So my roommate and I are going to try something new. We generally find ourselves staying up until 3am or so doing homework. We both have class at 8 or 9am so this usually nets us about 4-5 hours of sleep. My current schedule has two 1 hour openings between classes that allow me to take naps and try to catch up. Here is where Polyphasic Sleep comes in.
Polyphasic sleep basically means sleeping several times a day instead of 8 hours straight each night. There are a few different patterns you can follow but the idea is to sleep enough throughout the day to achieve enough REM sleep to stay healthy. We've chosen to sleep from 5am-8am for our 3 core hours, and then take three 20 minute naps at 1:15, 5:30, and 11:00. I already generally take a nap after lunch and dinner so those first two will feel pretty much normal.
Eventually, your body will adjust (about a week or two) and you begin to enter your REM sleep much sooner so that each of those 20 minute naps becomes very important. Before even learning about polyphasic sleep, I noticed that when I would get 2 hours of sleep, I enter my REM very quickly and actually don't feel too drained the following morning (two hours later haha).
I've also read that even once you go back to normal 8 hour sleep patterns, you retain the ability to enter REM sleep nearly instantly and a 15 minute nap can give you a LOT of energy.
The idea is to gain 4 more hours in each day but also feeling very energetic all of the time. Anyone else ever try this? I will keep this updated over the next week or so with the results.
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