I can reliably reach this state in between the two sleep periods of a biphasic sleep cycle (several hours of sleep, a couple hours wakefulness, several more hours sleep). Unfortunately I’m not usually on this cycle.
neither, it sporadically happens. It is much more likely to happen if I allow myself to surrender to the drowsiness that accompanies a large meal post gym.
If this works for other people, too, that’s potentially a really interesting lifehack. Out of interest, when you are biphasic sleep, what time do you go to bed, what time do you have your wakefulness period, what time do you end up waking up, etc? Does it stay constant from night to night, or does your sleep cycle shift forwards? What sorts of lifestyles/schedules make biphasic sleep possible?
It varies a bit. I generally sleep for 4-5 hours, am awake for 2-3, and asleep for another 3-4 hours. Up to 12 hours devoted to resting all told. This happens when I don’t have a tight schedule.
To a lesser extent this has worked for me. Over the last school year I ended up sleeping biphasically by accident by staying up to finish assignments, and then sleeping early the next day, and I noticed that I had quite a lot of mental stamina and willpower (doing assignments was a lot easier) after I woke up in the evening. I would usually sleep in the early afternoon after I finished classes, and in the morning just before classes, with the morning block being slightly longer. Each block would wobble by a couple of hours day to day, perhaps due to things I had to do, but there was no persistent drift forwards or backwards.
This worked out pretty well because my university gave engineering undergrads 24 hour access to labs, so I could do lab work in the middle of the night, and because I didn’t have time for most of the fun social activities I slept through in the afternoon anyway. It was pretty easy to switch between that and monophasic, just by staying up through my afternoon sleep block and then going to bed at midnight, or by going to sleep in the afternoon (or even just a few hours before monophasic bedtime), which would make me wake up early (no alarm clock necessary).
I stopped doing this over the summer because I was working full-time, which meant work days too long for this. I just started again now that I’m in grad school, it took me 2 days to acclimate to it, during which I slept not enough during the afternoon block and too much during the morning block.
Edit: The day after writing this, I was extremely tired, and ended up sleeping about 6 hours in the morning, so it took me longer to acclimate than I thought, but I seem to be stably biphasic now.
I can reliably reach this state in between the two sleep periods of a biphasic sleep cycle (several hours of sleep, a couple hours wakefulness, several more hours sleep). Unfortunately I’m not usually on this cycle.
Do you use an alarm clock for this, or just decide, “tonight I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night” and it happens?
neither, it sporadically happens. It is much more likely to happen if I allow myself to surrender to the drowsiness that accompanies a large meal post gym.
If this works for other people, too, that’s potentially a really interesting lifehack. Out of interest, when you are biphasic sleep, what time do you go to bed, what time do you have your wakefulness period, what time do you end up waking up, etc? Does it stay constant from night to night, or does your sleep cycle shift forwards? What sorts of lifestyles/schedules make biphasic sleep possible?
It varies a bit. I generally sleep for 4-5 hours, am awake for 2-3, and asleep for another 3-4 hours. Up to 12 hours devoted to resting all told. This happens when I don’t have a tight schedule.
To a lesser extent this has worked for me. Over the last school year I ended up sleeping biphasically by accident by staying up to finish assignments, and then sleeping early the next day, and I noticed that I had quite a lot of mental stamina and willpower (doing assignments was a lot easier) after I woke up in the evening. I would usually sleep in the early afternoon after I finished classes, and in the morning just before classes, with the morning block being slightly longer. Each block would wobble by a couple of hours day to day, perhaps due to things I had to do, but there was no persistent drift forwards or backwards.
This worked out pretty well because my university gave engineering undergrads 24 hour access to labs, so I could do lab work in the middle of the night, and because I didn’t have time for most of the fun social activities I slept through in the afternoon anyway. It was pretty easy to switch between that and monophasic, just by staying up through my afternoon sleep block and then going to bed at midnight, or by going to sleep in the afternoon (or even just a few hours before monophasic bedtime), which would make me wake up early (no alarm clock necessary).
I stopped doing this over the summer because I was working full-time, which meant work days too long for this. I just started again now that I’m in grad school, it took me 2 days to acclimate to it, during which I slept not enough during the afternoon block and too much during the morning block.
Edit: The day after writing this, I was extremely tired, and ended up sleeping about 6 hours in the morning, so it took me longer to acclimate than I thought, but I seem to be stably biphasic now.