Most newbies in the sleep hacking community as well as skeptics
outside the sleep hacking community, never question as to why the core sleep is
split into smaller naps when it comes to polyphasic sleeping.
Folks who are unacquainted with the concept of sleep and
sleep hacking believe that anything and everything concerning splitting your
core sleep into shorter naps is stupid and/or dangerous.
However there are also quite a few who are acquainted with
the concept of polyphasic sleeping but assume that, the more naps in a
schedule, themore awesome the schedule is. Which is not true.
Along the same lines, is another question as to why you
should even go polyphasic in the first place and split your core sleep into
smaller naps when instead you can keep decreasing your sleep monophasically.
To sum it up, the above paragraphs can be listed in a couple
of questions below:
1. Why polyphasic sleeping at all?
2. Why polyphasic sleeping is better?
3. Why can’t I
decrease my total sleep time without polyphasic sleeping?
Below is a short excerpt from page 74 of ‘The Manual’
provided in theEasy Sleep Hacking guide which answers all the three questions asked above.
1. Why can’t I continue
sleeping monophasically and keep decreasing the total sleep duration down to 2
hours?
Ans. The onset of the REM stage of sleep is immediate only
when you sleep short polyphasic naps. Hence, when you are on the Uberman or the
Dymaxion sleep schedule, the onset of the REM stage of sleep occurs within
minutes of the start of the nap. However, if you sleep monophasically and
decrease the total sleep time down to 2 hours, you should remember that the
entire sleep will not consist only of REM sleep because the REM stage of sleep
lasts for short bursts of 30 minutes to 1 hour and it will be either preceded
or followed by the N-REM stages of sleep. Hence, if you hack your sleep down to
a single 2 hour nap, you will be
deprived of REM sleep.
Not only will you be deprived of REM sleep but, on top of
being in state of sleep deprivation, the amount of time between two naps goes
up to 22 hours. This is prolonged sleep deprivation will affect your state of
body and mind. On Dymaxion sleep schedule however, the onset of REM stage of
sleep is immediate and the time gap between two naps is only 5.5 hours. This
means not only are you not being deprived of REM sleep but also, you will be
getting your REM sleep at short intervals of 5.5 hours.
