Sleeping Cycles

As you maybe have already noticed I am a person constantly to look for new things that could catch my interest. Recently I stumbled upon an article of Swedish scientists who wrote about the sleeping rhythms of Swedes who live far in the north of the country and have the least amount of sunlight during the day. Since their nights basically are longer than the days their biorhythmic clock cannot adapt to the conditions they live under with respect to modern requirements of sleeping times (most of the people have a nine-to-five job and hence must be at work by 9 am). Many of those people were tired and powerless throughout the day.

THE EXPERIMENT

The scientific team conducted an experiment with a group of couple hundred people (I don’t remember the actual figure). One part of the group would continue their regular sleeping habits whereas the other part would divide their daily sleeping time into portions of two. One portion, the main sleep phase during the night, consists of three to four REM-cycles (“Rapid Eye Movement” one cycle is 90 minutes) and the second portion is one cycle long. The second portion must be placed between 1 and 3 pm. That way it doesn’t impact the night sleep (if you undergo the second portion too late then it will disturb the upcoming night cycle). Combined, the two phases make either 6h or 7.5h of sleep daily. But because of the partition throughout the day your body and most importantly your brain gets enough REM-cycles not only to work properly but to be refreshed after the first powerout of the day (working time until 1pm).

MY RESULTS

I have been testing this method for almost four weeks now. The first couple days were rough because I was not used to sleeping 4.5 hours. That is why I decided to get four REM-cycles at night (6 hours of sleep) and then the second REM-cycle at 1.30 pm. The results are astonishing. The overall ability and willingness to work more and longer are extreme. Without any difficulties I can work from 6 am to 10 pm just because I get a full REM-cycle in the middle of the working day. After that „long-powernap“ I feel like I slept for hours.

Next week I am going to reduce the night phase to three REM-cycles. I want to diminish my combined sleeping time at first to six and then later maybe even to 4.5 hours a day.
One guy commented underneath the article about the Swedes that with this technique he reduced his sleeping time to each one REM-cycle (one cycle at night and one at day).

Let’s see what my results will be!

Cheers

Max