I was introduced to the concept of polyphasic sleep via Tim Ferris's book, The Four Hour Body. I was intrigued at the idea of adding hours to my day. I'm a father, husband, and business owner, a little bit ADHD and pretty much busy all the time so the idea that a fairly simple hack could substantively add time to my day was appealing to say the least.
Long version on wiki here. Short version of how to DO IT below.
1. Make a determination, right now, which is better between the two following options:
- Siesta – one single nap during the day. The obvious advantages simplicity, the obvious disadvantage is more modest benefit.
- Every man 2 – two naps during the day. This is what I tried and recommend.
There are other options but I think most people will agree they are definitely more advanced and more difficult and the above are not only a quicker proof of concept but probably sufficient for those of us for which polyphasic sleep is actually a good idea.
2. Make a determination, right now, which type of person you are:
- Just go – you totally comfortable just picking some nap times and proceeding
- Analyst – you gotta make at least one spreadsheet and read five websites before you proceed (this was me and I'll share my spreadsheet below)
3. Pick your nap times:
Just go - If you're the Just Go type, there is no step 3. (Tangent alert! - link is irrelevant to polyphasic sleep, just funny.) You can read the tips below, but if you're the Just Go type, you probably only needed the most scant little push to sanction the wild experiment (or pragmatic tool, depending on your perspective).
Analyst - If you're still here, you're an analyst and you'll like this spreadsheet. It's a Google spreadsheet. You can copy it if you like. It's not super polished and formula – slick, but it works for visualizing the Everyman 2. Leave comments here if you'd like to share an idea with me or request a change (or have a better one).
Social impact: I wanted to go to bed at the same as my wife - it's a lot easier for her to get behind this and support me if I'm not screwing up our relationship and communication. It's a lot easier for me to just get up earlier as opposed to staying up later, even though staying up later is my first instinct. In the long run, minimizing the impact on my family is much more important than hanging onto an eye via that I might be a night owl which is probably not really correct anyway.
Nap one: if I nap around 11 AM, it's when a lot of people are having lunch, including my business partner. Easy peasy.
Nap two: if I nap around 4 PM, I'm not absent for too much of the work day. Plus, as a consultant people kind of expect emails from me at all hours so if they get one of 6 PM it's not disruptive.
Snapshot of my spreadsheet:
4: Sleeping: Sounds easy to some but it might not be. Here are my tips:
- Pick your target sleep time, add a "time to get to sleep" time and commit to lay down until the timer on your phone goes off. I target 20 minutes sleep, 5 minutes to get to sleep. If I'm feeling like it might take longer, I'll add a few minutes to my 'get to sleep' time.
- Don't use an alarm, use a timer. If you're using your phone, turn it all off or put it in airplane mode.
- Pay attention to your breathing. It's a distraction from distraction and if you try for a while, it'll work. If it doesn't work right away, just assume it will and stick to it. You couldn't walk right away either but now you've probably got that handled.
- If you've been awake a long time and you're worried about not making your sleep target, stop worrying. It's more important to build the habit of laying there until the alarm goes off than it is to sleep the exact number of minutes. This will work itself out. Let go.
- Pay attention and adjust as needed. You're probably as smart as me, and what I've given you is a great head start. You'll need to figure out your own micro habit details based on… you. One example of this that I did for myself but did not include formally as a tip: paying attention to my breathing, I realized that it takes me a few minutes for my breathing to slow down. Presumably, my body is going from active in walking around to truly resting. I noticed this time period consistently and one adaptation that I made was to read for a few minutes before trying to sleep. I feel like reading still slows me down and gets me primed for sleep as a distraction as well. Fiction only. What you're reading must be made out of paper (electronics pump you up-YMMV).
5: Stick to it:
Try it for a while before making conclusions. According to what I read, I should be able to reduce my core sleep to about 4.5 hours if I have two successful naps. In my spreadsheet, you'll see that my "calculated" times show this, but my "wag" times show ~6 hours of core sleep. I'm going for a successful transition, as opposed to maximum awake hours so I'm still getting six hours core sleep. (Yes, this means I did the research and calculations and then just guessed because I liked my guesses better.) So far, waking up is not so difficult and if it proves out that I can wake up even earlier… Great. As it is I figure I have a net of about two additional hours a day, not bad.
By the way, Tim's book is really good, I highly recommend it though you don't need it if you're just looking for the sleep stuff, though there is a lot of interesting sleep info there and some stories.
Yeah, I even recommended it to my mom so it's not here just to make a buck. But if you are going to buy it, buy it from my link please.:
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