It’s 3 o’clock in the morning, I’m not sure where I am. Last two hours: Empty, unrecognized darkness.
I hear sounds like on a medieval battlefield. Swords rattle, horses gallop, men shout. I stagger forward and try to orient myself. I’m so confused.
I’m in the apartment; my apartment I think. Completely intoxicated, hallucinating. I want to throw up. I look down at my cell phone: three missed calls, all from my wife, sleeping in the bedroom.
I’m exhausted. What the hell is going on.
I stumbled into the bedroom and woke my wife.
“You called me?”
“I heard you were leaving the house. Where have you been for the last two hours?”
I’m pausing. I’m crazy inside.
“I have no idea.”
He sleeps like Superman
I set alarms. Lots of alarms.
It’s been almost 10 years since I tried polyphasic sleep. It was an irreparable catastrophe.
Most people, including me these days, sleep “monophasically.” Normal sleep. Seven to eight hours, followed by 16 hours up.
Polyphasic sleep is designed to divide this sleep pattern into more manageable parts, reducing the amount of time spent procrastinating. It’s usually a productivity hack: Eight hours is a long time to get out of service. If you can sleep less and you are just as effective, why not give it a try?
There are different types of polyphase sleep plans.
The “Everyman” schedule is the simplest. It allows one three-hour sleep time, supplemented by three 20-minute napes during the day – effectively reducing eight hours of sleep to a total of four hours.
At the other end of the spectrum lies the brutal “Uberman” schedule.
With the Uberman polyphase sleep plan, no large chunks of sleep are allowed – only a 20-minute nap. The days are divided into four-hour sections. You stay up for three hours and 40 minutes, then take a nap for 20 minutes. Then you do it again … and again … as long as you last. In total, this corresponds to two hours of sleep a day – if you sleep every second of sleep, which you probably won’t.
That’s the one I tried. My plan: Implement a Uberman polyphase sleep plan for one month.
I lasted one week.
Rough puppeteer
When it comes to polyphasic sleep, mileage tends to vary. There are reports of people downloading it. He claims that after a transitional period of around a week, your body will adapt and get into rhythm. Apparently a 20-minute nap will send you straight to full REM sleep and you will wake up, recharged, ready for three hours and 40 minutes of hard productivity.
That didn’t happen to me. Not quite.
Well, it happened and it wasn’t.
In the beginning, polyphasic sleep was relatively easy. Like making a big trip overseas, you get a small amount of sleep on a plane. Do you know the faint feeling that stumbles from customs to baggage pickup like a zombie looking for a brain? That’s how I felt – at least for the first few days.
I went to the gym in the basement regularly and walked just to stay awake.
It also felt a little cold. Being awake, playing video games or working on side projects in the early morning, looking for ways to banish sleep, such as when a small child is allowed to stay awake before bed. I quickly developed a disgusting pride in what I was doing. These normos, dormant in their primitive patterns, could not understand what it was like to develop despite the need for regular sleep.
I was tired, of course, but sleep seemed to keep me going. I had two small beds. One in the spare bedroom of my apartment and setting in the closet at work. I remember my co-workers laughing as I trudged to my strange little closet, holding an inhabited brown sleeping bag. The whole production was very entertaining.
Until there was.
The first signs of a fight appeared in about two days. I remember walking down the train platform on my way to work when, out of nowhere, I lost my balance. I tripped and almost fell on the train. I left the station shaken. How did it happen? I thought I was driving …
Later that night, I went for a walk in the pitch black darkness, exhausted and broken. I walked around the local park in the middle of a closed road, carrying the weight of what seemed like a full-fledged depression. It was a strange, distressing pressure I had never felt before or since.
Everything seemed endless, unbelievably huge. Insurmountable.
It’s hard to explain. When you sleep normally, days have ends and beginnings. If you have a bad day, you go to bed, pull the blankets over your head and write it off. “Tomorrow is another day,” you say to yourself. With polyphasic sleep Yippee no other day. The days are endless. I dramatically underestimated the impact of that.
I walked through the park, empty and empty, a pair of dead eyeballs set in a sunken, lagging brain. I walked aimlessly in the dark, trying to stop sobbing.
I haven’t laughed at jokes all day.
I knew jokes were being told. I understood the points. But the synapses connecting to the required physical output were interrupted. I would tell my wife that I love her, out of duty and instinct, but it would take a few seconds for those words to be heard. I looked in the mirror and felt disconnected from my own features. My body did not belong to me. I controlled it like a rude puppeteer.
But then, around day five, I had a breakthrough.
I woke up. I felt … better. That day I saw a joke on Twitter and he laughed out loud. I went home, hugged my wife and was satisfied. I was almost overwhelmed by the euphoria that I was reconnected with my body. I started laughing. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
“I feel normal again,” I said. My wife shook her head.
“You forgot what’s normal.”
It breaks up into parts
A few days later, it all fell apart.
I had a hard night. Physically, I was just very tired. The renewed energy I felt a few days ago had evaporated. I didn’t necessarily face the psychological pain of it all, I just – on a very primitive level – found it impossible to stay awake.
My old apartment building had a lousy gym in the basement. Things got so bad that I went down there and walked endlessly on the treadmill, trying to weather the waves of exhaustion. I had only one goal in mind: Get to the next nap … get to the next nap … get to the next nap.
At 2 o’clock in the morning – somehow – I got into another sleep.
I only had to sleep for 20 minutes, but my next conscious thought came two hours later, around 4:30 in the morning.
I woke up with the energy of someone who knew – without looking at the clock – that they were late for work. I immediately got up disoriented. I looked at my phone. Three missed calls and two SMS from my wife:
“Where are you?”
“Did you leave the house?”
Both texts were adopted at a time when I was not consciously awake.
What the hell happened? Did I leave the house in fugue condition?
I started to have hallucinations. I was panicking, but I calmed down quickly. I can handle it, I thought. I can reset. I just need to get to the next scheduled sleep. To be distracted, I tried to record a video.
During my experiment with polyphasic sleep, I shot a video every night and talked about my mental and physical condition. The video I made that night is hard to watch. I stutter, I’m obviously confused. I’m barely clear and I can see – in real time – trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
During the video, an alarm began to sound at full volume, an alarm I didn’t remember setting.
Who set the alarm? Who hell to set the alarm?
I turned off video recording and grabbed the phone. I saw it then. Someone – probably me during the last two hours I’ve been was unconscious – he went to my phone and changed all the alarm clocks, which I carefully set to keep track of my sleep. All the alarms were completely different.
It was almost as if Tyler Durden’s second-class self had deliberately tried to sabotage me in the Severance style in an effort to stop this stupid sleep experiment.
They were successful.
At that moment – gloomy, confused, sobbing – I decided to quit. At 5:04 I stumbled into my bedroom, curled up next to my wife, and fell into the deepest sleep of my life. I slept for more than 13 hours. Relief was like nothing I had ever experienced.
My sleep experiment is over.
Never again
In the weeks and months that followed, I often imagined trying polyphasic sleep again. It seemed like an unfinished business.
I made some glaring mistakes that, in retrospect, made it difficult for me to transition from regular sleep to Uberman schedules. At that time, I drank about six cans of Pepsi Max a day. I didn’t give my body time to handle the caffeine intakes, and that almost certainly made it difficult for me to take a nap on command.
But looking back, the whole thing seems ridiculous. An unnecessary challenge driven by male ego bullshit and a pointless need to “bodyhack”. Armed toxic masculinity in its purest form.
But it turned out to be a good story.
About five years after my experiment, the TV producer came across my live blogs and invited me to TV to discuss my experiences. It was an Australian panel show. They invited people from all walks of life to discuss their strange sleep experiences with experts in the field.
When it was my turn to tell my story, a doctor – a 20-year veteran of sleep studies – began to shake his head in disapproval. As I began to discuss my hallucinations, he folded his head in his hands in disgust.
On this panel were men and women with real sleep problems. People with insomnia, teenagers who left school due to abnormal sleep, which they could not control. There were people who fought narcolepsy and night terrors. And then there was me: Brother LifeHack, who slept to laugh. I felt like an idiot and a cheater.
That night, after the show, I promised myself that I would never try polyphasic sleep again.
Fortunately, I did not suffer any long-term effects when trying Uberman’s plan. Within a week, everything returned to normal.
But i never at all he took sleep for granted again.