My polyphasic sleep experiment has been called to a halt.

I know what your are thinking… only 2 days in? “So, was it a success? of a Failure?”

Well, we’ll get to that shortly.

I went into this experiment with 2 hypothesis, one being absolute failure on day 3 or 4 due to sleep deprivation the other being success.

Both were wrong, what I actually discovered was something unexpected.

I’m a bit disappointed it’s all over so soon, almost before the experiment had begun. However part of any experiment is keening your mind and eyes open for unexpected results and accepting these surprised when they come along.

The first two days have been relatively easy as sleep deprivation hasn’t really kicked in. This has gave me a unique opportunity that I hadn’t foreseen – a 2 day window to try Polyphasic sleep while also being productive.

It’s almost a honeymoon period where you can try a polyphasic cycle for free. Sure by the end I was tired, but it let me test my basic assumptions about this new sleep cycle without having to adjust fully.

Before I go on, let me just say that I know many poly sleepers will read this and laugh. They will have objections to the above like I wont have experienced the full benefits of being adjusted, the euphoria and time dilation that poly sleep brings… and they are probably correct. However I had set aims to achieve and this 2 day window has allowed me to test those.

For me, this test was about productivity.

My assumptions had been that the extra time at night would allow me to complete some of the computer work that I haven’t found time for.

So, what did I find?

The extra time at night was indeed perfect for achieving some work and I did manage to complete two specific coding projects I had set aside for these times… on face value, a success.

However, that’s only half the story.

My sleep cycle was designed around one core 3hr sleep and three 20min naps, giving a total sleep of 4hrs a day. This is where the theoretical and experimental diverged.

In reality, the 20min naps took more like 40min of my time. By the time I stopped what I was doing, set alarms, set the sleep track on the ipod going, etc, I was loosing a lot more time around the naps than I had budgeted. All up, I was actually taking around 5 1/2hrs to get my 4hrs sleep.

At this point I should point out that I normally only get around 6.5 to 7 hrs sleep, plus another 30min ‘lost’ time around this monophasic cycle.

So over all my actual productivity gains are looking like 2hrs per day.

Against this, I have had to look at what I need to do to achieve this 2hr gain:

• Basically I am loosing 2hrs in the day with people contact, to achieve 4hrs solo time at night. For those of you that know me, you will know this isn’t a obvious fit with my personality
• I had designed this sleep cycle to fit around work. This would mean taking one nap in my car for lunch time. Having tried this now this isn’t as easy as I had hoped and far less practical than I had imagined
• I also found that my daytime job crept into my night time. As my afternoon nap gives me a forced break at the end of the work day. This meant on the days that things don’t go quite as planned I ended up having to do some work in my night period – further reducing the productivity gains I had hoped for
• Finally, having to stop what I was doing every 5-6 hrs did not come at all naturally. I am more of a ‘keep going until it is complete’ types person and I found having to park jobs and pick them up 40min later was very inefficient. It surprised me how much of the jobs I had stored in short term memory and lost during the forced break – this lead to a higher level of re-work than I had hoped.

All in all, I think the real world productivity gains I would see post adaptation would be in the range of 30-90 minutes per day depending on the day. This differs significantly from my original 3hr-3.5hr target.

After two days it has became very obvious that for the level of gains I am seeing, do not outweigh the impact this cycle would have on the daily lives of those around me.

In fact, looking at this a different way, I think a better way to achieve these gains exists for me:

• I often sleep in on the weekends to around 9am. Removing these will give an extra 6hrs each week.
• Another 30-60min per day can easily be achieved through simple productivity gains and scheduling.
• This would give a usable 8 – 10 hrs gains a week.
• In addition, this experiment has shown I can do 1 or 2 nights a week with only 3hrs sleep when required to work on specific projects

So, given all that, I started to look down a different track: The Uberman Sleep cycle.

If the ‘Everyman’ cycle I had proposed isn’t going to given the productivity gains I am after then the 20min naps every 4hrs of Uberman is the obvious answer.

I think the Uberman cycle would still fall under my original aim of 4hrs ‘sleep’ even once the ‘lost time’ around the naps is added in.

After a fair bit of research and thinking, I think this could be the answer, however it simply isn’t practical for me at the moment at this stage in my life. I have a new job starting in 6 weeks time, and the Ubermans strict sleep times will not be compatible with this.

Based on the above, my experiment has been called to a halt with the following conclusions:

• The everyman sleep cycle is unlikely to give me the productivity gains needed to justify the upset to our daily lives at this stage in my life.
• After 2 days I believe adaptation will be tough, but achievable with the right motivation.
• I would be willing to retry either Everyman or Uberman if there was a change in either the productivity achievable (i.e. if I ever run my own business where I could maximise the 4hrs alone at night) or if our daily lives changed in away that reduced the impact of the schedule (travelling, home based job etc).

This isn’t how I expected to finish this experiment – I’m almost a bit disappointed that it is over before the real trial of sleep deprivation has begun. None of my hypothesis had included the idea that the productivity gains from the everyman cycle wouldn’t be as great as I had theorised.

This was an experiment, and part of conducting experiments is accepting results that are unexpected.

I am still determined to try this cycle fully at some point in my life, but 2 days in it is clear that this isn’t that time. Curiosity alone is not enough to justify the effort and upset to our daily lives… so this experiment will have to wait until a different time in life when our circumstances make it easier to work around the upset.

I think I will declare this experiment a “successful failure”.

I learn’t what I needed out of it and will be better prepared when the right time comes.