In this video I describe the polyphasic sleep schedules often promoted by lifehackers as ways of reducing the need for sleep. Though these schedules originate from sleep research, they are intended for maintaining performance in situations necessitating chronic sleep deprivation rather than for use as a long-term schedule when chronic sleep deprivation isn’t necessary or desirable. These schedules don’t align well with our circadian rhythm and the risks of chronic sleep deprivation (including immune suppression, obesity, cognitive deficits, reduced physical performance, and increased risk of accidents) far outweigh the possible benefits of a few extra hours of time awake each day.

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Video Transcript

Hi I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video I want to address the idea of polyphasic sleep schedules. So a polyphasic sleep schedule refers to splitting sleep up into smaller chunks or phases and then distributing these throughout the day and the idea is that this somehow makes your sleep more efficient and therefore you can get away with sleeping only 2 to 4 hours per day.

Now these claims are often accompanied by stories about figures like Thomas Edison or Leonardo da Vinci or Nikola Tesla but there’s really no evidence that any of these people actually followed this type of schedule for an extended period of time. But the idea is actually based on some scientific research. This is research conducted by a man named Claudio Stampi but what Stampi was looking at was people who were under conditions that guaranteed chronic sleep deprivation. He was actually studying athletes who are competing in long events that forced them to not be able to sleep for an extended period of time. So he studied people like solo sailors who were competing in events that lasted for 24 hours or longer and so this meant that they were going to be sleep deprived. And what Stampi investigated was what’s the best way to deal with this deprivation? How can we maintain the highest level of physical performance even though we know that this person isn’t going to be able to get enough sleep?

So the idea was not to find schedules that were meant to be implemented over the long term and in sort of everyday life, but life hackers and other writers like Tim Ferriss picked up this idea and somehow spread it as a long-term strategy for organizing sleep. And the fact that these schedules have names like Everyman or the Uberman schedule give a sense of legitimacy to them, as if they were actually viable ways of organizing your sleep, which they really aren’t. So in order to understand why these schedules don’t work very well at organizing sleep and why they really don’t allow you to get away with this 2 to 4 hours per day, we have to look at the circadian rhythm in a little detail.

That’s what I’d like to do first. So if we look at this, let’s imagine two things here. We’re going to look at your need for sleep over the course of the day and your urge to sleep. So on this chart here we’ll have, this will be noon, this will be 6:00 p.m. this will be midnight and this will be 6 a.m. here. And so the idea is that when you get here we repeat back to this, which this would be midnight as well. Ok, so let’s imagine we have someone who wakes up every day at 6 a.m. and gets enough sleep. So fully rested and ready to start the day at 6 a.m. So at that point the need for sleep is going to be at its lowest point because they’re totally rested and so the need for sleep is going to gradually increase over the course of the day until we get to late at night when the person is feeling quite tired and really needs to sleep. Let’s say this is around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. and then goes to sleep and so the need for sleep is going to decrease because the person is sleeping and then we repeat the cycle the next day so we have this you know need for sleep increasing, increasing maybe it’s increasing a little faster at the end of the day, the longer the person has been awake, and then decreasing while they sleep and this can be repeated day after day.

Now we can look at the circadian rhythm. So this is going to be our urge to sleep and see how this influences us throughout the course of the day. So again we’ll assume that the person is adapted to this particular schedule and so in the morning the urge for sleep is the lowest. They’re fully rested they wake up, you know, they’re alert and ready to be productive and they may have a slight surge in the early afternoon. This is pretty common I’ll talk about why in a minute, but you know they’re generally able to feel awake and alert for most of the day and then as we get later into the night again this urge to sleep starts increasing and hopefully around the same time that need for sleep is highest the person sleeps. And so their urge to sleep is going to get reset back down to zero and so this is sort of the ideal way to have your sleep organized; where your need for sleep and your urge for sleep are lined up in the right places. They’re both at their lowest when you’re waking up in the morning and they’re both at their highest when you’re trying to go to sleep at night. This means it will be easy for you to fall asleep because your sleep need and your urge to sleep are high and they’re lined up and it’ll be easy to wake up in the morning because your need and urge for sleep or both at their lowest point.

Now you might wonder about this little peak in the sleep urge in the early afternoon. You might wonder “well this how does this fit in? You know, I understand the idea that okay at night we should sleep in evolutionary terms and makes sense, we’re not nocturnal so we should be awake and alert during the day. So this sort of makes sense that that would decrease overnight, but what’s going on here? It’s the middle of the day. If we’re waking up at sunrise here why should we suddenly feel tired around noontime?” And one possible answer for this is that if we think about being in a hot climate where we don’t have things like air conditioning this is like the hottest point of the day. It’s really not a good time to be doing things like trying to hunt and so this might be the reason why we have this urge to rest in the middle of the day and we have a reduced urge to sleep during times we should be more productive which is just before that and after that when things start cooling off again and so that is a possible explanation for why we have this urge to sleep in the middle of the day if we are waking up at or basically around sunrise here. Ok, so what happens if we change some things here?

Well one thing we could change is we could imagine that I came in and I just changed all these times right? That’s jetlag, right? Basically you come in and you erase these times you say “okay actually what feels like noon to you is now 4:00 p.m. and so what feels like 6:00 a.m. is now 10:00 a.m.” and this totally screws up your schedule because you’re feeling this urge to sleep or this need to sleep at different times now. Instead of this being you know 6:00 p.m. it’s here now if we move 6 p.m. over to here now you’re you want to go to sleep at 6 p.m. and you want to wake up at 2 in the morning or whatever, you know, amount of change we have.

And that’s why it’s so difficult to get to deal with jetlag and the other reason is that the blue line is really hard to move. This takes a few days to adjust itself. This circadian rhythm, you can’t just shift in a couple hours, whereas your need for sleep you can have a little bit more flexibility with. We could imagine that this person at you know 11 p.m. or whatever time this is that he usually goes to sleep decided one night not to go to sleep you he has a project that he has to finish or he’s just binge watching something on Netflix and you know he ends up letting his need for sleep increase so it gets up even higher you know. Let’s say he stays up until 2:00 in the morning one night and then let’s say he still has to wake up at 6:00 a.m. so his need for sleep, he sleeps for a few hours, but he’s starting the day way up here with this very high need for sleep. And he might be able to function, you know, I mean he can he can deal with this level but it’s gonna start rising again as he stays awake and he’s gonna reach some point, you know, maybe in the afternoon, maybe also when this urge to sleep also spikes, where you know he needs to take a nap or something. And then that can sort of screw the schedule up even more because if he if he naps for too long he ends up down here and then you know he’s not tired later that night and so we can see how that kind of wreaks havoc on this system. And we want to have the ideal situation that we had before where our need for sleep and urge to sleep lineup.

Ok, so how does this fit in with circadian, sorry with polyphasic sleep? How does the circadian rhythm fit in with polyphasic sleep schedules? Alright let’s imagine another chart here and this time we’re gonna look at an extended period of time. So we’ll look at this over the course of say several days so one day two three four or five you know. Let’s imagine this over you know six days or so and let’s imagine that we start at that same point where let’s say this is 6 a.m. here. We’ll start it at the beginning of each day will be these markers. And let’s say the person is normally adjusted to that previous schedule we’ve drawn. So this is what their sleep normally looks like but now they decide “I’m gonna try to be a polyphasic sleeper” and so I’m gonna have a need for sleep slowly increasing at the beginning of the day but then I’m gonna take a nap a few hours later I’m going to take a nap. But the nap is only 20 minutes, so it’s not enough to really reduce the need for sleep all the way back to zero right? And none of those naps are actually able to do that so, over time this person is gradually accumulating a greater and greater need to sleep and might be able to do this for some time you the first two days they might be able to get through this because you know their need for sleep is never actually getting all that high because they keep napping but then maybe around day three or so eventually their need for sleep gets too high for them to manage just a 20-minute nap because even the 20-minute nap doesn’t bring it down enough, where, you know it’s still too high.

They still have a very strong need to sleep and so what usually happens if you look at the blogs of people who have tried to do this is they report accidentally over-sleeping. In other words they go for their 20-minute nap and they oversleep for quite a long time. This is not like “I overslept for ten minutes”. This is “I took my 20 minute nap and I accidentally overslept for seven hours” and so what they’re doing is essentially trying to get this back down to zero. That’s what your body wants it to do but let’s say “Ok, I overslept for six hours”, still not enough to make up for the fact that they haven’t got enough sleep in the past two days so then they start valiantly restarting this attempt here and then you know a day and a half or two days later same thing, they end up crashing. And they might look back on the week and say “oh I only had you know two mistakes. I only had two times where I accidentally overslept”. But you know the basic idea is there’s really no way to get this, you know, if you aren’t sleeping enough to bring your sleep need all the way back down to zero to sort of reset it for the day then eventually it’s going to get too high and you’re going to need an extended period of sleep. You can’t get through with just 20 minute naps, it’s not really possible.

Ok, now the other thing to consider is the circadian rhythm. How does that fit in this? I don’t even know how to begin trying to draw this in because you know the first day it’s going to be pretty much what it usually is right? As I said, it’s resistant to change. So you’re gonna have a little spike there and then it’s gonna increase and now normally the urge to sleep will be dropping because the person is sleeping enough but in this case it you know maybe it drops a little bit because they’re used to that schedule, but it’s not going to get all the way back down here, you know? So then it’s going to go through and then you know maybe you have that normal sort of peak and you know you’re gonna end up where your urge to sleep is gonna have to be elevated all the time. And you need that because you need to be able to take naps every few hours, and you won’t be able to fall asleep for your nap if you don’t have a high enough urge to sleep. And that means essentially you have to be chronically sleep-deprived in order to even begin trying to adopt this schedule. If you’re not chronically sleep deprived, if your urge for sleep is way down here at zero then how are you gonna take a nap? You’re not going to be able to. Just like in our original schedule here you know? If you’re used to sleeping eight hours at night, wake up at 6:00 in the morning, you’re not gonna want to take a nap at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. You’re not. You’re just not gonna feel tired enough for that to happen.

Whereas in this schedule that’s, you know, a requirement is that you take a nap every few hours and you’re really going to have a hard time doing that if you actually have a low urge for sleep. Ok, so this is why these schedules don’t really make sense over the long term. They can be applied over the course of a day or two and that’s essentially what Stampi was doing with these athletes, but over the long term you really can’t manage to fit this in, to get this to line up properly with your circadian rhythm.

Ok, so that brings me to the point of why I made this video. That is “well what’s the point? What’s the point of trying to adopt one of these schedules? Why would you do this? What are the benefits?” All the benefits are, okay let’s say you manage to do this. Now I’m of the opinion anybody who tells you that they’re able to adopt this schedule over the long term it’s probably lying. Either they’re intentionally lying to you or they’re lying to themselves. They’re they’re sort of selectively forgetting about those eight-hour accidental naps that they took. But what’s the point of doing this? Let’s imagine that you could actually do this successfully. You could follow this schedule and not you know, not have these problems. You could actually stick to this 20 minute nap every few hours.

Well what are the benefits? What do you get out of this? For some people, it seems the main reason they want to do this is just to say that they only sleep four hours at night. Bragging rights. Ok, great. Let’s imagine you do that, you know, we’re very impressed you only sleep four hours per night. So you’re awake twenty hours a day and I’m only awake sixteen. Well then the question is, well what are you doing with those 20 hours? Are you really that much more productive? Are you accomplishing more than I am in 16 hours? And if not, then what are you giving up in order to have this 20 hour day? I mean you probably have major sacrifices to your social life. I mean you’re unable to do things that last for more than a few hours because you have to stop for a nap so that seems like it’s not really worth it.

And then when I wonder well what if you actually are doing this but you are chronically sleep-deprived? It seems like you have to be in order to do this. Well that means you’re getting four more hours per day but you’re also spending a lot more time feeling groggy, having difficulty with concentration, having slower reaction time, having reduced physical performance. All those things we saw with chronic sleep deprivation. You’re putting yourself voluntarily into having those deficits and so that doesn’t seem to really be worth it either. Not a lot of great benefit there. And then the main reason I made this video is to talk about the risks because I really don’t see even if you could successfully implement this it doesn’t seem to be worth it because you’re putting yourself at a number of risks.

The first of these is immune suppression. We mentioned this in the video on sleep deprivation right? If you are chronically sleep-deprived, you are suppressing your immune system. This means you’re more likely to get sick. Again if you read the blog posts of people trying to do this, very often they explain away their eight hour nap by saying “I wasn’t feeling well, I was starting to get sick and I felt I needed to sleep longer”. Well of course you were starting to get sick, you’ve been doing something that makes your immune system less able to function so that’s the first major risk that you have is you’re increasing your likelihood of getting sick.

You’re increasing your risk of obesity which is then associated with a number of other problems but we saw this with the hormone fluctuations that occur during chronic sleep deprivation. It increases ghrelin, reduces leptin, increases levels of cortisol. So you’re going to feel more stressed, you’re going to be more likely to have cravings for food. You’re going to tend to eat more. You’re going to have a harder time resisting those cravings and your body’s going to have a tendency to store more fat. And all of these things are going to put you at increased risk of obesity, you know, in exchange for being awake for a couple extra hours per day.

And lastly, we have the risk of accidents. And this is why I want to really discourage you from attempting to adopt these types of schedules. You read about them and you know you might think that they they make sense but what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself at greater risk for an accident. And others. It’s not just about the potential for harming yourself, or saying “well I’m tough enough and I’m gonna, you know, manage”. If you’re chronically sleep-deprived you’re more likely to be in an accident and this means you can harm yourself or you can harm others. Or it can even be fatal. You can get yourself into a car accident if you’re driving while you chronically sleep-deprived. The consequences are potentially fatal for you or for other people and so if you think of it that way the risk-benefit analysis of trying to adopt one of these schedules really doesn’t make sense. I mean you’re potentially sacrificing thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of your future life in exchange for a couple extra hours per day right now and at most maybe for a week or two that you can manage to do this before you crash and fall asleep for eight hours.

So it’s really not worth the risk of attempting to do this and so I’d really just like to discourage anyone from attempting to adopt these schedules. There’s really no need to put yourself through this chronic sleep deprivation in order to get the bragging rights or whatever minimal benefits there might be associated with it. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!