"I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long-term damage."
Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't cause obvious, self-evident damage at the time, and it's not always obvious to the person who's experiencing it. But it can cause serious, serious problems over time. That is essentially the effect of sleep apnea. The effects are subtle enough that an enthusiastic confirmation-biased person would easily miss them over a period of "several months or more", but they're real and they get worse over time.
As I said in another one of my comments, sleep deprivation, in my opinion, isn't actually the key part of polyphasic sleep. You can sleep 6 or 7 hours polyphasically, too, and this will increase your productivity and creativity than sleeping the same amount monophasically.
Sleeping biphasically for 7 hours or so works because that's what humans are wired for. Maybe taking two or three naps instead of one is better than taking none at all, but without the sleep dep you might as well just go biphasic. The main selling point of polyphasic is the sleep dep.
Indeed... in a short period of time where you must do X, polyphasic makes a hell of a lot of sense. As a long term strategy, I can't believe it's healthy. I'd rather not meddle with the default operation of a complex system I don't really understand, so usually I sleep until I feel like waking up - there are very few leisure activities that I'd rather do than be consistently well rested.
Comments
"I dug into the subject of polyphasic sleep and read a couple very personal accounts of people who made it work for them for extended periods (several months or more). I never tried it myself, but I don't believe they were any less "creative" or functional during this time, or that they were doing long-term damage."
Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't cause obvious, self-evident damage at the time, and it's not always obvious to the person who's experiencing it. But it can cause serious, serious problems over time. That is essentially the effect of sleep apnea. The effects are subtle enough that an enthusiastic confirmation-biased person would easily miss them over a period of "several months or more", but they're real and they get worse over time.
As I said in another one of my comments, sleep deprivation, in my opinion, isn't actually the key part of polyphasic sleep. You can sleep 6 or 7 hours polyphasically, too, and this will increase your productivity and creativity than sleeping the same amount monophasically.
Sleeping biphasically for 7 hours or so works because that's what humans are wired for. Maybe taking two or three naps instead of one is better than taking none at all, but without the sleep dep you might as well just go biphasic. The main selling point of polyphasic is the sleep dep.
Indeed... in a short period of time where you must do X, polyphasic makes a hell of a lot of sense. As a long term strategy, I can't believe it's healthy. I'd rather not meddle with the default operation of a complex system I don't really understand, so usually I sleep until I feel like waking up - there are very few leisure activities that I'd rather do than be consistently well rested.