How Well Do You Sleep?

I have friends who complain about not being able to get “a good night’s sleep.” I usually laugh and say, “It’s cos we’re old now and we need less sleep.” That’s what I was always told about getting older: we would sleep less just when we had the time to sleep more. Personally I’ve been on a journey to increase my sleep. After more than 2 decades of getting between four and six hours sleep a night, starting when I had kids, I’m embracing sleep in its every form.

On Mondays, because I do my radio show from 10-midnight when I’d normally be asleep, I take a nap in the afternoon after lunch so my brain is still working later. Sometimes when I’m writing and I hit a wall, I take a short kip – maybe 20 or 30 minutes – and when I wake up I’m ready to go again. Overall I’m aiming for about 8 hours of sleep in total, but I don’t much care how many times I have to turn my brain off to get it.

Most folks think that if they don’t sleep for 8 hours a night, they’re sleep deprived. This is what the experts call a monophasic sleep cycle, which turns out to be only one of five different ways to get your battery recharged.

We didn’t always sleep a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep at night. If you wake for a couple hours in the middle of the night and you’re anxious that you’re going to suffer for it the next day, take heart. Midnight wakefulness was normal a couple of centuries ago.

While many experts recommend an uninterrupted night’s sleep, this suggestion hasn’t done our stress levels any good, especially if we’re not natural through-the-night sleepers.

Instead of fighting your middle-of-the-night wakings, consider this: the most important of any sleep cycle is the Stage 4 REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. This is when your brain truly benefits the most. If you go by a monophasic sleep cycle, you’ll fall into REM about 45-75 minutes after you clock out. But when you change to a polyphasic cycle, you’ll actually go into REM sleep immediately. You’ll get the benefits of monophasic sleep without having to wait all that time for your REM cycle.

Here are some examples of polyphasic sleep cycles:

The Uberman Cycle in which you sleep for 20 to 30 minutes every 4 hours; yup, that’s 6 naps a day.


The Everyman Cycle in which you sleep for 3-4 hours but then nap for 20-30 minutes three times a day. I expect this is the only way for some new parents to make it through with their sanity.


The Dymaxion Cycle in which you sleep for 30 minutes every 6 hours. I know that only adds up to 2 hours of sleep but proponents say it’s great. May, can you imagine how much you could get done with 22 working hours a day!


The Biphasic/Siesta Cycle in which you sleep for about 5 hours at night, and take a 90 minute kip around noon. Whole cultures embrace this sleep pattern.


The Triphasic in which you take 3 naps a day that line up with your circadian rhythm: the first is taken an hour or two after dusk, another is taken just before dawn so you’re waking up after the sun rises and the third is sometime between 1 and 4 pm when your alertness naturally drops off.

The toughest part of changing your sleep cycle is that everyone else will be awake when you’re asleep and vice versa. That can be a bummer and has made more than one polyphasic sleeper give up no matter how great they feel with their unusual approach to sleep. Being separated from their mates, their kids, their business associates by their unusual sleep pattern takes its toll eventually.

All this is to say that finding the sleep pattern that works best for you is up to you. If you lie awake at night wondering how you will ever make it through the next day, if you toss and turn trying to fall asleep, you’re not doing yourself any good. Maybe there’s a way for you to rearrange your day so you can take a restorative nap mid afternoon to make up for the sleep you lost at night. Right after lunch when digestion compounds with time of the day is the point at which your circadian cycle (your body natural sleep regulation rhythm) will help you fall asleep quickly.

 

For most people 20 minutes of sleep is perfect. If you wake up from a nap feeling groggy and worse off for having slept, you likely slept too long. Some people recommend having a cup of coffee before the nap because the caffeine will kick in just as you’re supposed to wake up.