Hacking Your Brain To Sleep As Little As 2 Hours Per Day

Are you never getting enough sleep? Do you feel like you need more than 24 hours during a day to get your work done? Then you may possibly benefit from altering your sleep schedule.

A Little on Sleep

Adults need anywhere from 7 ½ to 9 hours of sleep a night. Throughout sleeping you go through different stages. Stage 4 REM (Rapid eye movement) only occurs for about 2 hours, and is the most beneficial for humans. The rest of the time spent sleeping is essentially wasted.

How to Sleep Less

Polyphasic sleep is another method of sleeping. Instead of sleeping once during the night (monophasic) you nap multiple times throughout the day. Although it is generally believed that polyphasic sleep makes you achieve REM sleep faster, it actually doesnâ??t; no one really knows how polyphasic sleep works or why it does. So thatâ??s not something I can really explain. On the other hand I can explain how to achieve a more efficient sleeping schedule.

Polyphasic Sleep

Some people actually use a polyphasic sleep schedule, and they probably donâ??t know it. The Siesta method involves sleeping 6 hours during the night, and taking a twenty minute nap after noon. This removes about an hour and forty minutes off of a monophasic sleep schedule, while you continue to feel just as rested.

Then thereâ??s the Everyman 2-nap. This involves sleeping a total of 4 ½ hours during the night, a nap at noon, and a nap at around 5 oâ?? clock; for a total of 5.2 hours of sleep. As you sleep less, you have to take more naps to recharge. Once you get into a certain napping schedule your body becomes more efficient at sleeping and thus you have to spend less time unconscious. One nap you go through a certain sleep stage, and the next nap you go through another, etc.

You can keep adding naps such as the Everyman 3-nap schedule requiring only 4 total hours of sleep, or the Everyman 4-nap requiring only 2.8 hours of sleep.

The craziest method out there is called the Uberman. It requires you to nap 20 minutes every 4 hours for a total of 2 hours a day. It was also believed that by using this sleeping technique your body will only use REM sleep. That has been proven incorrect, as your body still goes through all the stages, but is more efficient in each one. This is what adds to the mystery, because we still canâ??t find out why we need non-REM sleep.

Uberman sleep schedule

At any rate these methods have been tried and proven to work without any negative side effects. Steve Pavlina tried this sleeping schedule for 5 ½ months and experienced no problems with it. He eventually chose to go back to monophasic sleep because of the social impact. The rest of the world runs on monophasic schedules and the extra naps cut time you can spend with other awake humans.

To incorporate something such as napping 20 minutes every 4 hours you would have to be an independent freelancer, or not bound by an 8 hour job. You would also get an extra 6 hours of waking time! I think if you aren’t productive with your extra time you will eventually end up bored, and going back to a monophasic sleep schedule. I doubt anyone is actually crazy enough to incorporate this sleeping schedule in their lives to do more work.

In Other Sleeping News

Margaret Thatcher, the ex-prime minister of England, only slept 3-4 hours a night!

Scientists have also discovered a gene that controls the amount of sleep we need to sleep. ABCC09 used to be associated with heart disease and diabetes, but is also responsible for our sleeping needs. Fruit flies have the same gene, and researchers were able to shorten their sleeping time by mutating ABCC09.

A biphasic sleep cycle involves sleeping 4-4.5 hours at night, and taking a 90 minute nap at around noon.

Article written by Octavian Ristea.