Last week I stumbled upon a theory/method of sleeping called “polyphasic sleeping”. For Seinfeld fans, this was the sleep pattern that Kramer claimed Leonardo Da Vinci used. Basically, you take 30 minute naps every 4 hours, so you end up only sleeping about 3 hours or so a day. To me, the nap regimen sounds too strict plus it sounds very stressful on the body, so it’s not something I would try. Users online tend to be either heavily biased towards the system or they sound miserable with the experience.
However, while looking up information on polyphasic sleep, I found discussions on other types of sleep patterns. The one that most people are familiar with is called “monophasic”: you get one long block of sleep per day. Polyphasic sleepers get many blocks of sleep in the day. There is a middle ground, however: biphasic sleep. As you might have guessed, this involves two blocks of sleep per day. This is exactly what I do right now! I finally gave in to my napping tendencies a while ago, so I plan my day so I get a long block of “core” sleep at night and a short block of sleep after work to recharge for the rest of the day.
There is another interesting theory that works in tandem with biphasic sleeping: the body has a set sleep cycle that runs approximately 90 minutes (actually, it ranges from 75 to 110 minutes, depending on the person). Natural sleep occurs in multiples of your sleep cycle time. When you wake up naturally, it is right after a sleep cycle. Using alarms to wake yourself up in the morning breaks you out of a sleep cycle, which has a disruptive effect on the rest of your day. If you actually manage to just sleep in increments of your sleep cycle, you can get away with less sleep! Or so the theory goes….
Since I already have a biphasic sleep pattern, I’m going to try out this theory and see how it goes. I figure that if I sleep 4.5 hours a night and take a 1.5 hour nap, I’ll get in 4 cycles of sleep a day, which should be pretty good for me. For comparison, I found one strong advocate of this method that only gets 4.5 hours of sleep a day. Another regularly gets either 4.5 or 6, depending on the day.
If you’re curious, here are a couple of links to people that have been using this method:
On October 13th, 2006, at 6:35 pm, 
On October 13th, 2006, at 6:35 pm,