Questions

I have been asked some of the same questions repeatedly about polyphasic sleep, so here is my "mass text" answering them. If you have any other questions, let me know and I can answer them in a future post.

1. Why are you doing this?
Well for one, there is the obvious reason of having more time. I could definitely use it. In addition to more time, I will supposedly have more energy throughout the day instead of getting tired as the day goes on. But the main reason I am doing it is just to find out for myself what it is all about. It seems pretty far-fetched, to be able to get the same amount of rest with only three hours of sleep a day. If it is that simple, why aren't more people doing it? What will it feel like to almost always be awake while the rest of the world is sleeping? Will my concept of the passage of time change? These are things I want to find out which is my main motivation for doing this.

2. It seems unnatural, are you sure that it is safe?
Ironically, it may actually be more natural than the monophasic way that most humans sleep. When we are born, we naturally sleep polyphasically. A baby sleeps for short periods throughout the entire day. It is hypothesized that the only reason they switch to monophasic is because their parents condition them to sleep that way. There are cases of cultures completely isolated from modern society that sleep polyphasically. Almost all other animals sleep polyphasically. So the majority of our societies may actually have it all wrong.

The sleep deprivation experienced during the adaptation week is also fairly harmless. There have been countless studies on sleep deprivation and there have been no found long term effects of a short period of sleep deprivation.

3. How will you be able to take a nap every four hours when you have stuff going on all day?
It actually works out pretty well with my schedule. I have long enough breaks between classes that I can fit in naps. And there are plenty of places to sleep. In the aud, there is the couch in the green room. In SnyPhi, there is the pillar room full of couches. I'll have to keep on top of it, but it should be doable.