9 ms·

The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

rappatic 3y ago
It's so interesting to me that fundamental ways of life like this can go nearly undocumented save passing references. We know a lot more about the annals of Greek history, for example, because that's what was written down. Ekirch took years to rediscover all these references to biphasic sleep because it was so fundamentally normal that historic writers never thought to focus on it. Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
- eschulz 3y ago
  I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    > I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. Oh no what will future generations do without doomscrolling.
    - jeffhuys 3y ago
      You might be projecting there.
      - klyrs 3y ago
        Oooh, and projecting. Will they even know what they've lost? (tongue firmly in cheek, I hope you understand)
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      How well doomscrolling and were it happens is documented in historic documents? Just food for thought...
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      It would be a loss IMO if future generations never knew that we even engaged in doomscrolling (or to what extent). Of all things you’d want future generations to learn from, maladaptive behavior that’s so widespread as to be hardly noticed in daily life seem high on the list. Caveat that doomscrolling specifically maybe isn’t a great example given that we are collecting a ton of data about it, we’re mostly just ignoring it.
  - m463 3y ago
    I've been reading the book Debt by David Graeber, and it went a lot of places I didn't expect. I suspect a lot of things we would take interest in are just not written down, or not commonly explored. For example, it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. It was also common for people to give each other gifts, not too large or too small or too equal to form a community.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. I am sure there is some regional variability, but at least in these parts you can still see that habit ingrained in those now around 80 years of age or older. But it seems to quickly taper off in anyone younger. By the time you get to my generation it is effectively unheard of.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    As an example, think about how some alien visitors might try to piece together how we live day-to-day by watching TV shows and movies and reading whatever books they manage to dig up. The only way they'll even know we have bathrooms and take a crap there is if they find books or other archives detailing toilet diagrams, bathroom design, etc. If they just watch movies and TV, they'll think we somehow never have to expel waste, even though we obviously eat a lot as proven by how much screen time eating gets.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  > our obsessive encyclopedic documentation ...will bitrot away in 50 years. In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The government-run national libraries (think Library of Congress and similar) at least have the mandate for long-term archival. Bitrot isn't as much a concern any more - we have data formats worked out these days, with well defined specifications and open standards (PDF/A), so basically as long as computers keep operating on the fundamental principle of bits and bytes, our documents will always be able to be read, and for virtually all popular data storage formats there is open source software that can, should the need arise, be run in an emulator. In fact, future historians should have it easier to understand our times, given that machines can actually sift through data at speed and you don't need humans to tediously take and scan brittle paper, and a lot of data is replicated so often across the planet that even a nuclear war should leave at least one copy alive in contrast to earlier times where wars, fires and natural disasters would routinely wipe out entire nations' memories. (Doesn't stop people from trying though, just look at the book burnings in Ukraine committed by Russia) The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. The former because a lot of data there (hole punch cards...) literally rotted away, the latter because of decades worth of homegrown architectures, all kinds of DRM, a lack of obligations for publishers to submit DRM-free copies and copies of the server backend code to national libraries, and the current "trend" towards e-stores for games instead of physical media.
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
      > The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. It's much worse today, because most of the so-called "archives" are actually stored somewhere "in the cloud", and are one serious economic crisis away from being deleted at the press of a button. (Also an even bigger problem is all the proprietary or unmaintained data formats. We already have issues maintaining this stack of bullshit today, and only a couple decades have passed. Maintaining this for centuries is out of the question.)
- ianstormtaylor 3y ago
  I agree, it’s kind of mind blowing when simple things like this are discovered—very humbling. (If the research can be trusted ofc.) > Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life. I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.
lmm 3y ago
Has this evidence been examined sceptically? I've heard this theory a few times, but it always sounds like one person's obsession, and I struggle to credit it.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  You are right (and very observant) that this is mostly Ekrich when you dig into it. I didn't realise this until quite recently, and I too had assumed there was a lot more work about this. But what he's found in literature is pretty consistent, and biphasic sleep was once quite normal in a specific context: the siesta. It's dying out in continental Europe alas -- a lost cultural touchstone -- and in the contemporary West, a siesta is short (literally a nap). But a traditional Spanish siesta is the best part of a sleep cycle -- a good couple of hours, with an hour's rest spread either side. More than enough that you could have four hours sleep overnight throughout the longer days and not be incompetent the next day. My sleep is currently polyphasic, which is not a great time. But it has taught me that sleep in the absence of natural light (or the presence of consistent artificial light) does have a habit of going polyphasic. I woke up at 4:15am after about five hours of sleep. I just cleaned a grill pan. I may go back to sleep again. Sleep scientists seem pretty sure that polyphasic sleep is bad.
  - ilvez 3y ago
    And it feels bad as well. I have polyphasic periods and I'm always relieved when they end. Not sure why I don't feel too good, because I have ways to cope now, but good monophasic sleep makes me wake up rested and without a headache.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      I think it feels bad because it inevitably messes up one's digestive clock (which is implicated in robustly configuring the sleep clock) and by implication, particularly with modern food, blood sugar levels. (I suspect that the long cultural stability of the Spanish long siesta has a lot to do with the cultural stability of mealtimes -- and meal types/sizes -- that developed around it.) The other day I felt queasy, suddenly, after lunch at a normal time -- so queasy I had to write off the day. I then proceeded to sleep for the best part of 24 hours, because all the phases seemed to merge. A literal 24 hour period, useless. Other people lived normal lives in that period; for me it just vanished. I think blood sugar had a lot to do with that, as well as the time of year (winter in Britain) and it has definitely unnerved me. I cope by just accepting it; trying to do things when awake. But there are things you can't really do in the middle of the night if you live in a close, quiet neighbourhood; hoovering, running laundry, shredding documents, even some printers are noisy.
CalRobert 3y ago
When my wife was pregnant with our first kid I did this for a while. She was exhausted and went to bed early and so did I. Bed at 8, up 1-3, bed 3-7. I got a ton done in those two hours. I remember looking for an e ink display to use with my computer so I could do it by candlelight, to no avail
- elliotec 3y ago
  Wait tell us more about use your computer by candlelight… do you mean like red shift? Most OSes have this built in and there are 3rd party apps that can do candlelight settings
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    I never found a solution. I ended up using a very red-shifted screen set to a very low light but what I really wanted was e-ink, like a Kindle for instance. The only options I came across were impractically expensive, though. https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-paperlike-253 https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-p... for instance, and this was years ago when there were fewer options.
    - clarkema 3y ago
      I have a 'study' setup using a Boox Mira (portable 13" eink screen) for exactly this kind of use; not polyphasic in my particular case but late evening use. Yes, the screen is expensive, but _totally_ worth it.
      - CalRobert 3y ago
        Thanks for the tip!
    - washadjeffmad 3y ago
      Just noting because I went through the same, but I haven't found I've been able to use any LCD or OLED at very low contrast and brightness without content becoming illegible or uncomfortable without ambient light. However, a relatively smaller CRT maintains a contrast ratio that I don't seem to struggle to look at or decipher in complete darkness. I've also tried dropping the aspect ratio on my 42" 4k OLED to 4:3 and not scaling the resolution to limit light output, but the pixel density ultimately seems to be a limiter. Since I can work on my smartphone at its lowest output and with redshift, a smaller, higher-dpi display may be key.
buserror 3y ago
I do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It's 6:50 now and I've done a lot of work! It's nice, quiet, I just really crack on. I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again. Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do already! ... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon. I used to be a 'night owl' really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk. Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!
- nly 3y ago
  So your weekday evening social life is non existent?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - romanovcode 3y ago
    I would imagine everyone who is 35+ with family has no evening social life. Or am I missing something? Another question, at some point in your life - do you even want an evening social life?
    - amonith 3y ago
      This! It's not even about the family. I think it just gets boring and unnecessarily exhausting after 10+ years so it transforms to trips, mid-day visits at home and various shared hobbies (like you meet with your friends to go bouldering Saturday morning, idk).
  - amonith 3y ago
    Not OP, but most of the people I know above 30 don't "go out" on weekday evenings nor regular weekends tbh. Even people without kids. Various trips and meets in friends' houses during the day (usually Sunday) is the main form of socializing.
INTPenis 3y ago
Ever since I learned of sleep cycles, and how to measure my own, I've pretty much governed my life around them. Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state. For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes. This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  Can you share more about how you got accurate measurements on this? I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    I did this at community college ~15 years ago. So I'm mostly improvising regarding my cycle being that long. I'd say it's around 60 minutes. Specifics don't matter after a while because you build new habits and do them without thinking. But the thing our teacher told us was to stay up until you get more and more tired, until you feel your eyelids wanting to close, but power through it and measure the time between the most tired and the most alert after that.
- IndySun 3y ago
  The trick to going back to sleep is often, after waking too soon, to do something boring. A chore. Try it for 5-15 mins, go back to bed. Repeat if you're not nodding off. The thinking is, you'll prefer sleep to the boring chore.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2022) Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907
rapjr9 3y ago
As people get older polyphasic sleep often becomes their norm, they sleep when they are tired, and are awake when they are not, especially if they no longer have a job. If you have to interact with people (sign for packages for example) it can be a problem, but if you don't it seems about the same as normal sleep to me. Being forced to change sleep schedule constantly does cause health issues, but just doing what your body tells you seems to work out ok in my experience. Taking drugs to force sleep to a schedule seems like a worse option. One drawback to it is that many sleep trackers don't handle it well. They'll treat a second sleep as a nap for example and then pester you that you're not getting enough sleep. The Galaxy G5 seems to capture all sleeps fairly well (but it loses pairing every few months and has to be reset from scratch), the Oura Ring sometimes catches 2nd or 3rd sleeps as naps and adds them to the total, the Xiaomi Mi7 Band often misses shorter sleeps or lists them as naps without adding them to the total. The Android app "Sleep as Android" is started and stopped manually so if you can remember to do that it works well.
satvikpendem 3y ago
I've been experimenting a lot with polyphasic sleep over the years. I've done siestas, Everyman routines, Dual Core, Biphasic-X, etc. They're all interesting in their own way but these days I've been getting into the dual core routine which is similar to the post's two sleeps. These routines by the way are documented on https://www.polyphasic.net/polyphasic-sleep-schedules/ https://www.polyphasic.net/polyphasic-sleep-schedules/
- mnk47 3y ago
  I have gastroparesis, which often gives me bloating/pain that lasts a long time, and if I'm too hungry at night, I have to choose between trying to ignore hunger and not sleeping for the next ~3 hours (even a snack or a cup of water makes me bloated). On top of that, I live in a studio with a cat and a morning person. Due to this, sleeping for 8 hours straight uninterrupted is extremely difficult, so I'm very curious about polyphasic sleep. In your experience, are you able to learn and be productive while adjusting to these sleep cycles? How long does it take you to adjust and feel well rested? Are there any risks to be wary of, and any tips to change my sleep routine effectively?
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Yep, it takes around a month though to fully adapt. You are better served asking questions on the Discord, they are more knowledgeable than I: https://discord.gg/polyphasic-sleeping-249219704655183876 https://discord.gg/polyphasic-sleeping-249219704655183876
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JR1427 3y ago
This happens to me naturally in winter. The only problem is trying not to disturb my wife and daughter, so I usually try and resist it.
nunez 3y ago
waking up in the middle of the night is extremely normal, even with "perfect" sleep hygiene. in fact, cbt-i, the therapy I undertook last year and earlier this year, takes advantage of this to help patients mitigate their insomnia.[0] the treatment protocol requires that you get out of bed and literally go anywhere else when you wake up at night. you can do almost anything you want during that time, even watch TV or play games! (i read hacker news or read "linux kernel development" by robert love; if you're on here, thanks!) given this, it's not surprising that our ancestors divided their sleep into two halves. our circadian rhythms are naturally programmed to sleep when it's dark and stay awake when it's bright. i could imagine that their circadian rhythms were more "in tune" before electricity. [0] "insomnia" isn't curable and can happen to everyone! it's more of a state of being than a condition or disease.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
I've done this, and it... works, mostly, for me. The problem is I have a family, and I couldn't make the schedule work out to where I get a good polyphasic sleep cycle in and still be a part of the family with the normal food-oriented together times.

It's so interesting to me that fundamental ways of life like this can go nearly undocumented save passing references. We know a lot more about the annals of Greek history, for example, because that's what was written down. Ekirch took years to rediscover all these references to biphasic sleep because it was so fundamentally normal that historic writers never thought to focus on it. Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.

eschulz 3y ago
I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.
- klyrs 3y ago
  > I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. Oh no what will future generations do without doomscrolling.
  - jeffhuys 3y ago
    You might be projecting there.
    - klyrs 3y ago
      Oooh, and projecting. Will they even know what they've lost? (tongue firmly in cheek, I hope you understand)
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    How well doomscrolling and were it happens is documented in historic documents? Just food for thought...
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    It would be a loss IMO if future generations never knew that we even engaged in doomscrolling (or to what extent). Of all things you’d want future generations to learn from, maladaptive behavior that’s so widespread as to be hardly noticed in daily life seem high on the list. Caveat that doomscrolling specifically maybe isn’t a great example given that we are collecting a ton of data about it, we’re mostly just ignoring it.
- m463 3y ago
  I've been reading the book Debt by David Graeber, and it went a lot of places I didn't expect. I suspect a lot of things we would take interest in are just not written down, or not commonly explored. For example, it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. It was also common for people to give each other gifts, not too large or too small or too equal to form a community.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. I am sure there is some regional variability, but at least in these parts you can still see that habit ingrained in those now around 80 years of age or older. But it seems to quickly taper off in anyone younger. By the time you get to my generation it is effectively unheard of.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  As an example, think about how some alien visitors might try to piece together how we live day-to-day by watching TV shows and movies and reading whatever books they manage to dig up. The only way they'll even know we have bathrooms and take a crap there is if they find books or other archives detailing toilet diagrams, bathroom design, etc. If they just watch movies and TV, they'll think we somehow never have to expel waste, even though we obviously eat a lot as proven by how much screen time eating gets.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> our obsessive encyclopedic documentation ...will bitrot away in 50 years. In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The government-run national libraries (think Library of Congress and similar) at least have the mandate for long-term archival. Bitrot isn't as much a concern any more - we have data formats worked out these days, with well defined specifications and open standards (PDF/A), so basically as long as computers keep operating on the fundamental principle of bits and bytes, our documents will always be able to be read, and for virtually all popular data storage formats there is open source software that can, should the need arise, be run in an emulator. In fact, future historians should have it easier to understand our times, given that machines can actually sift through data at speed and you don't need humans to tediously take and scan brittle paper, and a lot of data is replicated so often across the planet that even a nuclear war should leave at least one copy alive in contrast to earlier times where wars, fires and natural disasters would routinely wipe out entire nations' memories. (Doesn't stop people from trying though, just look at the book burnings in Ukraine committed by Russia) The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. The former because a lot of data there (hole punch cards...) literally rotted away, the latter because of decades worth of homegrown architectures, all kinds of DRM, a lack of obligations for publishers to submit DRM-free copies and copies of the server backend code to national libraries, and the current "trend" towards e-stores for games instead of physical media.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    > The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. It's much worse today, because most of the so-called "archives" are actually stored somewhere "in the cloud", and are one serious economic crisis away from being deleted at the press of a button. (Also an even bigger problem is all the proprietary or unmaintained data formats. We already have issues maintaining this stack of bullshit today, and only a couple decades have passed. Maintaining this for centuries is out of the question.)
ianstormtaylor 3y ago
I agree, it’s kind of mind blowing when simple things like this are discovered—very humbling. (If the research can be trusted ofc.) > Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life. I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.

lmm 3y ago

Has this evidence been examined sceptically? I've heard this theory a few times, but it always sounds like one person's obsession, and I struggle to credit it.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
You are right (and very observant) that this is mostly Ekrich when you dig into it. I didn't realise this until quite recently, and I too had assumed there was a lot more work about this. But what he's found in literature is pretty consistent, and biphasic sleep was once quite normal in a specific context: the siesta. It's dying out in continental Europe alas -- a lost cultural touchstone -- and in the contemporary West, a siesta is short (literally a nap). But a traditional Spanish siesta is the best part of a sleep cycle -- a good couple of hours, with an hour's rest spread either side. More than enough that you could have four hours sleep overnight throughout the longer days and not be incompetent the next day. My sleep is currently polyphasic, which is not a great time. But it has taught me that sleep in the absence of natural light (or the presence of consistent artificial light) does have a habit of going polyphasic. I woke up at 4:15am after about five hours of sleep. I just cleaned a grill pan. I may go back to sleep again. Sleep scientists seem pretty sure that polyphasic sleep is bad.
- ilvez 3y ago
  And it feels bad as well. I have polyphasic periods and I'm always relieved when they end. Not sure why I don't feel too good, because I have ways to cope now, but good monophasic sleep makes me wake up rested and without a headache.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I think it feels bad because it inevitably messes up one's digestive clock (which is implicated in robustly configuring the sleep clock) and by implication, particularly with modern food, blood sugar levels. (I suspect that the long cultural stability of the Spanish long siesta has a lot to do with the cultural stability of mealtimes -- and meal types/sizes -- that developed around it.) The other day I felt queasy, suddenly, after lunch at a normal time -- so queasy I had to write off the day. I then proceeded to sleep for the best part of 24 hours, because all the phases seemed to merge. A literal 24 hour period, useless. Other people lived normal lives in that period; for me it just vanished. I think blood sugar had a lot to do with that, as well as the time of year (winter in Britain) and it has definitely unnerved me. I cope by just accepting it; trying to do things when awake. But there are things you can't really do in the middle of the night if you live in a close, quiet neighbourhood; hoovering, running laundry, shredding documents, even some printers are noisy.

CalRobert 3y ago

When my wife was pregnant with our first kid I did this for a while. She was exhausted and went to bed early and so did I. Bed at 8, up 1-3, bed 3-7. I got a ton done in those two hours. I remember looking for an e ink display to use with my computer so I could do it by candlelight, to no avail

elliotec 3y ago
Wait tell us more about use your computer by candlelight… do you mean like red shift? Most OSes have this built in and there are 3rd party apps that can do candlelight settings
- CalRobert 3y ago
  I never found a solution. I ended up using a very red-shifted screen set to a very low light but what I really wanted was e-ink, like a Kindle for instance. The only options I came across were impractically expensive, though. https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-paperlike-253 https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-p... for instance, and this was years ago when there were fewer options.
  - clarkema 3y ago
    I have a 'study' setup using a Boox Mira (portable 13" eink screen) for exactly this kind of use; not polyphasic in my particular case but late evening use. Yes, the screen is expensive, but _totally_ worth it.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      Thanks for the tip!
  - washadjeffmad 3y ago
    Just noting because I went through the same, but I haven't found I've been able to use any LCD or OLED at very low contrast and brightness without content becoming illegible or uncomfortable without ambient light. However, a relatively smaller CRT maintains a contrast ratio that I don't seem to struggle to look at or decipher in complete darkness. I've also tried dropping the aspect ratio on my 42" 4k OLED to 4:3 and not scaling the resolution to limit light output, but the pixel density ultimately seems to be a limiter. Since I can work on my smartphone at its lowest output and with redshift, a smaller, higher-dpi display may be key.

buserror 3y ago

I do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It's 6:50 now and I've done a lot of work! It's nice, quiet, I just really crack on. I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again. Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do already! ... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon. I used to be a 'night owl' really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk. Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!

nly 3y ago
So your weekday evening social life is non existent?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- romanovcode 3y ago
  I would imagine everyone who is 35+ with family has no evening social life. Or am I missing something? Another question, at some point in your life - do you even want an evening social life?
  - amonith 3y ago
    This! It's not even about the family. I think it just gets boring and unnecessarily exhausting after 10+ years so it transforms to trips, mid-day visits at home and various shared hobbies (like you meet with your friends to go bouldering Saturday morning, idk).
- amonith 3y ago
  Not OP, but most of the people I know above 30 don't "go out" on weekday evenings nor regular weekends tbh. Even people without kids. Various trips and meets in friends' houses during the day (usually Sunday) is the main form of socializing.

INTPenis 3y ago

Ever since I learned of sleep cycles, and how to measure my own, I've pretty much governed my life around them. Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state. For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes. This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
Can you share more about how you got accurate measurements on this? I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  I did this at community college ~15 years ago. So I'm mostly improvising regarding my cycle being that long. I'd say it's around 60 minutes. Specifics don't matter after a while because you build new habits and do them without thinking. But the thing our teacher told us was to stay up until you get more and more tired, until you feel your eyelids wanting to close, but power through it and measure the time between the most tired and the most alert after that.
IndySun 3y ago
The trick to going back to sleep is often, after waking too soon, to do something boring. A chore. Try it for 5-15 mins, go back to bed. Repeat if you're not nodding off. The thinking is, you'll prefer sleep to the boring chore.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2022) Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907

rapjr9 3y ago

As people get older polyphasic sleep often becomes their norm, they sleep when they are tired, and are awake when they are not, especially if they no longer have a job. If you have to interact with people (sign for packages for example) it can be a problem, but if you don't it seems about the same as normal sleep to me. Being forced to change sleep schedule constantly does cause health issues, but just doing what your body tells you seems to work out ok in my experience. Taking drugs to force sleep to a schedule seems like a worse option. One drawback to it is that many sleep trackers don't handle it well. They'll treat a second sleep as a nap for example and then pester you that you're not getting enough sleep. The Galaxy G5 seems to capture all sleeps fairly well (but it loses pairing every few months and has to be reset from scratch), the Oura Ring sometimes catches 2nd or 3rd sleeps as naps and adds them to the total, the Xiaomi Mi7 Band often misses shorter sleeps or lists them as naps without adding them to the total. The Android app "Sleep as Android" is started and stopped manually so if you can remember to do that it works well.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I've been experimenting a lot with polyphasic sleep over the years. I've done siestas, Everyman routines, Dual Core, Biphasic-X, etc. They're all interesting in their own way but these days I've been getting into the dual core routine which is similar to the post's two sleeps. These routines by the way are documented on https://www.polyphasic.net/polyphasic-sleep-schedules/ https://www.polyphasic.net/polyphasic-sleep-schedules/

mnk47 3y ago
I have gastroparesis, which often gives me bloating/pain that lasts a long time, and if I'm too hungry at night, I have to choose between trying to ignore hunger and not sleeping for the next ~3 hours (even a snack or a cup of water makes me bloated). On top of that, I live in a studio with a cat and a morning person. Due to this, sleeping for 8 hours straight uninterrupted is extremely difficult, so I'm very curious about polyphasic sleep. In your experience, are you able to learn and be productive while adjusting to these sleep cycles? How long does it take you to adjust and feel well rested? Are there any risks to be wary of, and any tips to change my sleep routine effectively?
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Yep, it takes around a month though to fully adapt. You are better served asking questions on the Discord, they are more knowledgeable than I: https://discord.gg/polyphasic-sleeping-249219704655183876 https://discord.gg/polyphasic-sleeping-249219704655183876

deleted 3y ago

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JR1427 3y ago

This happens to me naturally in winter. The only problem is trying not to disturb my wife and daughter, so I usually try and resist it.

nunez 3y ago

waking up in the middle of the night is extremely normal, even with "perfect" sleep hygiene. in fact, cbt-i, the therapy I undertook last year and earlier this year, takes advantage of this to help patients mitigate their insomnia.[0] the treatment protocol requires that you get out of bed and literally go anywhere else when you wake up at night. you can do almost anything you want during that time, even watch TV or play games! (i read hacker news or read "linux kernel development" by robert love; if you're on here, thanks!) given this, it's not surprising that our ancestors divided their sleep into two halves. our circadian rhythms are naturally programmed to sleep when it's dark and stay awake when it's bright. i could imagine that their circadian rhythms were more "in tune" before electricity. [0] "insomnia" isn't curable and can happen to everyone! it's more of a state of being than a condition or disease.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

I've done this, and it... works, mostly, for me. The problem is I have a family, and I couldn't make the schedule work out to where I get a good polyphasic sleep cycle in and still be a part of the family with the normal food-oriented together times.