frederic

Have you heard of polyphasic sleep before

This particular day, I was stumbling by boredom and I found Steve Pavlina’s blog which is dedicated to personal development. It immediately picked my interest and more specifically this post about polyphasic sleep captivated my attention.
Indeed, since I have been back from France, I have been quite unsatisfied with my life style and more specifically with my sleeping schedule. I got used to go to bed late, far beyond midnight and wake up late. The worst part was that I did not feel any rested. My energy level was low and I had difficulties to find the motivation to achieve my daily routine. Going to school itself became a hassle…

The first day I found this material, I red it entirely including definitions from Wikipedia online encyclopedia and other links. I weighted the pros and the cons… Immediately I felt excited. I talked about it to my flatmate and likewise, he enjoyed the idea. We both were on to start an incredible journey. At last, I remain alone. His lifestyle indeed does not allow such transition as he is having lots of classes and exams.

To make a long story short, the idea behind polyphasic sleep is to reduce your sleeping time from the usual average 8 hours per day to an amazing 2 to 3 hours per day. The method is simple, it requires shifting from the monolythic 8 hours sleep trunk to a set of 6 naps of 25 to 30 minutes each spread throughout the day every 4 hours.

Is it possible not to sleep more than 25 minute at a time? The research made by practitionners have demonstrated that it was completely feasable. A little understanding of the sleeping pattern is needed. When sleeping, the body goes into different phases of sleep: simply put, there is the non-REM slow-wave sleep and the REM sleep. REM sleep is popularly associated with dreaming. By shifting your body to polyphasic sleep, you actually make your body go immediately into the REM phase instead of much later in the sleep cycle. Of course it takes time to adapt, practitionners estimate it to approximatively one week but after that, everything will be on track and no sleep deprivation should be felt at all.

So I have decided to adapt my body to this new schedule. From today onward, I will try to blog on a daily basis about my experience and my feelings about it.

Please feel free to send me feedback and questions, I’ll be glad to answer you.