C re a te Th e Fi l te r Yo u s h o u l d fo l l o w m e o n tw i tte r

My body is incompatible with Earth.

It has a daily sleep-wake cycle that lasts about 28 hours instead of 24 hours,
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 11PM 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, well, that 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. There’s a way to fix it using
a hack called polyphasic sleep, which is
really fascinating and can be used by
anyone. It can shave 6 hours off your normal
sleeping time (with a catch, of course).

But first, about sleep...

 A lot of people believe sleep has been
proven to repair or rehabilitate the brain and
body, but this is not necessarily true. We
don’t really know much about sleep. There’s
no clearly defined biological reason for it,
and it is intuitively an evolutionary
disadvantage.

In the late 1930’s, a wealthy amateur scientist named Alfred Lee Loomis and his colleagues watched an
EEG monitor for brain electrical activity during sleep, and they made a pretty remarkable discovery: there
are actually five main parts to each of several phases of sleep that occur during a normal night. One of
these stages is called REM (rapid eye movement), and it is where most of the benefit of sleep comes
from. Ironically, it is in REM sleep that the brain looks the least asleep. In fact, it looks awake. This is the
phase where dreams occur.

It seems that all you really need to survive and feel rested is the REM phase, which is only a tiny portion of
your actual sleep phases at night. You only spend 1-2 hours in REM sleep during any given night, and the
rest is wasted on the other seemingly useless phases. This is where the opportunity to hack the brain
presents itself. What if you could find a way to cut out the other phases and gain 4-5 more hours of
productive wakeful time?

Hello, polyphasic 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 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 2 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 possibly
a couple hours of core sleep at
night. The most simple 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 forty minutes off your
total sleep requirement.

The “everyman” method is just a

stepped ladder acting as a
guide to show how much core
sleep to have for any number of
naps. The amount of total sleep
per day is drastically reduced
for each extra nap you add.

The “uberman” method 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 2 and
3 “Everyman” methods, and you must have your naps within 30 minutes of their scheduled times for the
Uberman method. If you miss a nap, the whole schedule is thrown off and you’ll feel tired for days.
 Thankfully, when I can keep to one of these schedules, I'm able to ignore my body's abnormal internal
clock and just stay awake all day and all night with minor 20-minute interruptions.

The rigor of keeping the schedule makes most of these methods unrealistic for most people. But if you
have a flexible schedule and can manage to pick a method and stick with it for several months, you’ll find
that you feel amazing and you have a seemingly unlimited amount of time during the day to get things
done. It’s the ultimate brain hack. •

Further reading

I haven’t included all of the material required to start these alternative sleeping methods in this article. If
you really are interested in trying them, there are tons of resources online. Here are a couple places to
get you started.

• The Wikipedia article is a concise and excellent introduction: Wiki on Polphasic Sleep

• And this is a good article about Everyman and Uberman: The History of Everyman

-d

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Sleep (or how to hack your

brain)

This article was published on June 25th, 2009 at

My name is Dustin Curtis.
5:13AM local time in SOMA, San Francisco.
I have been alive for 9,466 days.

Article #12

According to the best scientific data available from

Permalink /sleep.html
the NIH and the CDC -- and based on my location,
habits, and socioeconomic status -- I will die in Typography Georgia
17,056 days, 13 hours, 20 minutes, and 2 seconds Proxima Nova
at the age of 72.
 The lif e of Dus tin Cur tis is 36% c omplete.

I live in San Francisco and New York City. I like

sushi, the sky, and the brain. I want to become a
better writer. You should follow me on twitter here.

You can learn a tiny bit more about me in Article

#5 and on my other easier-to-update blog. Say
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