it's healthy. I'd rather not meddle with the default operation of a complex system I don't really understand, so usually I sleep until I feel like waking up - there are very few leisure activities that I'd rather do than be consistently well rested.

For another anecdote, when I did polyphasic sleep for about 2 weeks, I felt consistently at 80-90% of my creative peak. On a normal schedule, I'll vary from 40-100% throughout the day. So I don't know if I could have done my best work, but I could have done more good work.

Unfortunately kids, wife, and job didn't cooperate with staying on polyphasic sleep.

For yet another one, I just woke up from a 30 minute nap, and have been sleeping polyphasically for the past two weeks. (Did this for a month last summer, too.)

I think the reason it keeps me more creative is that it's always morning. You are never more than 6 hours from waking up. And, when I've been awake for 6 hours, I start getting tired... take 15 minutes to relax... then take a 30 minute nap, and can get back to what I was doing with renewed vigor.

(I don't think it's the sleep deprivation that is the key part of polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep with 8 hours of sleep a day - say, 4 two-hour naps - would still be polyphasic sleep. You do not have to be sleep deprived to sleep polyphasically. People assume that sleep deprivation comes with it, because when you sleep polyphasically, you need less sleep. Messed up cause and effect here.)

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