Polyphasic Sleep Cycles - How to Need Less Sleep

By Adam Sinicki

I'm a busy busy guy - I work from home, I've got a long distance relationship, lots of social groups and a really comprehensive training routine. For this reason I often find myself going to bed later and later and really wish I didn't sleep at all. You waste 6-12 hours every day sleeping - think how much you could achieve! If you spent this whole time reading you'd be a font of knowledge, if you spent it working online you'd be twice as rich. Eradicating sleep certainly has it's appeal…
That's why I was interested when I heard of 'polyphasic sleep cycles'. You might not know it, but right now you are probably practicing 'monophasic' sleep while in hot European countries they already practice 'biphasic' sleep (you guessed it - we sleep once while they sleep twice including their siester). Polyphasic then adds even more, taking away from the one big chunk of sleep and splitting it throughout the day in a variety of ways to try and achieve more awake time.

One popular way to do this is to take a fifteen minute nap every three hours. That means that throughout the course of the day you are sleeping only two hours, but that the way it's spaced means it keeps you going longer throughout the day. Like Margaret Thatcher. Studies on polyphasic sleep suggest that we can in fact get all the recovery we need from this type of sleep and that our brain will adjust our sleep cycles to make amends for this strange behaviour - placing the crucial REM stage at the beginning of our sleep.
So I tried it. Fifteen minutes every three hours. For me falling asleep that quickly was no problem - I'm an amazing sleeper. The problem however was waking up again. Not the first few times as I knew this was paramount for the experiment to stand any chance of success. But by the time it was dark outside it was becoming incredibly difficult to drag myself back up. And then even when I was up - productivity was low. So I supplemented with coffee and Guarana, and that worked for a while until I started developing a head ache.
The next day I did the worst workout of the year, then fumbled through breakfast conversation (I didn't eat much either having eaten all through the night and felt quite sick as a result). My productivity was certainly down and I didn't want any more coffee as it had sent my heartbeat through the roof and made me miss my next sleep - but I had to power on. Them's the rules.
I had read that eventually my body would adapt, once I'd plowed through. But by day three I was feeling worse than ever and I decided to think about this properly. I'm a bodybuilder - I work out and during the night we produce all the anabolic hormones and repair all the damage. In other words I was giving my body no chance to recover and would be seriously limiting my muscle growth as a result. I also train my brain. And during the night we cement neural networks made throughout the day, so that wasn't sticking either.

But even if I didn't do any of those things I was also out of energy and concentration. I was staring into space day dreaming and having to take every supplement under the sun to gain the energy for a single workout. What's the point of being awake longer if you're just dribbling and staring into space? I was actually getting less work done and certainly less quality work. So I lasted four days, then I had the best god damn sleep of my