“depriving rats of REM sleep specifically leads to death in 3 to 8 weeks ”

Losing REM sleep leads to death, that can’t be a good thing. “There have been tests on humans in which REM sleep was deprived, and all subjects in the study had to quit before the study could run to completion. Obviously, scientists cannot ethically experiment how long it takes for lack of sleep to kill a person. ”

The theory is that your body will start forcing itself into REM much sooner after a 14 day adjustment period, so that you will after the adjustment, gain REM sleep. This probably is true. The body is capable of amazing things when put under pressure, the keywords being _under pressure_. Why inflict this upon yourself when you are under no such pressure? Putting your body in permanent ‘survival mode’ can not be a good thing. Plus, there are other phases of sleep that we have little to no research on, but they must have their importance, no one knows what the effect of those other phases is. What if it is something like longevity?

“long-term polyphasic sleep has not been thoroughly studied for its health effects. Most of what we know of “going against the nature” comes from the research on shift-work schedules.”

Polyphasic sleep is useful if you are like, a soldier, or a sailor, and absolutely _must_ stay on guard or whatever, but these states last at the worst, a couple of months. It is used as a temporary stop-gap measure when put under extreme duress. Claudio Stampi does not advocate poly phasic sleep as a lifestyle, only for use in these short term situations where little to no sleep is possible.

I am no expert, but I have always found all nighters difficult because I had no psychological concept of ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ I think something about, well my brain at least, requires my life to be segmented into days. By giving yourself 3 hours of sleep instead of 8, that is 5 more hours of information coming into your brain that you have to process and remember. By adopting this sleep schedule, you would never give your brain a chance to shut off. A lot of our decision making and problem solving (I think) is done in your sleep (the phrase ‘I’ll sleep on it’ – your subconscious analayzes the day while it sleeps, it is a natural process).

If you really want to do this, and really think it will increase your quality of life, all power to you, but it seems to me like it will do more harm than good! Be carefull!

This is what I concluded based on what I’ve read, which amounts to the SA thread + that Steve Pavlina guy and a few other random sites which were mostly personal accounts of failures to successfully adopt the schedule.

I’m kind of concerned that I’ll need to find some sort of portable but unintrusive alarm system, as with this schedule it is fairly unlikely that the naps will be able to occur in my apartment every time. Any suggestions? I’m thinking that something like this in-ear alarm device might fit the bill?

I’ve heard (from the SA thread) that taking a nap a bit late isn’t usually a big deal, so I’m sure you’d be fine.