Polyphasic sleep

Today I was reading Yahoo news and I came across an article "Napping gets a nod at work”. I almost wanted to forward the article to my boss. Haha.

Many people came up to me before and ask me, “Xingwei, how do you do it? How do you sleep so late and manage your day job and cheer life at night?” (on average I sleep at 2-3am and wake at 6am for work) I always told them passion fuels me and I take naps whenever I could in the day.

Now after reading the article “Napping gets a nod at work”, I got to learn of a new term - polyphasic ultrashort sleep. I got a little information from the article and then when to research more information about polyphasic sleep; as usual just google it.

As you would most of the times, wikipedia is the top search result and it states Polyphasic sleep, a term coined by early 20th century psychologist J.S. Szymanski, refers to the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period and does not imply any particular sleep schedule.

And also in the top 3 results, I also found a blog on polyphasic sleep - http://polyphasic.blogspot.com/. It is a blog by a few “researchers” on their experiment on polyphasic sleep and also you can find from the blog some basic introduction about polyphasic sleep.

A little extract from the blog:

“On this schedule, I feel quite normal. I am alert, creative and able to do any activity as if I were monophasic. So I guess I've reached one goal. I've discovered a sleeping pattern that I can maintain for long periods of time that will net me 3.5 - 4.5 extra hours per day.”

And after more research, I found out that Polyphasic sleep is considered scientifically tested, a way one could be able to squeeze out more hours in a day without the need to sleep that much, by taking more power naps in between. As described in the blog it is a useful tool to get extra waking hours in the day.

So I guess having polyphasic sleep had been how I was managing my time and sleep, a more scientific way to answer those who asked me “how do I do it?”

My schedule goes something like this: about 45mins nap while I take the transport to work, another 45 to 60mins nap during lunch, and another 45 mins nap while I take transport out of the island (I work on an island). So add that to 3 hours of sleep at night, I could almost net 6 hours a day; only just in much more and shorter phases of sleep.


P.S: Though I would still prefer to be able to get more sleep