Biphasic Sleep Guide

I must confess that I have been relying a lot on original research from very non-scientific bloggers in my ventures with biphasic sleep. Dr Piotr Wozniak, a (self-proclaimed) expert on bi- and polyphasic sleep with an MS degree in molecular biology, clears up a lot of myths about polyphasic sleep.

Wozniak completely refutes polyphasic sleep, calling thos who call themselves polyphasic sleepers liars. However, he seems to say that biphasic sleep is better than monophasic.

• “EEG measurements indicate that humans are basically biphasic.”
• “Human body clock is not adapted to sleeping in patterns other than monophasic or biphasic sleep.”
• “[…] an important biphasic nature of the human sleep that is not fully accounted for by the present sleep models.”
• “Only when approaching substantial sleep deprivation can polyphasic schedule be superior to biphasic schedule [when it comes to maximizing creativity].”
• “Many biphasic sleepers can do well on 4 hours [of sleep a day].”

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any expert on the subject (except Uberman, the “inventor” of a very strict polyphasic sleep schedule) who promotes sleeping in more than two phases. Fortunately, I’m a biphasic sleeper.

All along, my plan has been to start by sleeping 7.5 hours a day, and following that up with 6 hours a day when I feel that I am ready. I’ve been trying to nap around the same time every day, and so this is what I’ve come up with:

Core sleep: 03:00 (or 01:30) - 07:30
Nap: 20:00 - 2130

Of course, this schedule is completely theoretical and impossible to follow to the minute. I always take a few minutes extra time to fall asleep, and I doubt that my sleep cycles are exactly 90 minutes long.

I first read about polyphasic sleep in a comment to a Slashdot-story about medicines that reduce the need for sleep. Since I’ve always been a bit skeptical about taking pills — the big companies have almost no incentive to avoid long-term health-risks — I wasn’t interested at all by the article, but that comment got me going. I kept reading, both on Wikipedia and on several blogs, and the potential advantages seemed to far outweigh the potential health-risks: I would just be able to set my biological clock back if sleep-deprivation would creep up on me, wouldn’t I?