The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [121]
There are hundreds, if not thousands, who swear by the Thomas Edison approach to minimalist sleep, which bears little resemblance to “sleep” as you know it.
I have used both the “Everyman” and “Siesta,” detailed in this chapter, with great success. I reserve anything resembling “Uberman” for emergency deadlines only. To explain the options and pitfalls of each, I’ll let a more experienced polyphasic sleeper, Dustin Curtis, tell you his story.
Enter Dustin Curtis
My body is incompatible with Earth.
It has a daily sleep-wake cycle that lasts about 28 hours instead of 24, which means each day I stay awake about four hours longer than most people. In the middle of the week, I sometimes find myself waking up at 11:00 P.M. and going to bed in the early afternoon the next day. When I was younger, people thought I was insane. The only thing I remember of elementary school is being tired.
Eventually, I discovered that if I stuck to a 28-hour schedule, my body was happy. I woke up rested, went to sleep tired, and everything worked great. Except that, well, my life was incompatible with the rest of the world. Living with a normal schedule was going to be tough, so I had to find a solution.
After some research, I discovered that what I probably have is called non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome. The solution is polyphasic sleep, which anyone can use to shave six hours off their normal sleeping time (with a catch, of course).
HELLO, POLYPHASIC SLEEP…
The basic premise of polyphasic sleep is that the most beneficial phase of sleep is the REM phase. Normal sleepers experience REM for a mere 1–2 hours per night. To reap the benefits of polyphasic sleep, we’ll need to engineer things so that REM is a much higher percentage of total sleep.
One of the ways to force your brain into REM sleep and skip the other phases is to make it feel exhausted. If you’ve gone 24 hours without sleep, you might notice that you drift away into dreams straight from being awake. This is because your body goes instantly into REM sleep as a protection mechanism. The way to hack yourself into entering REM sleep without being exhausted is to trick your body into thinking you’re going to get a tiny amount of sleep. You can train it to enter REM for short periods of time throughout the day in 20-minute naps rather than in one lump at night. This is how polyphasic sleep works.
There are actually six good methods to choose from. The first one, monophasic sleep, is the way you’ve probably slept your whole life. The five others are quite a bit more interesting.
With monophasic sleep, you sleep for eight hours and you get about two hours of good REM sleep. This is the normal schedule most people use, and it means about five hours of the night are lost to (as far as we know) unnecessary unconsciousness.
There are five methods for polyphasic sleep that all focus on many 20-minute naps throughout the day and, in some cases, a couple hours of core sleep at night. The simplest is the “Siesta” method, which includes just one nap in the day and then a huge chunk of sleep at night. Remarkably, adding just one nap during the day shaves an hour and 40 minutes off your total sleep requirement.
The “Everyman” method is just a stepped ladder that offers different combinations of naps and core sleep. The amount of total sleep per day is drastically reduced for each extra nap you add.
The “Uberman” method, coined by PureDoxyk, has six naps and no core sleep. Amazingly, you can function with just two total hours of sleep using the Uberman method.
THE CATCH
How awesome would it be to sleep a total of two hours a day and feel rested? Very awesome, of course, but there is a catch. The more naps you have (and thus the less sleep you have total), the more rigorous you have to be regarding your nap times. You can’t miss a nap by more than a couple hours in the Everyman 2 and Everyman 3 methods, and you must have your naps within 30 minutes of their scheduled times for the Uberman method.