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matt comments on Group rationality diary, 8/20/12 - Less Wrong
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(Note that there are a few LWers attempting or contemplating polyphasic sleep right now. If you are considering it seriously we'd love your participation in a data collection effort on before and after cognitive performance.)
Polyphasic Sleep
How to have 19-22hrs of fun every day
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep/index.html
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep.zip
which includes at slides 114 and 115
and finally
My sleep tracks (which include masking sound including walla to drown out distracting conversation):
My schedule calculator: http://bit.ly/poly-schedule-tool
Going to mention my crackpot theory on why polyphasic sleeping might end up killing you again:
Polyphasic sleep drastically reduces the amount of deep sleep you get. Sleep helps the body heal. Human aging and mortality seem to be modeled well by a Gompertz curve, where the thing that kills you at old age is the body's diminished healing ability, which lets cancer precursors in the body stay unfixed long enough to grow into something that kills you.
So for all we know, throwing out 4 hours of deep sleep daily(*) for years on end might make you look a lot more like an 80-year-old, as far as the Gompertz curve modeled mortality is concerned.
ETA: (*) All non-REM sleep isn't deep (SWS) sleep, see below. According to online hypnograms of sleep stages, the deepest sleep stages mostly happen during the first three hours of sleep, so a sleep cycle that maintains a 3-hour core sleep should be significantly better than a sleep cycle like Uberman that runs solely on power naps. The 4 hours of deep sleep bit is probably an oversimplification.
ETA2: If the first three hours of sleep are the most important for making the body heal, would a sleep cycle where you have two core sleeps daily, for example 3 to 6 AM and 3 to 6 PM, keep you more healthy than a single 8-hour sleep?
I'm currently adapting to polyphasic sleep and have been consistently getting about 2h of deep sleep during my ~3h core (according to my Zeo). Contrast that with e.g. gwern's Zeo charts which show about 1h of SWS during an entire night of 8 hours. Note that even when his ZQ (~sleep quality) was about 100 (a "good" score) he was still getting about an hour.
...and I'm not even fully adapted. That said, I'm currently not getting quite enough REM, but I'm working on this.
How long have you been on the 3h core sleep so far?
About a week now. Just last night I had a much more appropriate distribution in my core, with a standard 1h of deep sleep and about 55mins of REM. This was accompanied by about 45mins of (wasteful) light sleep as well, but I woke feeling very refreshed thanks to the REM.
I'm planning to blog about this soon. Will link when I do.
The aforementioned blog post, which I wrote days later but forgot to post (and I just saw this thread again now).
Any more news?
I'm now biphasic—I sleep about 6h at night plus a 20min nap every day. This is by far the most stable & rested sleep schedule I've ever had. Before, when I was monophasic, if I tried getting a full night's sleep, I would typically be unable to fall asleep again at the same time as the night before, after a few days. Which meant that I would stay up a bit later (since I couldn't fall asleep anyway) and end up getting about 7h or so. On 7h of sleep, I was chronically sleep-deprived (would doze off in lectures etc) but at least I could fall asleep at the same time each night.
I've been biphasic for the majority of the last 8 months (except for christmas and missing a few miscellaneous days) and I love it. It just feels totally normal now.
What happened to the polyphasic phase? And how does the biphasic look on Zeo?
Oh, and the first question.
The polyphasic phase got messed up, I believe because I made my first nap too close to my core (2.5h) and so I wasn't properly waking up at that time. I tried fixing this over the course of a month or so, but by then I had really bad sleep habits (in terms of how I would respond to tiredness). Then I tried re-adapting (using an exaptation approach) at the end of last summer (about in time with Leverage), but it failed due to insufficient self-control / systems to keep me awake.
Then I switched to biphasic and have been really happy with it. I could see me trying a 2-nap, 4.5h core at some point, but at the moment I'm happy here.
Wow, I haven't been signed into LW in awhile.
Zeo has typically recorded about 2h each of REM, Light, and Deep sleep during my core, plus 8 mins REM during my naps.
I finally started actually charting this stuff just about a month ago, and so far can report: (all times in minutes)
Average bedtime = 230 minutes past midnight (stddev 62)
Nap typically 229.6 minutes after wake (76)
I am totally not a statistician, but models of sleep and my own data definitely support the conclusion that I get much more deep sleep when I go to bed earlier. Given this, I really need to start doing that. The three datapoints I have where I went to bed by 2:30, I got >= 2h deep, which only happened in one later-bedtime case (during which I also slept 7h total, fwiw, due to having missed a nap or something).
So I predict that when I start sleeping earlier I'll be back to the 2h of deep I mentioned initially.
I'm happy to throw this data at you for analysis. In theory my zeo has been logging it since over a year ago (and decrypted, thank god) but I don't know how to get it off so I've just been logging it in a spreadsheet daily. If you want the raw zeo file, you can have that too.
We get about as much REM and SWS (deep sleep) as monophasic sleepers - about 90mins each per 24hrs. This is one hypothesis to explain why so many people (me included) have so much trouble adapting to the original Uberman schedule (which, properly adapted, gives you 50+ mins each).
Hm, right. So the really deep SWS sleep seems to mostly happen during the first 3 hours of sleep, and the rest is alternation between REM and lighter sleep. Based on that, the Everyman cycle does look a lot more sustainable than full-on Uberman.
And, your body repartitions your sleep on a polyphasic schedule. My sleep really isn't like yours any more. See the bar charts waaaay down the page here: http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/post/8455/#p8455
Thanks for sharing all of the info. You mentioned the effects on cognitive performance, which is my main concern. There is an article here that is skeptical / critical of polyphasic sleep, claiming that it will have negative effects on cognition. I'm curious, do you have data for yourself? Just a subjective assessment? Either would be welcome, although of course the former would be more valuable.
Yah - Wozniak is fairly well known in the polyphasic community for having very strongly held views that are directly contradicted by the experience of polyphasic sleepers. See for example http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-polyphasic-sleep/.
I did not gather objective evidence of the differences in my cognition before and after polyphasic sleep, but any differences are small enough that they're invisible to me and those who live with me.
I think Wozniak is only evangelical about the Uberman schedule being a horrible idea. He states in his 2010 update that the Everyman 3-hour core sounds "pretty sustainable".
I tried the Everyman-3 for 1 day & found it completely intolerable. I slept for 3 hours late at night, took a nap before work, at lunch, & when I returned home. All day I was basically useless. I felt as if I had the Flu. My mood was severely depressed, my head felt as if it were in a vice, & I was "zoning out" continuously. If this only lasts a few days, I think I could push through it, but my main consideration is that if I make a mistake at my job or miss some minor detail, someone could have a serious reaction or die. For this reason I feel like this is an unacceptable price to pay.
Is there something I'm missing or is this only viable for people who are either unemployed or have work that is not cognitively demanding?
The first couple times I tried it, I had the exact same experience, though it took me a little longer to give up. What really helped me finally adjust was using nootropics. I had a lot of success with piracetam + choline + l-theanine after each nap, sometimes adding coffee when I needed it. I also used modafinil every other day for the first two weeks (I wouldn't recommend this though, since most people can't sleep on it).
The coolest thing about the modafinil (and to a lesser extent piracetam, etc) use during this period was that I could really see the difference between my sleep deprived self and my normal self, since modafinil completely erases all of the effects of sleep deprivation. On my previous attempts I did feel very useless, but I didn't realize the extent to which I just couldn't do things until I took modafinil on a particularly difficult day - it felt like someone gave me an entirely new brain. So it's really clear to me how much sleep dep actually impairs my ability to do things.
Thanks for sharing your experience, it is valuable data to have. From what I've read most people recommend NOT using stimulants & nootropics because they can damage sleep. Interesting that you were successful with it. Just out of curiosity, what sleep schedule are you on now & how long have you been doing it?
I'm still on the Everyman-3, and have been for about 7 months now.
Do you still regularly use nootropics and/or stimulants or was that just to get you through the adaptation period?
With regard to the piracetam combo, yes I still use that regularly. With modafinil, I wouldn't say regularly, since it's a little expensive to keep that up. But I didn't actively stop using it. I pretty much use the same amount as I did when I was monophasic - i.e when I have it, I take it on a semi-regular basis.
I have scheduled a week off of work to adapt to polyphasic sleep, so I don't have to worry about making mistakes while sleep deprived.
Following Matt's advice, I am not just adopting my desired schedule of everyman-3, but instead temporarily adopt a "uberman-12" schedule, that is, 12 20 minute naps a day, 1 every 2 hours. The idea is to train myself to get REM sleep during the 20 minute naps, because that is all the sleep that is available, while running off of reserves of slow wave sleep. I am going in expecting 3 hard days before I start getting the REM, at which point I start backing off the naps to 1 every four hours (standard uberman) until I run out of slow wave reserves at the end of the week when I add in the core and cut back to 3 naps a day.
I will also be skipping lunch and dinner on the day of my first night of adaption, which is supposed to help me adapt to a new sleep schedule. And keeping up an exercise routine. And I will have friends help keep me on schedule.
This sounds like a good plan. I admit I didn't do much research before giving it a try. I found a blog here where the author seems to be attempting a similar approach. The last entry is "Night 45" & he still seems to be struggling to adapt, so I would be cautious that scheduling 1 week may be on the optimistic side.
PureDoxyk writes about the adaptation periods in her Ubersleep book. She claims that the Everyman cycle takes a longer time to fully adapt into than the full Uberman. She says that it should take about a week of adaptation to feel mostly normal. She also tested her cognitive skill with a memorization test, and only got back to the pre-adaption level after 6 weeks, even though she was feeling subjectively fine after 3 weeks.
Yikes. 6 weeks of impaired cognitive function would be psychologically difficult for me to deal with, I think.
Even when 3 of them are weeks where you wouldn't notice the impairment unless you were specifically testing for it?
Well now that I know I can't un-know. Point taken though, I imagine the 1st 3 weeks would be bad & the last 3 more bearable.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep/index.html
This is now a 404.
(Came here to re-download the nap tracks, which still work fine :))
If that ever worked, it looks like Dropbox is no longer indexing:
Brilliant, thanks!
Another random fun thing I realized. I addition to being a lot like the first half of the reported archaic human bimodal sleep, an Everyman core sleep is also a lot like the first phase of the night's sleep done in the Wake-Back-To-Bed lucid dream induction technique.
Just tried a WBTB with 5 hours of initial sleep, and it led to a lucid dream (slept another 3 hours afterwards). 5 hours is pretty close to the Everyman-2 core sleep. I wonder if, in addition to being potentially nice for lucid dreams, adopting a bimodal schedule for a full night's sleep could be used as a stepping stone to adopting an Everyman sleep schedule, since you're training yourself to sleep no more than 4+ hours at a time.
I wish I had that schedule calculator earlier - I must have spent a couple of hours googling (#1 failure of my rationality skills) for one because I was sure someone had to have made it, given that all these polyphasic sleepers have oodles of free time.