Vincent Sparreboom

In my last post, I wrote that I haven’t posted here in a while, and that I won’t publish any articles about making money online, but that I would only write about personal stuff – and I have something cool for you.

 

Some of you already know that I’m writing a book about lifestyle design and living the life of the new (internet) rich. This book isn’t so much about how to make money online but more about how to achieve the life you really want – you don’t need millions to live your dream life. And one of the things I wanted to do for quite some time now is experiment with polyphasic sleep patterns’. In my book, I’m also writing several chapters about managing your ‘home life’, including sleep patterns. When you are an internet entrepreneur, or thinking of becoming one you shouldn’t be fearful of running into 80 – 100 hour workweeks. Ask any online marketer or entrepreneur “do you pull any all nighters?”, and they all will answer with “pfff”.

 

Sleep can be a real ‘luxury item’, and if you’re like me (when I still had an alarm) always ‘in an everlasting battle with your alarm clock’ balancing work, motivation, sleep (and fun) can be a real pain in the ass and this is the reason why I wanted to give polyphasic sleep a try.

 

What is polyphasic sleep?

 

We sleep in a monophasic pattern. This means that during a 24 hour you sleep 7.5 – 9 hours continuously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, with polyphasic sleep you sleep multiple times – but shorter, during your 24 hour day. There are more variations to it but the 4 most known are biphasic, everyman, dymaxion and uberman.

 

 

 

 

Images: Mike Rossetti Experiments

 

We all sleep with different cycles and patterns and the idea behind polyphasic sleep is that you only use your deep sleep. I have been monitoring my sleep pattern for the past 4 months, and it turns out that during my sleep cycles (multiple per night) that my deep sleep is lasting around 30 – 35 minutes per cycle.

 

According my sleep pattern the ‘best’ suited program for me would probably be the dymaxion pattern – the everyman would probably be better, but since I have trouble waking up with an alarm clock, the everyman with one longer cycle in it wouldn’t be an option. Nevertheless, I’m always up for a challenge, and I have read so much about the uberman program that I’ve decided to try the program. The uberman sleep program are 4 hour cycles in which you only sleep 20 minutes per cycles, so in total you only sleep 2 hours a day. I want to do the uberman program for at least 1 year.

 

Last week (6-14-2011), I came home from some traveling and vacation and I immediately started with the program. And even though 30 hour workdays are no problem for me at all, I immediately ran into difficulties with this program.

 

On this page I’m going to be referring to all the weekly video journals that I’m going to be publishing on this blog. I’ll link to my sleep data (online spreadsheet will follow soon), and I will refer to other interesting books and resources that I find on the topic.

 

If you want to follow my ‘2 hour a day’ sleep journey, be sure to subscribe to my blog.

 

Wish me luck;)

 

Cheers

 

Vincent

 

 

 

Below you will find my sleep schedule that I’ll document with the help of Google Docs.

 

Here’s what the below rating means:

 

L = Length = I plan to take six 20 minute naps. During my start period I found that I overslept regularly and oversleeping can ruin your sleep cycles and pattern. You can deal with the hourly intervals but if you oversleep, your body gets restless, agitated and needs several days to adapt back to your ‘normal’ pattern. I found starting over after one long nap, to be the biggest struggle of the system. The below figures are minutes.

 

I = Intensity = Did I sleep well or did I only close my eyes. A good sleep is rated with a 5.

 

O = On Time = This is of great importance, and I really want to start my naps exactly at 5am, 9am etc. and exactly on time gets a rating of 5.