Increase Your Productivity - Change Your Sleep

Unfortunately I think my fiance would kill me if I tried any of these... Sounds cool though.

I always wonder why do we sleep the way we sleep. I would like to try different system of sleeping but it is very hard when society enforce monophasic sleep

Mexican siestas are an example of a simplistic polyphasic sleep schedule: 6 hours a night, then a 1 hour siesta in the middle of the day.

I've heard of people subsiding for a while on the uberman cycle of 20 minute naps every 3 hours. It can be brutal, and the lack of REM sleep can have background highly detrimental effects that can very likely decrease overall productivity.

Here is a 10 year old write-up from Steve Pavlina with reflections a year after he did uberman for almost six months:

https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-one-year-later/

Quite interesting. Sometimes when I don't sleep enough at night or have a bad sleep, I end up sleeping for 1-2 hours during the daytime, and feel extremely energetic afterwards as if I slept for 7-8 hours.

Still would rather prefer a good night's sleep for at least 7 hours, but these methods are definitely worth experimenting in particular occasions.

When I was at University, I came to a point of either I lock myself for 1 month, study like a madman and pass all 6 exams I had left, or drop out completely.

What I did was, I changed my sleep pattern completely: If I felt like I got tired or even a bit fatigued I went to sleep for 2-3 hours. I didn't care what time it was, since it was irrelevant at that point. This way I went into a cycle which basically consisted of sleep 2-3 hours, awake 5-6 hours, then sleep 2-3 hours, awake 5-6 hours and so on .... This lasted for a whole month, and I can say that it was the most productive month in my life so far. Needless to say, I passed all 6 exams

While being productive, I don't think it is actually a good idea, because basically you lose track of time and you became very isolated, which can have lots of psychological side-effects if practiced long term. But for a good productive boost period, I highly recommend it.

Ok,I hate posting about these guys.. but,he did a good experiment with the sleep-thing

My sleep pattern is ~ 6-7 hrs per night and 1-2 hours during the day - I think it's the perfect sleep time and I couldn't be more productive, but then again people are different, so it's worth experimenting for a while to find your balance. BUT, and this is a big one, as another member said above, doing this continously for years will most probably fuck your brain up.

Remember, we sleep so that our brain can "rest" for a few hrs, although it's not quite the break that most people think. During sleep, our brain activity levels are at their highest - our brain organizes things such as our memory (very important!) both long & short term, detoxification (that's why most people wake up wanting to pee and shit in the morning), energy levels balancing and most importantly illness fighting, especially life threatening diseases such as cancer.

Our immune system works better when our body is asleep, that's why for example when you take something for your headache (anything that its base is paracetamol let's say), you begin to slightly fall asleep even if it's just for 1 hour and then when you wake up there is no more headache. Sure, it works when you are awake as well, but slowly and sometimes it's not even effective (especially if you are addicted to pills).

That's because our immune system is constantly fighting free radicals when we are awake, starting from the very air we breathe, which nowadays is polluted as fuck, down to the water we drink (don't get me started on that one), things we eat, people we meet, etc... During sleep, this doesn't happen to the level it does when you are awake, so the immune system is more concentrated on causing apostopsis (cell death) to cancer cells instead. Same with healing after having an operation or accident. That's why you always hear doctors say & recommend lots of sleep/resting to heal faster. And what I mentioned is just scratching the surface, so I suggest you do more research about it before you fuck up your long-term health.

Now, I do believe there are people that can sleep let's say for few mins every few hour sessions or other uncommon patterns, but they are rare, a small %, as with everything else. We evolved genetically to adapt to the common sleep pattern that most people perform on a daily basis and evolution takes millions of years. That's the reason it fucks up your brain in most people, we don't have the mental/physical capacity to handle it. Maybe after a few more millions of years, we will adapt to another pattern, who knows... But for now, stick to the usual one if you don't want to gamble with your body/mind/health.