Strange Sleep Patterns

Many of you that know me, know that I keep odd hours, to say the least. I’m often up for days at a time, equally as often by choice as I am due to insomnia. I’m quite sure that my ADHD has a large effect on my sleeping cycle, and is probably responsible, either directly or by way of the adderall that I take to treat it (cope with it? mask it? who knows what it should be called). Regardless, my odd sleep patterns and difficulties sleeping have led me to reading a lot of articles related to it.

Recently I came across an article on Polyphasic Sleep. I had never really heard of this before, so of course Hyperfocus took over and I spent the next few hours reading about it. The most interesting and detailed information I found about it was a log Steve Pavlina kept while experimenting with Polyphasic Sleep. The concept is rather than sleeping for a long block of 6-8 hours each night (Monophasic Sleep), you sleep 20-30 minutes every 4 hours, meaning you sleep 6 times a day or so, for a total of 2-3 hours. This method apparently takes around a week to physically adjust to (and as Steve points out, a little while longer to mentally and emotionally adjust to). I wouldn’t expect to have much trouble as Steve did adjusting mentally, since I am already usually up all night and sleeping a larger part of the day (if at all) and already am used to not dividing time into “days” because of this. The benefits are extending your waking hours, effectively giving yourself around 35 extra hours per week (as opposed to sleeping 6-8 hours each night).

If I can ever work my work schedule around it, I intend to try it. If you’re curious, you can find more information on Polyphasic sleep at lifehack.org and Super Memory. Both have very interesting articles on the topic.