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Comment by bonniemuffin | Hacker News Reader

Having recently experienced raising an infant, let me tell you, getting all my sleep in <2 hour chunks is HORRIBLE, even if I'm getting a pretty reasonable total amount of sleep.

I was getting what this article suggests would be a viable polyphasic sleep schedule (total of 8 hours per 24 hour period, in chunks of 1-2 hours throughout the day and night whenever the baby slept), but I started hallucinating, got deeply depressed, and felt like I was losing touch with reality. All the symptoms vanished as soon as I started getting longer chunks of sleep at night.

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> getting all my sleep in <2 hour chunks is HORRIBLE

I can sympathise with this. My son spent about 18 months (from 4 months old onwards) only sleeping 45 -50 minutes at a time, before waking up crying. It felt like every aspect of our lives at that point was outside of our control and any attempt to organise ourselves or to co-ordinate outside assistance (in the form of family, friends, medical intervention) was an ordeal beyond our mental capabilities.

Things improved just before his 2nd birthday. He went from 45 minute sleep to 6 hour sleep in the course of two days.

> He went from 45 minute sleep to 6 hour sleep in the course of two days.

That must have been the happiest days of your life!

> That must have been the happiest days of your life!

We woke up and thought he had died. 10 minutes later everything was awesome.

I admit, I misinterpreted the sentence in the first read and was pretty shocked.

If you swap the conclusions of the two sentences it is pretty shocking indeed.

We had the same thought after the first night when my daughter slept through the night. We woke up at around 6AM thinking: "She's dead... She'll be just as dead in another hour, so let's get another hour of sleep."

This is verbatim what I told my wife and mother when my son slept 3 times its normal sleep length for the first time.

It took him 3 years to have a complete night.

Now a teenager, it takes me 20 minutes to drag him out ofbhis bed at 10 in the morning.

Had that exact same experience.

I’ll never forget that morning. Waking up with the sun up and immediately thinking the worst, then exuberant joy when figuring out he was fine, just sleeping well for the first time ever.

Although I don't have any belief in polyphasic sleep being true or not unless you were getting that sleep in extremely regular intervals - that is to say with exactly the same amount of time between each interval and with the time you slept during each sleep period also rigorously timed what you had would not be a viable polyphasic sleep schedule.

Since the polyphasic idea is to decrease the actual amount slept getting 8 hours also is going against the whole purpose of doing it.

I've raised two children, one of them with real sleep irregularities, and neither time did I have anything resembling what the adherents of polyphasic sleep would consider a reasonable schedule.

Oh man, raising an infant and sleep deprivation hit me too. For about a week, I had to just chart if I was awake or not and just sleep when the chart said to sleep...

Other than the couple of times where I ended up not sleeping for 24 hours, I thought the wake up/eat/sleep cycles around 2 hours were ok, but 3 hours was torture, the wakeup would always happen in the middle of deep sleep and really mess things up. Once it got over four hours, it all seemed fineish. Not a lot of memory retention from that period though. Pretty happy we had a good sleeper or I would have been wrecked.

Everybody's situation is different but in our case we did sleep training around 4 months and we had whole night sleep from then on - with a few minor regressions and a bit more training.

My wife found letting the baby cry out very difficult so I did have to be quite firm about it...

But my daughter is 8 now and doesn't seem the worse for it ... As far as I can tell.

Edit: only mentioning this in case anyone is in despair and wants to try something different.

Sleep training, so that's what they call it now.

My mom tells me it was standard practice back when I was born, they used to say it was good for their lungs as well, but she couldn't do it either.

They will eventually shut down in self-defense to escape the terror of being abandoned by their parents.

All I can say is it doesn't sound like a very good idea to me, no matter how convenient.

We've attempted this with our daughter several times from 6 to almost 10 months now.

Just can't do it, it feels wrong. Obviously not science-based, but we haven't been able to do it for more than a few days at a time.

We used the methods in this book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345497791/donhosek (there's a non-twin version as well) with good results. We didn't just let the kids cry it out, and we had kids sleeping through the night by three months and a regular sleep schedule at four months. It's worth noting that most young kids are sleep deprived and making sure that they get enough sleep makes a big difference in their overall behavior.

It's also worth noting with kids that once you figure out how to deal with them, they enter a new developmental phase and all the rules change.

I used the non-twin version, and recommend it to all my friends when they become parents. It changed our lives. Having a well-rested child makes a world of difference.

That's awesome.

What sorts of techniques did you try? Sort of a gradual letting them soothe themselves for longer and longer periods of time?

Yeah, I respect other people's decisions in this kind of subjects because not enough is known to be very sure.

But my feeling is that if nature makes babies cry (and do so in such a way that arises feelings of urgency, as every parent will know from experience) it's because it wants us to attend to them.

Of course, sometimes overriding nature's defaults can be a good idea, especially if one knows what they're doing. But it's not the case, so I'd rather err on the side of caution.

I think "convenient" may be a mild understatement. Many parents are enduring serious mental health issues because of their inability to sleep. I should say that was not our case.

> They will eventually shut down in self-defense to escape the terror of being abandoned by their parents

Perhaps. I don't think we actually know what's going on in a baby's mind. Children appear to be amazingly resilient and also quite logical.

But as with all such advice you have to respect your own instincts as a parent and take cognizance of what the child's temperament is like. It's always different.

I have two children, I get it. But no one ever promised it was going to be easy.

Lack of sleep wouldn't be as big of a problem if we didn't force parents to work as well as raising children. Children are our future, messing them up to fit our messed up society is not a long term solution.

I agree about trusting your instincts, but that's not what I'm seeing. When a child cries the typical parental instinct would be to hold them.

Nothing about this is convenient. Letting a baby cry and not providing comfort is emotionally shattering. Spending hours trying get a baby to sleep without abandoning them is exhausting. Caring for a sleep deprived baby is exhausting, physically and emotionally. Doing any of this without having enough sleep yourself makes it 10x worse.

The fact is, parents and babies both need to sleep to be healthy and happy. Most parents are trying to achieve that, and have to try a bunch of things before they figure out what works for their situation. Try not to judge.

How much crying without being tended to do you think is terrifying?

Most sleep training I have seen says to let them cry for up to 15 minutes before getting them.

We usually let ours cry for up to 5 minutes before picking her up. She would rarely cry for more than a minute or two before just falling asleep.

My 2yr old cries/screams so loud i'm starting to get hearing issues. And can do so for 1 whole hour until i give up first.

We had all kind of theories too, up to the moment we said fuck it and took our son with us into our bed.

We slept, oh sweet sleep. Zero guilt.

The second one was sleeping in his bed 3 seconds after putting him in. He still does at 14 yo.

You probably weren't getting much "good" sleep time. I know the anxiety of anticipating when the next wake up is going to be, it's like trying to sleep with one eye open.

Might be that your sleep was just short of a single cycle (1~2 hours usually) which, from what I understand, could feel the same as no sleep at all. Sleeping short chunks is probably only viable if you can be sure to fully complete a cycle every time.

That is one reason, why I tell people raising a child is a whole day job. However, often people will tell me something like: "Oh it cannot be that bad!" or "Nah, it's more like you can sleep 3-4h."

Well, I warned them.

What I read, real polyphasic sleep is extremely sensitive to delays — if you go to sleep 10 mins late or early that could already break the rhythm. The more sleep phases your polyphasic sleep has, the more important this gets.

I can't really imagine one would be able to keep that schedule accurately with an infant in the house.

I tried polyphasic sleep a month for fun, and this was my experience as well: feeling a bit out of touch with reality.

I've never done drugs, alcohol or tobacco, but I've been a messy sleeper most of my life. Night owl as long as I could get away with it, pulling all-nighters, sleeping a whole day, staying awake for a few days to set a personal record, etc. Even for me, polyphasic sleep was too disorienting, as if I wasn't fully awake when awake, and not fully asleep when asleep.

Yea, I experienced that too with a new kid. I think I aged 5 years in that one year.

I've heard more than one woman observe something to the effect of: "oh, so this is why I was able to party 48 hours straight in college without sleep!"

I think every parent relates to that at various degrees.

To future parents: congratulations. Also, take every possible opportunity to sleep. When baby sleeps, you sleep.

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