A Procrastinators Dream

I love to sleep and as a student there are times where I can't get a full nights rest because of a paper or upcoming midterm. That's when I start to rely on less sleep and more napping throughout the day. Funny enough, there is a time to this kind of sleeping and its known as Polyphasic sleeping. Most of us are accustomed to what is known as Monophasic sleep, aka sleeping once a day for an extending period of time. However, I recently stumbled upon different methods of sleeping through a Buzzfeed experiment that people have found to be useful in their own lives. The two methods are

• Biphasic Sleep
• Polyphasic Sleep

Biphasic Sleep

Biphasic sleep is when you separate your sleeping into two distinct slots. For example, a common Biphasic sleep routine would be to sleep at night for 4.5 hours and then have a 1.5 hour nap during the day. This routine saves you about 1.5 hours a day from a normal 8 hour Monophasic sleep cycle. The entire belief behind these systems is the thought that humans can sustain themselves with less sleep if they follow different patterns like these. 

Polyphasic Sleep

Polyphasic sleep takes Biphasic to the next level. This is when you segment your sleep even further but while using 20-minute naps instead of long naps. One crazy Polyphasic cycle is known as the Uberman. Using the Uberman cycle you reduce your total amount of sleep to just 2 hours a day with six 20-minute long naps! Doctors do not recommend these programs because they believe that this is in essence sleep deprivation and in the short and long term you will be doing yourself harm. However, some people who have gone on to using Polyphasic sleep cycles seem to function just fine within their everyday lives and only cite tiredness within the first week of adapting to this new way of sleeping. 

I thought that this was a real interesting subject to look into and there are tons of anecdotal evidence of people who have thrived while using this, but almost all doctors can agree that this is probably not the best thing for a person. They believe that humans are only meant to be monophasic sleepers. But as a student finding different ways to optimize sleep in order to gain more hours to be able to do homework does sound pretty appealing