Switching to Biphasic Sleeping? Start here.

[kazerniel]

Hi,

(I only read the 1st and last page of this topic so sorry if this question has been asked) I slept polyphasically for a few months before. At the polyphasic system I know that the 20 minute naps are equivalent to the 1,5 hours cycles in monophasic. Is there some similar logic with this "1,5 hours nap" biphasic system? I mean as I've read everyone here in biphasic sleeps 3-4,5 hours cores, but what if I need 9 hours of sleep instead of 6-8, how long should my core sleep be then with biphasic?

Thanks

[krackato]

Do you guys think this sleep schedule would work / be ideal?

4:30am - 9am = core sleep (4.5 hours of sleep)
11 hours of awake time
8pm - 9:30pm - nap (1.5 hours of sleep)
7 hours of awake time

[Joerg]

Hi!

In case this thread is still read, I'd throw in a question as well:

I am very interested in getting into a biphasic sleep rythm (4.5/1.5 would be great). I do absolutley see how this can work with a regular schedule. But how do I proceed with a rotating shift rythm? Unfortunately, that's my situation right now. My work times switch between three different shifts. Work times are 6-14 / 14-22 / 22-6 . The first (day) shift seems easy as my preferred sleep times would be 0030-0500 and 1730-1900. But how do I go about the other shifts? Nap at 1200 on the 14-22 days? And how in the world can I include sleep times on the night shifts?
Does anybody have experience with fluctuations like these?
Any help is appreciated!

Take care,
JJ

[sleepproblems]

how does using the alarm clock work? I'm transitioning in to biphasic sleep for quality primarily so isn't it counteractive to have myself waking up in the process of a sleep cycle? I think I might start trying to implement a core sleep tonight so if someone could just elaborate on how to use the alarm clark with core sleep and nap that would be great. Like what if I'm trying establish a 2 - 6:30 core sleep but it's 3 and I'm still not asleep? What if during my 7 - 8:30 nap I'm not asleep halfway in to the nap time? If I miss the nap then what am I supposed to do? etc...

[Smart People]

I apologize if this was already asked in this thread, but:

Is it in any way better to schedule the nap so that it's in the middle of the overall waking time or it doesn't matter at all?
Would this perhaps help in reducing the sleeping time?

Here's a 24 hour clock, to see this illustrated:

For example, if sleeping from midnight to 6 in the morning, the mid time between the waking hours would be 15:00 (so following this, you'd go to sleep at 14:30 for an hour).

But so far I've seen people (the OP and Steve) having the nap later, at 18:00 or so, even tho they wake up at 5 in the morning.

[RED COMPASS]

Be aware of what one consumes and drinks before taking a nap.

[Marsupilama]

I actually gave it a shot January this year. If anyones interested, here's my log:


Day 1

or...the jump in the cold water. After not having slept much anyway the night from the 31st to the 1st due to celebration of the new year, I forced myself to stay up until 3am and set my alarm clock to 7:30. And immediately overslept. What a great start haha. Well I guess I know now that my ipod alarm clock isn't loud enough since I didn't hear it and got up at 8:45 instead. Oh and by the way, that doesn't change the fact that I feel like **** right now, I'm gonna schedule my nap for 7:30 later and see how long I can stay awake after that.

Well, after not feeling tired enough and also given the longer sleep in the morning, I decided to skip my nap. I just hope I don't feel too bad tomorrow morning and don't oversleep again.

Day 2

Now who thought it would be that easy, I just had to change my alarm sound to something that could easily compete with the ******* Shawshank alarm siren. First impulse is to smack it against the wall, fortunately my brain boots fast enough to prevent my arm from taking action. Next thing is putting on music loud enough to not fall back to sleep again. Looking forward to my nap.

I felt pretty tired the whole morning but it got better and better throughout the day. I almost decided to skip my nap again but I somehow new that I would've regretted that later at night. And sure enough I passed out sleeping after like 5 minutes in bed. Approx. 70 minutes later I feel pretty good, stayed in bed the whole 90 minutes tho. Let's see how I'll do tomorrow.

Day 3

7:30, my alarm goes off. It takes me a solid 30 minutes to be able to hold my eyes open for more then 7 seconds. Again, loud music helps to stop falling back to sleep.

YES!!!

As I'm writing this, the phone (which due to retarded circumstances is in the room where I sleep right now) just rang. And I was awake already! No you did not wake me up stupid phone, suck on that!!! Well I guess sometimes God has his ways in showing that you're going the right path , lets see how I'll do during the day.

I just awoke from my nap, I guess I will never beat that timing again. I fell asleep like 2 minutes after closing my eyes and literally woke about by myself a minute before the alarm goes off. Apparently I'm still a little dizzy hence the last sentence, of course I meant I woke up all by myself a minute before the alarm went off. Or I woke up about a minute before the alarm went of...it kinda depends on the way you look at it. Anyway, like yesterday, I felt pretty tired in the morning which got better and better during the day. Especially the first 30 minutes it was nearly impossible keeping my eyes open for longer than 30 seconds.

Day 4

Today was even worse. It took me a full 45 minutes to be able to hold my eyes open longer then 7 seconds, I just hope this improves dramatically within the next 7 days.

Day 5

I found out that I have to work the late shift starting next week. This cancels all further biphasic activities. On the one hand I feel like it was a waste of the 4 days of torture, on the other hand tho it was a good experience. I know eventually it would've gotten better but I'm also glad I can sleep in tomorrow...

[Smart People]

Here I am, after one week.
The plan was 1:00-5:30 and ~16:30-18:00.

I've made a little bit of progress, but I'm still struggling very hard to get a solid 1.5 hour of sleep in the afternoon. In the afternoon I'd usually fall asleep for 5 minutes (get a quick dream) and then it would be hard to fall asleep again. I don't think I've ever managed an uninterrupted 1.5 hour in the afternoon.

Then if I do happen to sleep in the afternoon it's a challenge to fall asleep at night before 2:00 or so, which in turn makes me very sleepy at 5:30.

[NZsFinest]

I'm into day 3 of attempting to go biphasic and really just feeling crap. It is somewhat encouraging to see by this forum that I'm not the only one though hah

The headaches are starting to subside but eye strain is killing me and I look terrible. Probably doesn't help that I find most things I can do to pass time in the early hours of the morning involve focusing on something ie. reading, computer work, video games.

I'm going to the gym and hitting the cardio pretty hard in the early afternoon to set me up for a nap and it seems to be working alright but for now the problem is more sleeping in.

I've just started my mid-year holidays and have basically no committment so it should give me a fair go at getting this right. Juggling the social and work life of university would be so much easier with a few more waking hours but if I'm still feeling this dodgy in a week's time I'm not sure how keen I'll be to keep it up.

[Rosewood]

It's interesting to see all these people trying and succeeding at biphasic sleep.
I started trying it about 3 weeks ago, thanks to Steve's blog about how he did it.
I started with a schedule based on his, 4.5 hours core sleep, 1.5 hours nap.

My usual schedule was as follows:
- Nap from 8PM to 9:30PM
- Core sleep from 4-6AM to 8:30-10:30AM

Now that I've gotten used to it, I've cut a little time off of both.
I changed my core sleep to 4 hours and my nap to an hour.
But this has caused two strange things to occur.

First off, every time I awaken from my core sleep, I find myself feeling incredibly groggy and tired.
It passes after half an hour, but I happen to know that feeling groggy is caused by sleep inertia, which only happens when your in deep sleep.
In other words, my body wants me to sleep longer.

Second, I can't nap anymore, not like I used to anyway.
I just lie in bed, shift positions every now and then, and only fall asleep for a couple of minutes at a time or just not at all.
I am always very relaxed and far off when I'm lying in bed though, so I'm pretty sure I at least do some stage 1/stage 2 NREM sleep.

Funny thing is, I don't feel sleepy at all during the day.
Only when it's nearly time to go to bed do I feel a little drowsy, but even that's manageable.
The other day I got into an online discussion that lasted so long I missed my nap, but it didn't cause my mental performance to suffer at all, cuz I won the discussion, and I didn't realize I had missed my nap until I checked my watch afterward.

Can anyone tell me what the heck is going on and what I can do about this?
Has anyone ever had something like this before?

- Rosewood

[Anythingwilldo]

Hey everyone. I see that your all trying biphasic sleep and was wondering if you tried the others as well(Uberman/Dymaxion)?

It would be nice to talk to someone who has tried both so I can hear about benefits and cons vs each other from somebody who has actually done it!

[slb]

Ok so decided i'm going to start this Biphasic sleeping thing, as I want to stop sleeping for 8+ hours a day which feels like a waste of time to me, as well as improve my quality of sleeping.

So I decided on a 4.5 core sleep from 2:30am - 7am, and a 1.5 nap from 7pm to 8:30pm.

So first day didn't go too well. Fell asleep at 2:30 as planned, but set my alarm clock wrong and ended up sleeping untill 9:30. But i'm going to try nap this afternoon as scheduled anyways, to try get my body clock synced. Will post every morning with progress.

[Darkingfire]

Hello everyone, I am very new to the whole idea of polyphasic/biphasic sleeping, but I think that it is something that could really help me a lot.

See, generally I have a problem with getting enough sleep. Not through lack of sleep, exactly, but I either get too little, or too much, even when I've slept for (up to) 36 straight hours. I only have two times of day that I'm really awake, (the few hours before during and after dusk, and the hours before during and after dawn) and my husband is an extreme insomniac who runs on a 36 hour sleeping schedule. (He's awake for 22 hours, then asleep for 14.)

The two of us were talking about it, and he suggested that I try polyphasic sleeping, but I looked into it, and it seems like biphasic sleeping would suit me better, so that I could sleep during the night, then again during the day, and be awake at the two points in time that I have the most energy naturally.

Any ideas how I should go about dividing up my schedule?

[nasars]

I read only first and last page of this thread, so didn't notice if some one has already discussed this before or not?

Any suggestions / guidance are welcome.

I want to start biphasic sleep ( 6 Hrs. in total) with following timinings (flexible and not rigid).

1. Core sleep Around 4.5 Hrs..... 1 am to 5:30 am

2. Nap / Short Sleep 90 min...... 6:45 pm to 8:15 pm

[jgerminario]

Looks like this thread is pretty on-and-off right now! But I figured I'd post this in case anyone is still reading:

I'm looking to go biphasic but I am terrible at that most necessary skill— getting out of bed in the first place (I'm a freelancer and thus don't have any external constraint on my sleeping time). I'm wondering if anyone else is trying out biphasic right now, so we could share our experiences/successes/failures and, more important, keep each other a little accountable.

I've tried it a few times, but usually stop because I oversleep too much for a day or two, napping becomes difficult, and I get discouraged. I am now trying to do a nap only about 3 hours after waking up -- so sleeping from 12-5:30, exercising, eating breakfast and preparing for the day, then napping from 8-9:30. My sleep cycles are about 1:20, and I used to need only 6:40 when I was working a 9-5 job (best of times, worst of times...), so this is really just a way of getting me out of bed at a consistent time (i.e. 5:30 AM instead of 8, 9, 10, whatever...)

I might try to push the nap time back from there to make it more 'properly' biphasic -- but has anyone had any experience with taking a nap earlier in the day?