I think it goes without saying that becoming a polyphasic sleeper is probably not the best thing to do for your health. Sleeping against one's circadian phase (as is the case with
shift-workers) has well documented detrimental health effects (e.g.
dramatic increase in cardiovascular disease).
If you are not interested in becoming a zombie, but still would still like to add more hours to your day, consider waking up earlier. Pavlina also provides interesting advice on how to become an early riser. I've included much of his advice below:
Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my
early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight and I'd almost always sleep in late. I usually didn't start hitting my stride until late afternoon.
But after a while I couldn’t ignore the high correlation between success and
rising early, even in my own life. On those rare occasions where I did get up
early, I noticed that my productivity was almost always higher, not just in the
morning but all throughout the day. And I also noticed a significant feeling of
well-being. So being the proactive goal-achiever I was, I set out to become a
habitual early riser. I promptly set my alarm clock for 5:00 AM… and the next morning, I got up just before noon.
I tried again many more times, each time not getting very far with it. I
figured I must have been born without the early riser gene. Whenever my alarm
went off, my first thought was always to stop that blasted noise and go back to
sleep. I tabled this habit for a number of years, but eventually I came across
some sleep research that showed me that I was going about this problem the
wrong way. Once I applied those ideas, I was able to become an early riser
consistently.
It’s hard to become an early riser using the wrong strategy. But with the
right strategy, it’s relatively easy.
The most common wrong strategy is this: You assume that if you’re going to
get up earlier, you’d better go to bed earlier. So you figure out how much sleep
you’re getting now, and then just shift everything back a few hours. If you now
sleep from midnight to 8am you figure you’ll go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am instead. Sounds very reasonable, but it will usually fail.
It seems there are two main schools of thought about sleep patterns. One is
that you should go to bed and get up at the same times every day. It’s like
having an alarm clock on both ends — you try to sleep the same hours each
night. This seems practical for living in modern society. We need
predictability in our schedules. And we need to ensure adequate rest.
The second school says you should listen to your body’s needs and go to bed
when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up. This approach is
rooted in biology. Our bodies should know how much rest we need, so we should
listen to them.
Through trial and error, I found out for myself that both of these schools
are suboptimal sleep patterns. Both of them are wrong if you care about
productivity. Here’s why:
If you sleep set hours, you’ll sometimes go to bed when you aren’t sleepy
enough. If it’s taking you more than five minutes to fall asleep each night,
you aren’t sleepy enough. You’re wasting time lying in bed awake and not being
asleep. Another problem is that you’re assuming you need the same number of
hours of sleep every night, which is a false assumption. Your sleep needs vary
from day to day.
If you sleep based on what your body tells you, you’ll probably be sleeping
more than you need — in many cases a lot more, like 10-15 hours more per week
(the equivalent of a full waking day). A lot of people who sleep this way get
8+ hours of sleep per night, which is usually too much. Also, your mornings may
be less predictable if you’re getting up at different times. And because our
natural rhythms are sometimes out of tune with the 24-hour clock, you may find
that your sleep times begin to drift.
The optimal solution for me has been to combine both approaches. It’s very
simple, and many early risers do this without even thinking about it, but it
was a mental breakthrough for me nonetheless. The solution was to go to bed
when I’m sleepy (and only when I’m sleepy) and get up with an alarm clock at a
fixed time (7 days per week). So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5am), but I go to bed at different times every night.
I go to bed when I’m too sleepy to stay up. My sleepiness test is that if I
couldn’t read a book for more than a page or two without drifting off, I’m
ready for bed. Most of the time when I go to bed, I’m asleep within three
minutes. I lie down, get comfortable, and immediately I’m drifting off.
Sometimes I go to bed at 9:30pm;
other times I stay up until midnight.
Most of the time I go to bed between 10-11pm.
If I’m not sleepy, I stay up until I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. Reading
is an excellent activity to do during this time, since it becomes obvious when
I’m too sleepy to read.
When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a couple
seconds, and sit up. I don’t think about it. I’ve learned that the longer it
takes me to get up, the more likely I am to try to sleep in. So I don’t allow
myself to have conversations in my head about the benefits of sleeping in once
the alarm goes off. Even if I want to sleep in, I always get up right away.
After a few days of using this approach, I found that my sleep patterns
settled into a natural rhythm. If I got too little sleep one night, I’d
automatically be sleepier earlier and get more sleep the next night. And if I
had lots of energy and wasn’t tired, I’d sleep less. My body learned when to
knock me out because it knew I would always get up at the same time and that my
wake-up time wasn’t negotiable.
A side effect was that on average, I slept about 90 minutes less per night,
but I actually felt more well-rested. I was sleeping almost the entire time I
was in bed.
I read that most insomniacs are people who go to bed when they aren’t
sleepy. If you aren’t sleepy and find yourself unable to fall asleep quickly,
get up and stay awake for a while. Resist sleep until your body begins to
release the hormones that rob you of consciousness. If you simply go to bed
when you’re sleepy and then get up at a fixed time, you’ll cure your insomnia.
The first night you’ll stay up late, but you’ll fall asleep right away. You may
be tired that first day from getting up too early and getting only a few hours
of sleep the whole night, but you’ll slog through the day and will want to go
to bed earlier that second night. After a few days, you’ll settle into a
pattern of going to bed at roughly the same time and falling asleep right away.
So if you want to become an early riser (or just exert more control over
your sleep patterns), then try this: Go to bed only when you’re too sleepy to
stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning.
