Ever wish you had more hours in the day?
Like too much of it’s spent on that necessary evil called sleep?
Well, if you’re in a bizz where your time’s your own, then mayhaps the Uberman Sleep Schedule is for you.
Also dubbed Polyphasic Sleep, this naptime itinerary is employed by peeps who wanna cut through the BS of light sleep phases, get straight to the restorative, deep sleep, and wake up refreshed within half an hour or less. Instead of clocking out nocturnally, your 24 hours’re peppered with brief siestas. And, in the end, your day comprises about six twenty to thirty minutes naps (though some people tweak it to fit their needs.) Who the hell would do this, you might ask? Well, soldiers, pilots, and crazed writers – just to name a few. In fact, recently I came across an interesting account from a member of that latter group and thought three things:
1.) This dude’s getting away with 2 to 3 hours of sleep a day.
2.) That means you’re adding years to your lifespan which I totally want.
3.) Nevermind. ’cause I could never survive the transition phase.
And that – the adaptation part – is where a lot people end up giving up.
Here’s a writer’s advice on how to do it successfully:
Adjusting To This Schedule
Adjusting to this schedule (as you might imagine) will make you feel like you’ve put your body and mind through a blender for a few weeks. Here are some general tips for adjusting that I found to be greatly helpful.Do the adjustment when you are in complete control of your schedule. I converted to the cycle during a three week vacation; it would have been impossible to get through a normal work day while adjusting to this cycle. I was by and large a zombie.
Find a large project to work on while adjusting. If you don’t keep busy, you will revert to a normal sleep cycle. In my first failed attempt at switching (on vacation more than two years ago), I didn’t have an ongoing project to keep me focused.Use physiological “tricks” to teach your body the cycle. I found that using a dawn simulation trick worked nicely. Every time I went to lay down, I set my monitor to wait thirty-two minutes, then begin running a program that had a strobe effect along with some excessively loud music. I also used two alarm clocks, and during the day I would adjust my blinds such that the sun would start shining in my face roughly a half an hour later. These would force me to become somewhat conscious for a while, which was all I needed to keep going.
(Sidenote: Human alarm clocks work well too)Days 3 to 10 are the hardest and least productive. I spent the adjustment period working on two projects, one involving programming and another involving writing. At the start of day three, I stored a backup of these projects because I knew that my thought processes were starting to become nonsensical and bizarre. For the next week, I continued to “work” on the projects, but utterly failed to make any sensible progress (interestingly enough, the fiction I wrote in this period was entertaining in a Thomas Pynchon meets The Electric Company kind of way). Don’t expect to be hugely useful during the actual forced adjustment to compressed REM sleep.
Convert to a more nutritious diet. I’ve found that drinking a great deal of orange and apple juice makes the Uberman schedule easier to follow, as does eating plenty of vegetables and avoiding fatty foods like the plague.
Yeah, I gave up when he mentioned turning into a zombie. I do that enough as it is.
The other downside? The social aspect.
Some of the great minds of history have allegedly tried to adhere to the Uberman (or some variation of it) sleep schedule. However, when it came time to hold meetings, conduct business, or try to engage in anything remotely social, some genius’ brain train had to make a snooze stop for at least a third of an hour ‘fore it could get back on track and manage professional matters anew. I imagine it can’t be easy on families, either. Or sex lives. Or your sense of time. Or your diet… according to one Quora user who’d be Uberman’ing for a while:
“After your body gets a handle on the extreme military-like conditions your stupidity is forcing onto it, it’s amazing and then unbearably boring. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be (…) Although you only sleep two hours a day (via six 20-minute naps), each nap feels like eight hours of sleep and every four hour segment feels eleven hours long; every day feels three days long.”
Also, the same dude described the too-real nature of the dreams you get while polyphasic napping:
“I had a nightmare in which a giant squid unexplainably pulled me down into the ocean— the fear I felt as I slowly died underwater from lack of oxygen was as real as the keyboard in front of me now, and when I died I woke up to real reality, which was just as vivid as what I’d just experienced.”
Vividly inimical squids? Getting dead underwater? Are we dreaming or dropping psychadelics here?
Aside from that deterrent (and the fact that my schedule wouldn’t allow this… and the fact that it takes me twenty minutes to fall asleep in the first place, making my total time in bed be at least 40 minutes), my personality and human habits in general wouldn’t fit this system either. The main drawback, as I see it, would be the fact that you only get four hours to get shiz done before you’re due for nap number next. And I dunno about you, but I have a whole process about getting up. There’s some stretching involved. A vat of caffeine. (Can you have stimulants on this schedule?) Then, there’s the complaining about being awake that’s equivalent in length to that of the nap I just took. If I knew the four hour countdown was already initiating the moment I woke up, sure, I’d be mowing through my to-do’s. But I’d be doing it in such a hysterical state, that I’d be executing all’a my tasks, major responsibilities, or projects people count on me to do correctly in a less than stellar fashion.
“What? What’s wrong with it? Is it the font?”
Verdict?
Between the adaptation phase and the isolating aspect – this sleep plan’s probably best for less social folk.
And “uber” useless for everyone else.