My biphasic sleep experiment

I think sleep is a pretty important issue when it comes to personal health and improvement, given that we’ll each spend around a third of our life in bed. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about biphasic and polyphasic sleep patterns and considering possible implementations in my own life. It’s likely worth an attempt, given the potential benefit I could gain from a better sleep schedule versus the cost of the experiment. For all I know I could be stuck at a local maximum,¹ unaware of the far larger global maximum nearby:

So why not give myself a chance to spring off this local maximum, I ask? I am thus spending this last week of my winter break beginning an experiment with biphasic sleep.² Last night was my first time ever sleeping biphasically, and I intend to continue through at least the rest of this week.

Here’s the schedule I’ve developed:³

1. Go to sleep at 8:30 PM.
2. Wake up at 11:30 PM (3 hours later). Remain awake for 2 hours.
3. Go to sleep at 1:30 AM.
4. Wake up at 6:00 AM.

This yields a total of 7.5 hours of sleep, which exactly matches the average amount of hours I spend in bed per night.⁴

Tracking the effects of biphasic sleep

I’m using Quantified Mind to get an objective measure of my daily awareness as the experiment continues. I’m also recording observations of how I feel throughout the day. I’ll likely make this data public once I’ve decided on a format that I can use consistently.

Special considerations

Given that my per-segment sleep amount has been drastically reduced, I’m trying to be more careful about what I do during the waking periods near and between these segments. Blue light can be especially detrimental to sleep, and so I’m doing my best to avoid this. I’m using f.lux to tone down the color temperature of my computer screens at night, and avoiding other artificial lights of any kind (especially in the waking period between the two sleep segments). I bought these blue light-blocking glasses in order to further limit the amount of harm done by electronics at night. Apart from light, I’m also lending special attention to my eating habits, avoiding late-night meals and limiting sugar intake.

There’s no hiding that I’m pretty ridiculously tired after the first night. As you’ll see in the forthcoming sleep logs, I had relatively very little amounts of deep sleep in this first trial. I expect this to change as the week continues and my body adjusts to this new pattern. It should be exciting to see where this goes! Stay tuned for further updates.⁵