This site is a record of my experiment with polyphasic sleep, subtitled “one man’s story through an Everyman sleep adaptation while wrestling with his demons”. Polyphasic sleep is just a part of my larger experiments in consciousness, which I write about on the Experiments in Lifestyle Design and Integral Evolutionary sites.
The experiment began January 11, 2009, and for now consists of a modified Everyman schedule (normally 3 hours “core” + 3 naps of 25 min every 5 hours), the modification consisting of substituting a long afternoon nap (about 2 hours) for the second daily nap. This increases total sleep to 6 hours of course, but it is still far better than the 9-10 hours I was sleeping before, and what is actually more important than total hours of sleep, is that I feel great and I am relatively more focused and productive. As of today (April 2 – about 10 weeks) the experiment has been dramatically successful in terms of consciousness/personal development and moderately successful in terms of productivity. Even so, I have been amazed at the profound impact that a few relatively simple lifestyle changes (that includes diet and exercise components) has had on my life. This has been, literally, a revolution in consciousness (see my article My manifesto (Part 2). I plan to gradually reduce the second nap to between 1 and 1 1/2 hours. I may at some point give Uberman a try, just out of curiosity, but so long as I am feeling fabulous and getting a lot done I will probably just be doing minor tweaks to the program.
I think that the importance of diet and attitude is critical and greatly under-estimated inside the polyphasic community. People often equate polyphasic sleep adaptation to misery, and I don’t necessarily agree. The schedule I am experimenting has the potential to reduce or even eliminate adaptation time for the Everyman schedule. I also don’t think that a pure Uberman or Everyman schedule is for everyone, and I believe that it’s more important to be feeling great and be focused and alert during one’s waking hours than to squeeze every waking minute out of the day. Good quality sleep and rest is, to my mind, one of the deepest pleasures that we have, and polyphasic sleep does not equate to sleep deprivation. The polyphasic community is an odd bunch of wonderful people, but they do tend to be a bit obsessive (the 3 other fingers point back at oneself of course) and this is not always a good thing.
I hope that you will find my story interesting and/or that the Polyphasic resources page be useful to you.
*Update Oct. 2009* I have not been polyphasic for the last 4-5 months but I intend to return to the modified Everyman very soon.
More about me
My passion in life is to research peak-performance and the pathways to enhanced states of perception, intuition and joy. I believe that living healthy, happy and creative lives is our birthright as human beings, and my goal is to help disseminate information on this topic. My chief subject of research right now is myself, and my particular form of bliss is to share my most intimate thoughts and experiences all over the internet in long rambling narcissistic posts, which includes documenting my own success in creating a rich, joyful and fulfilling life. Despite the somewhat unusual nature of my passion, I do have a small loyal fan base. If you want to join them, please subscribe to the Lifestyle Design School blog which is my main site. The Polyphasic Sleep blog is even more unedited (if such a thing were possible) and I created it in order to free myself of the weighty responsibility of attempting to justify my sanity to people on my larger list, most of whom think that I should be upping my meds.
Polyphasic sleep constitutes the most fascinating experiment in consciousness that I have seen for a long time (and so accessible :-). My primary motivations for doing it I have describe on my first post.
Polyphasic Sleep Resource List
See the Resource page.
Contact
If you find any of this information useful, please feel free to Contact me and to connect with me on Facebook or Linkedin (please reference this blog).
