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How To Hack Your Brain, Part 1: Sleep | Dustin Curtis

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Saved by 48 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-06-25


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a daily sleep-wake cycle that lasts about 28 hours instead of 24

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cycle that lasts about 28 hours

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Eventually, I discovered that if I stuck to a 28-hour schedule, my body was happy; I woke up rested, went to sleep tired, and everything worked great.

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incompatible with the rest of the world

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I probably have is called non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome

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polyphasic sleep

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can be used by anyone

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shave 6 hours off your normal sleeping time

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don’t really know

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In the late 1930’s, a wealthy amateur scientist named Alfred Lee Loomis and his colleagues watched an EEG monitor for brain electrical activity during sleep, and they made a pretty remarkable discovery: there are actually five main parts to each of several phases of sleep that occur during a normal night. One of these stages is called REM (rapid eye movement), and it is where most of the benefit of sleep comes from. Ironically, it is in REM sleep that the brain looks the least asleep. In fact, it looks awake. This is the phase where dreams occur.

It seems that all you really need to survive and feel rested is the REM phase, which is only a tiny portion of your actual sleep phases at night. You only spend 1-2 hours in REM sleep during any given night, and the rest is wasted on the other seemingly useless phases. This is where the opportunity to hack the brain presents itself. What if you could find a way to cut out the other phases and gain 4-5 more hours of productive wakeful time?

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all you really need to survive and feel rested is the REM phase,

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a tiny portion of your actual sleep phases at night. You only spend 1-2 hours in REM sleep during any given night

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If you’ve gone 24 hours without sleep

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your body goes instantly into REM sleep as a protection mechanism

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train it to enter REM for short periods of time throughout the day

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20-minute naps rather than in one lump at night

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With monophasic sleep, you sleep for eight hours and you get about 2 hours of good REM sleep. This is the normal schedule most people use, and it means about five hours of the night are lost to (as far as we know) unnecessary unconsciousness.

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five methods for polyphasic sleep

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all focus on many 20-minute naps throughout the day

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possibly a couple hours of core sleep at night

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The “everyman” method is just a stepped ladder acting as a guide to show how much core sleep to have for any number of naps. The amount of total sleep per day is drastically reduced for each extra nap you add.

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on 2009-10-02 by grahamperrin

This sounds like me, since suffering from tinnitus.

The “uberman” method has six naps and no core sleep. Amazingly, you can function with just two total hours of sleep using the uberman method.

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If you miss a nap, the whole schedule is thrown off and you’ll feel tired for days.

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