My ultimate goal for this experiment is to find a sleeping schedule or strategy that will maximize the amount of functional waking time, while minimizing transitionary side-effects, and maintaining a flexible and practical schedule. I’m looking for a sleep method that will provide the most benefit with the least amount of restrictions. I found information on sleep schedules that shorten the amount of sleep during the night by utilizing short naps throughout the day. After a week of research and deliberation, I decided to use the Everyman schedule as my first attempt at pholyphasic sleeping.
The key to understanding how a polyphasic sleep schedule can work is learning how sleep actually provides rest to the human body and mind. There is a theory that in order for a person to feel rested and alert the important factor is not only the amount of time slept, but rather the amount of sleep cycles experienced. I also found documentation (source) indicating that most people need five, 90-minute cycles, transitioning from light sleep to deep sleep to REM sleep over the course of a night. The fascinating thing about taking short naps throughout the day is that your body and mind find a way to condense benefits of an entire 90 minute cycle to fit into a mere 2o minutes. You can see this in action when after a short nap you find yourself feeling alert, awake and refreshed, while when you take a longer nap (40 min to an hr) you might wake up groggy and tired.
Armed with my goals and this newfound knowledge, I set out to create my ideal schedule.
As an inexperienced napper, I was very skeptical of the efficiency of napping abilities. For example, I fully expected it to take 10 minutes for me to fall asleep for naps, on a good day. In light of this, I created a schedule consisting of a 4.5 hour core sleep period (3 cycles) and three 20 min naps (3 more cycles) spaced throughout the day, thus giving me 6 total cycles per day as opposed to the standard amount of 5. I eventually would like to adjust to a 3 hr core, 3×20 min nap, however I theorized that an extra 90 minute cycle over night would ease the transitionary period both to make up for napping deficiencies and so my body could acclimate to the schedule with less sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is the biggest hurdle for adopting a polyphasic sleep schedule and can render people mentally incapacitated until recovery, and I wanted to make sure I would be able to function at full capacity for work responsibilities.