Biphasic Sleep Cycle
Last weekend I stayed up until about 3 in the morning two nights in a row (not entirely on purpose). Because we have Cross Country at 9 in the morning on weekends, I wasn’t able to sleep in so I ended up collapsing for a couple of hours in the afternoon.
I recalled that my friend Snuffy had tried to get himself into a polyphasic sleep cycle last year, and I wondered if what I had ended up doing was close at all. I found this lovely Wikipedia article on the subject and one section popped out in particular:
According to that chart I was very close already to being on a biphasic sleep cycle with 6 hours of sleep a day. So I decided to keep it up; with my weekly schedule it makes the most sense to sleep from 2 or 2:30 to 7 in the morning, and 1.5 hours right before or after Cross Country practice, which goes from 4 to about 6 on weekdays.
So far it hasn’t worked out too badly. I feel awake and alert for most of the day except for right before and right after my sleep times. My body is definitely still expecting to be getting more sleep at once because I always feel groggy right after I wake up. I have been pretty strict about maintaining the schedule because I know that I will lapse back into 8 hours a night if I let myself.
I think I will experiment a bit with different lengths of sleep (maybe a little more sleep during the major sleep block and less during the nap?) and see what feels the most natural. For example, I will get an extra hour of sleep tonight because we have a Cross Country meet tomorrow.
In a week I will let you know if I have successfully adjusted to biphasic sleeping; if it still doesn’t feel natural by that time I will go back to my normal sleep cycle. I’m in college, I’m supposed to try out new things, right?
Originally published at ianrbuck.blogspot.com on September 28, 2012.
[Ian from 2015]: Trying to maintain a strict schedule was probably a good idea, but it was definitely the wrong schedule. Cross Country practice was far worse than usual, and after a while colors started to look… different. Almost like an HDR photograph. I gave up on it before long, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not on a biphasic cycle anymore.
After several years, I have realized that my natural sleep cycle involves getting 7.5–8 hours of sleep a night, and a 20 minute power nap partway through the day. My mistake back in 2012 was that I was too aggressive in trying to reduce the amount of sleep I was getting at night.
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