Daily Dose of English 162
Polyphasic Sleep
Daily Dose of English 162
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about polyphasic sleep. which might sound like a very interesting and crazy name, but it's actually a relatively simple idea to understand. And we're just gonna look at the word, the words, there's two of them. So the first one is polyphasic, and the second one is sleep. I hope that at this point you know what sleep is, but that's when at night you close your eyes and rest your brain and everything. And then polyphasic is two different parts. The first one is phasic or phase, which is like a section or an amount of time, right? You can think about the various phases of a project or something like that. And then poly is many. Right, so monophasic would be one phase, so one phase of sleep, which is when you sleep for one entire unbroken stretch at night, so eight hours straight, monophasic, nothing during the day. Polyphasic just means that you have multiple times in the day where you sleep and you wake up in between those. And anything like that qualifies as polyphasic sleep. However, there's a bit more to it that we're gonna dive in today. I wanted to talk about this episode a while ago because I find it very interesting, but I wanted to have been doing it for a while first. And so I've been doing a simple version of polyphasic sleep for a couple of weeks now, and I think that I can talk a bit more about it. So the main idea behind modern polyphasic sleep is to sleep well and get a good sleep and have healthy sleep, but also end up sleeping less generally. That's not always true, but that's sort of one of the goals. And one of the reasons is that there is pretty good evidence that throughout various points in history and different cultures in the world, it is very normal to do polyphasic sleep. There are parts of the world that have siestas or daytime naps that are normal. I think in Greece, even, it's a very normal thing for shops and everything to close for an hour in the early afternoon as a lot of people take a nap. It's a very, very common thing in many parts of the world. There is also some evidence in writing, it's not 100% guaranteed, but there's evidence that polyphasic sleep was also relatively common hundreds of years ago among regular people, especially if they had a farm or something like that, where you'd sleep for a chunk, then you'd wake up in the middle of the night, do something, maybe work on the farm, check on some things, or even just do a fun physical activity with your partner, and then go back to sleep again and wake up later. Or whenever it might be, there's writings of people talking about it as if it's normal, like a second sleep of some kind. But that's not necessarily a sure thing. And so I wanna talk a bit more about the modern version of polyphasic sleep, which generally has to do with sleep reduction. So the goal is to sleep less than the normally required amount because most adults, in order to feel rested, need to sleep for eight or nine hours in a row at night. That is the amount where people feel good and they get their proper sleep you can think about. However, polyphasic sleep aims to reduce that number to whatever, like six and a half or something like that. So for example, I sleep for about six and a half hours a day and I feel usually rested, we'll get into that in a second, and have just more time in the morning specifically. So the sleep reduction works for, I think, one relatively simple reason. Because when we sleep, there are a couple different things that happen in our brain. One of them is, one phase of sleep is called REM, or rapid eye movement, which is a phase of sleep where your eyes move very quickly. And that generally happens like an, I forget exactly how long after falling asleep, but we go through these REM cycles, they're called, and that is like a very deep sleep. If you wake up in the middle of a REM cycle, that's when you feel bad. You feel like kind of crappy. You're like, ugh, I'm so groggy. It's hard to think, right? Your brain was sort of interrupted in this middle of its process. But we don't do that for eight or nine hours. We do that only for a small amount of time, for a small amount of time. And the rest of the time we spend sort of on just regular body rest, right? We're resting our muscles and the rest of our body and our brain is not super active. And we're generally just regular resting. And so the idea behind sleep reduction is to reduce more of that rest because honestly, a lot of us get rest during our days, right? If you're working at a computer or you're just sitting on the couch, you're getting actually some decent regular body rest because you're not thinking too hard or whatever. And so if you can reduce your need for like sleeping to get that general rest and just getting all of your REM sleep, then you can have better and more consistent sleep with less time. And that's sort of the main idea. Now, there's many different ways to do this, right? Some of the most extreme people go down to four hours a day of sleep plus a couple of naps or something like that during the day. But most people should do something that's a little bit healthier. right? A lot of these more extreme versions are they even like the people that do it recommend you should only do it for like a week or two if you need to like if it's a requirement maybe you have a big emergency or something like that where you absolutely need to be awake for as many hours as possible. But for most people, there are these subset of a couple of different schedules that you can do that are relatively healthy and you can do for a long period of time. Or actually that are even just totally healthy, right? They're the same as getting nine hours of sleep or whatever it is. And I've been doing what's often known as every man one, which is six hours of sleep-ish at night. So I go to bed at around 11 and I wake up at about five and then I take a nap during the day for 20 minutes. And that's what my sleep schedule has been for the past couple of weeks and I plan to keep going. because one of the things that is very true on any kind of sleep changes is that you need time to adapt. Your body is going to be figuring stuff out and getting used to things. I've been doing quite well. I actually feel really good most days because I'd already been doing some sleep reduction, although I hadn't added in the nap, so my daily nap now is just extra sleep basically for me, and it's been really great. So, yeah, I sleep for less time overall. I have, so I sleep for about, I said about six and a half hours, which means I have 17 and a half hours of awake time, which is a little bit more than is average, right? An average person would get maybe like 16 hours of awake time. And I generally use that for language learning. Now, the important thing to know about polyphasic sleep is that you do have to be sort of regular, right? If you want to actually, anything for any sleep, the best thing you can do is be regular with it. Every day, sleep at the same time or times if you're doing a polyphasic thing. And so if you're thinking about doing this, but you have an inconsistent life, That's the first thing you have to solve. You can't do something like this and have good healthy sleep if you're not in control of when and where you can sleep, which is very common. And so it's not for everybody, right? If you have other more important issues, focus on those first. But if you have the flexibility to choose when you sleep, what time you wake up, when you can take naps, it's a thing that you can try. It's kind of interesting and it's pretty fun. Um, and so yeah, that's the disclaimer. If you are interested in trying, I definitely recommend reading about it a bit more. Polyphasic.net has some good information. Um, and yeah, so my experience doing with doing this, um, I want to talk a little bit longer. We're going to go long this episode. Um, but my experience with this has been really interesting. So like I said, I'm still in that adaptation period. I'm not fully, um, Adapted I guess is the best word for it to this news this new Cycle, but it's actually been really good and a couple of things that I've noticed that I think are interesting are first My naps are great. They I look forward to them every day. They feel really good They also feel really long like I started to fall asleep and I feel like I'm there for a good long time I feel like I'm just getting good Rest and that sort of thing and it's only I set my alarm for 23 minutes because I give myself a few minutes to fall asleep but it's really nice to kind of have that weird time in my day where it's It feels almost like 45 minutes where I just get this free space to not think about anything to just be and sleep really I generally wake up halfway through and then fall back to sleep and then wake up at the end again and Um, and so I get this really interesting, like time just in my brain and something I've noticed that I actually dream, um, that I know about. Cause I mean, I probably dream all the time, but I never ever remember my dreams at night. Well, maybe 1% of the time, but it's very rare that I remember my dreams from the nighttime. Um, but when I'm. when I take a nap, I feel like I'm dreaming. When I wake up, something was happening in my head, which has been really cool because I've never really dreamed before like that. And so it's a nice difference in sleep and I feel like, I don't know, it feels like a good, deep, solid sleep during the day that I'm really enjoying. Um, it's also a great, it forces me to sort of disconnect from the world and I just kind of go and I lay down, I, I recharge and it feels really nice. Um, and I don't really have trouble waking up from it. It, I don't feel groggy. It takes me a second, but then I'm back to normal and it's, it's helped me with my afternoon energy for sure. And the other thing is that I also sleep really well at night. That's not a problem. I've always been a good sleeper, honestly. I've never had issues with falling asleep, but potentially if you have trouble falling asleep on time, something like this might be helpful to you, having a more strict sleep schedule and letting yourself fall asleep. One tip that I have for that, especially if you're trying to nap for the first time and you're not very good at it, is to really practice mindfulness. I talked about this like a month ago or something on the episode on meditation. But if you practice like allowing your mind to think things and then just gently pushing them away and coming back to middle to like thinking about nothing, that's a very nice way to calm your mind and fall asleep. I also wanted to mention something else about doing this. It's been interesting. So the dreams, the feeling good. Oh, I definitely do feel tired some days. Yesterday was great. This morning I struggled to wake up. I actually fell back asleep for another 20 minutes. But my mornings generally aren't too bad. Oh, that's why. But because one of my friends actually told me about this I guess a trick, and it really works oddly well, for me at least. But right before I go to sleep, I sit on my bed, I sit up straight, I try to be fully alert, and I tell myself what I'm going to do tomorrow morning. I go, I'm going to get up at five, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to go to the gym, or whatever is my next day plan. Then I go to sleep. And the next morning, that's like the first thing that's in my head. I remember where I am. I remember what's happening. I get up and I go and I feel good in the morning. I forgot to do that last night and I noticed it this morning. I felt worse in the morning because it was just like, oh, morning, instead of like an actual getting up and ready to go. I know it sounds dumb, like the power of thought, but this has actually helped me to tell myself what's happening in the morning. I have it clear. I'm getting up at five, I'm getting ready, and I'm going to the gym at 8 a.m., or whatever it is. And that's just been really helpful. So that's actually what I'm doing tomorrow. I'm getting up at five, gonna do my check and stuff, and then I'm going to the gym at eight for a class, and I'm excited about it because it's always been good. So yeah, that's more or less been my experience with polyphasic sleep so far. My hope is that I can continue doing it for as like my defaults. I think when I'm on vacation and that sort of thing, I won't do it because that's a little bit hardcore. But when I'm here, when I'm in my apartment and when I'm just regular, have working days and stuff, I have been really enjoying it. And so I would like to be able to continue to have that amount of time and additional No, it's not even just about the awake time. It's also about just the other stuff that I get to do and feel like in the day. I don't ever really feel rushed to do things in time. So yeah, but that's all that I have for today. I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts down in the comments below, but I'm gonna say thank you and I'll see you again tomorrow in another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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