Nightly 8-Hour Sleep Isn't a Rule. It's a Myth.
Different sleep habits are just as
valid, and maybe even preferable.
Ray
Williams on Mar 03, 2014 in Wired for Success
We’ve
been told by health experts, and it’s conventional wisdom, that we should sleep
between seven and eight continuous hours a day as an adult. Yet, the assumption
that an eight-hour block of sleep is the ideal or norm may be a myth.
Numerous
studies have been published concerning the dangers of lack of sleep, to our
brain and general health and longevity. In just one recent example, scientists
have found that sleep allows our brains to clean themselves of toxins (link is
external).
Yet,
the insistence that "monophasic" sleep, with eight hours of
continuous nightly rest, is the necessary way to refresh ourselves not only
creates stress for people who are unable to achieve that goal, but ignores
other common variations in sleep patterns, and historical precedent as well.
“Everyone is
different," says Matt Bianchi, director of the sleep division at
Massachusetts General Hospital (link is external). "Some people drink
caffeine and get a rush while others don’t. One person might be fitted for
polyphasic sleep [sleeping in short multiple blocks throughout the day], but
someone else gets sleepy and crashes their car.”
We're
familiar with the stories of polyphasic sleepers such as Leonardo da Vinci,
Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Buckminster Fuller and Margaret Thatcher, who got
along fine with as little as four hours sleep each night, but little attention
is paid to such sleep cycles today.
Consider
these underexplored variations on daily sleep:
*
The Biphasic Schedule: Two three-to-four-hour sleeps with an hour of awake time
in the middle.
*
The Dymaxion Sleep Schedule: 30-minute “naps” every 6 hours.
*
The Uberman Schedule: Six 30-minute naps per day.
*
The Everyman Schedule: A daily three-hour sleep plus three 20-minute naps.
Polyphasic
Sleep - What is it?
Uberman
Sleep Schedule
All
of these alternative sleep schedules are linked to evolution and history. A
2007 report from the Journal of Sleep (link is external), for example, found
that the majority of animals on earth sleep on polyphasic schedules.
Most
people in advanced countries today follow monophasic sleep cycles, or try to,
but advocates of polyphasic sleep argue that their approaches trick the body
into entering REM sleep more quickly, making the total length of sleep time
less of an issue. Critics of monophasic sleep also argue that eight-hour sleep
schedules just don’t account for individual differences. For example, it's
believed that as much as three percent of the population can survive on only a
few hours of sleep per night without ill effects.
History
yields valuable insights regarding sleep. According to some recent research,
until the age of electricity many people slept in two segments. They would wake
up in the night for an hour or two, then return to sleep for another block of
time. “The dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was
biphasic,” says Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech
University and author of
At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (link is external). "Humans slept in
two four-hour blocks, which were separated by a period of wakefulness in the
middle of the night lasting an hour or more. During this time, some might stay
in bed, pray, think about their dreams or talk with their spouses. Others might
get up and do tasks or even visit neighbors before going back to sleep.”
References
to “first sleep” or “deep sleep,” and “second sleep” or “morning sleep” abound
in historical legal depositions, works of literature, and other pre-Industrial
era archival documents. Gradually, during the 19th century, references to
segmented sleep disappeared, Ekirch says, "and now people call it
insomnia.”
Electric
light at night now disrupts our circadian clock. The body reacts to bright
light the same way it does to sunshine; too much can stop it from releasing
melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep.
In
the 1990s, sleep scientist Thomas Wehr (link is external) discovered that most
people will sleep biphasically when subjected to natural patterns of light and
dark, supporting Ekirch’s findings.
Yet
this research struggles to gain a wider audience. In an article in Psychiatric
Times (link is external), Brown
Medical School
psychiatrist Walter Brown writes: “The general public seems to regard
seven-to-eight hours of unbroken sleep as a birthright; anything less means
that something is awry. Sleep specialists share this assumption.”
In
other words, if you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t worry about it.
“Waking up after a couple of hours may not be insomnia,” Wehr says. “It may be
normal sleep.”
Ekirch
adds, “If people don’t fight it, they’ll find themselves falling asleep again
after one hour.”
Instead,
many people who wake up in the middle of the night today automatically become
anxious about not sleeping or reach for sleeping pills.
Our
modern society, with its many stimuli, and an environment full of light, has
partially created this hysteria about sleep, and combined with the myth that an
8-hour block of continuous sleep is essential, does all of us a disservice.
Don’t forget about the well-documented benefits of incorporating naps into your
day.
How Sleeping 6 Times a Day Helped the Founder of
“WordPress” Build a Billion-Dollar Company
Source: What The Sleep Habits Of WordPress’s Founder
Can Tell Us About Success In Startups
April 9, 2015 | Posted by Rachel
Gillevet
I think we all know on one level or
another that our sleep habits have a direct impact on how we perform in both
our personal and professional lives. Too much sleep, and we’re dim, slow, and
sluggish. Too little, and we’re ineffective and irritable.
There’s gotta be a middle ground
somewhere – but many of us seem more or less incapable of finding it, instead
slogging through our day on a mixture of willpower and entirely too much
caffeine.
Not Matt Mullenweg. As the founder
of WordPress – which powers more than 20% of the world’s websites – and
Automattic – now valued at over a billion dollars, he’s among the tech
industry’s most successful and influential entrepreneurs. And he also makes no
secret about the fact that he naps. A lot.
Six times a day, as a matter of
fact.
During the early days of the
company, Mullenweg operated on something known as the Uberman Sleep Schedule.
While most people are monophasic sleepers – that is, they sleep once a day –
Mullenweg’s a polyphasic sleeper. Rather than hitting the hay at night and
waking up in the morning, he gets all his sleep through a strict schedule of
naps.
“Polyphasic
sleeping is not a new concept,” notes Youth Health Mag. “People in Spain
have been doing it religiously for many years. In fact, they have one of the
longest lunches in the world, as workers usually spend a good amount of their
time lounging, resting, and napping after their lunchtime meal.”
Mullenweg’s far from the only
business leader to nap, either, nor is he the only one who follows the Uberman
technique. Other noteworthy Ubermen include Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas
Jefferson, along with Tim Ferriss, best-selling author of The Four Hour
Workweek. All pretty successful, no?
Now, it’s worth noting that
Mullenweg no longer follows Uberman sleep. Since starting a new relationship,
he’s back to regular sleep habits like all the rest of us. Even so, he points
to his Uberman period as one of his all-time most successful.
“The
time when I was following the Uberman Technique was probably one of the most
productive periods of my life,” explained Mullenweg in an interview with
Ferriss. “I wrote WordPress in that time.”
The Power Of A Good Nap
Of course, the Uberman sleep
schedule can be incredibly risky, even if it does increase your waking hours.
Not only is it incredibly difficult to adapt to, prolonged lack of sleep can
cause lasting physical and psychological damage. For those of us who don’t quite feel like playing Russian Roulette with our sleep
habits, there’s another solution – naps.
Hear me out.
See, there’s this stigma in the
western world about napping. The general idea is that, if you regularly take
naps, you’re lazy; you’re unproductive and more or less useless. Mullenweg and
others like him are proof positive that this notion couldn’t be further from
the truth.
“Some
people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton,” Mullenweg admitted in the
interview. “I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a
20-minute snooze in the office…Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from
the bar at 2 or 3am, and then go back to work.”
And again, Mullenweg is hardly the
only entrepreneur with polyphasic sleep habits.
“I do
a lot of very mediocre stuff, but once in a while I come up with a really good
idea,” said Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan to Business Insider. “Maybe I’ll come up
with two in a month. Those two inevitably happen when I’m falling into a nap,
coming out of a nap, or waking up slowly on a Saturday morning.”
According to research from The
Journal of Sleep, even something as simple as a ten minute power nap in the
afternoon can work wonders for both focus and productivity.
Closing Thoughts
Success in the startup world
demands both great efficiency and boundless energy. Those are hard to come by
when you’re dragging yourself through your day in a sleep-deprived haze.
Napping could be the perfect solution – it could be just what you need to
succeed.
Everyone’s sleep needs are
different, of course. What worked for Mullenweg might not necessarily work for
you (and vice versa). The trick is finding something that fits you
specifically, and sticking to it.
Become Uberman & Sleep like Da Vinci:
The Polyphasic Sleep Cheat Sheet
A College Student & Polyphasic Sleep:
The Who, What, Where, Why, and How
http://markocalvocruz.com/2015/07/polyphasic/
