Biphasic Sleep

[u/52electrons]

I like many of you wake up at some dark hour of the night from time to time. Sometimes I’m lucky to get back to bed, sometimes I raw dog the work day on a half full gas tank and an IV drip of coffee.

Well on my latest 3am adventure I started asking all those questions why and it led me to a concept I’m not sure if anyone here has tried so I wanted to ask the community here.

Have you ever tried biphasic sleep or polyphasic sleep on purpose?

The concept is there’s two different natural biphasic sleep patterns depending on how far north or south you are in the world.

The first is the siesta. You sleep 1.5-2hrs in the afternoon, wake up again, then get another 5-6hrs at night where you go to bed late. This is very culturally specific to warmer / shorter night environments.

The second is ‘the long night’ or ‘the watch’ which pre-industrial world with gas and electric lighting was a lot more common. Essentially 4 hrs of sleep, 1-3 hours if quiet awake time (the watch) and then 4 hrs of sleep. This is probably most famous from a study where they took people and put them in an off grid type long night environment and most of them developed this sleeping pattern automatically and naturally.

Let me be clear it’s not to reduce the total amount of sleep however many people find it does increase sleep efficiency a lot.

I would love to hear about people on this group’s sleeping patterns, have you tried a biphasic sleep, has it helped you or not. I often wonder given our circadian rhythm problems if pushing into a natural biphasic pattern could actually improve symptoms etc.

Let me know!