Sleeping in two

Simon — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:55:00 +0000

For a long time I have been intrigued by the idea of getting more out of each day. More waking (and productive) time.

I have looked at polyphasic sleep especially the most famous form, Uberman's sleep, on several occasions in the past. However it has never really been practical for me to try it out.

Sadly this is still the case, but the slightly less ambitions biphasic sleep sounds like it might be possible.

The basic plan is to get a 1.5 hour nap at some point during the day (most details I can find suggest early evening) and then a 4.5 or 6 hour main sleep at some point during the night.

For some years now it has been quite common for me to only get 6 hours sleep or less on several nights a week. However I would always catch up by sleeping half of the weekend.

As a relatively new parent, the extra weekend sleep is no longer possible and my regular nightly sleep is still only a maximum of 6 (or on a really good night 7) hours. Plus with this now being our 10th month of parenthood, sleep deprivation is kicking in to help make a good portion of that sleep restless and less effective.

So if I can take my existing sleep time (6 hours) and transform it from "always over tired bad sleep" into "good sleep" simply by splitting it into a 1.5 hour nap and a 4.5 hour night, it sounds ideal. Further more as I'm already sleep deprived, it shouldn't even be too hard to get into.

So I have a plan, now to see if it works!

Today was my first attempt at taking an afternoon nap. I picked a time in late afternoon/early evening (which seems to be most popular) that I hoped would cause the least disruption to both my work and Liz/Edward.

This is what I've learnt:-

it's difficult getting to sleep with a baby shouting in the background, even if someone else if looking after them
in a house this small, even this fairly non-disruptive time is actually quite disruptive
to use an alarm clock that actually goes off
that laying down for 1.5 hours is not the same as getting 1.5 hours of sleep

I'm hoping to change a number of these points (especially the last) by adapting my plan slightly. Tomorrow I will try out taking my 1.5 hour sleep during an extended lunch break. While I can't guard against screaming babies, hopefully this will be a less likely time of day for disruptions. It's just a bit different to most other accounts I've found of biphasic sleeping.

So with about 30 minutes of nap sleep this afternoon, it's now ~1am and time for me to get to bed. For tonight the plan is a 6 hour sleep. I will reduce to 4.5 hours once the 1.5 hour sleeps are in place and working.

Pither.com: Sleeping in two

Sleeping in two