It seems to us that sleeping for eight hours is a lot, because how many useful things you can do and how many new impressions you can get if you sleep at least a little less. People are looking for ways to shorten their sleep time and still feel refreshed and refreshed. Will they find it?
Why eight?
The great, they say, slept little. Napoleon, for example, had enough sleep 4 hours a day. He went to bed between 10 and 12 pm, slept until 2 am, and then got up and worked. At 5 am he again went to bed and slept until 7. Winston Churchill slept a little more. The British prime minister used to go to bed around 3 am and wake up at 8 am.
True, he did not deny himself a daytime sleep, spending an additional one or two hours in bed during the daytime. The ingenious Nikola Tesla generally cost 2 hours. However, hardly anyone was standing with a clock next to their beds, and now we will no longer be able to check if these statements are just historical legends.
Scientists today are confident that for a full life, we must sleep about 8 hours a day. Moreover, both men and women need approximately the same time to sleep healthy - 8 hours. Finnish scientists have determined the optimal amount of time to sleep. To do this, 3760 people aged 30 to 64 were involved in the experiment. Participants in the study were questioned about the duration of their daily sleep and compared the responses with the data on their health during the period of the experiment.
As a result, it was found that in order to feel good and not get sick, men should sleep on average 7 hours 42 minutes a day, women - 7 hours 38 minutes. This average value, of course, the amount of time a person needs to sleep depends on the individual characteristics of his body.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) has the same opinion about how much sleep you need: adults should sleep 7-9 hours a night. At the same time, for children, the sleep rate is much higher. Babies need 12 to 16 hours of sleep per night (including naps), while teenagers, for example, need 8-10 hours. According to academy experts, parents should be an example for their children and sleep at least 7 hours every night. But, according to statistics, the vast majority of the adult population in developed countries is chronically sleep deprived.
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How to sleep less
Our lifestyle takes more and more time from sleep. Some work late, and some have fun all night long, there is always not enough time, and it is the hours traditionally set aside for sleep that are sacrificed to the modern way of life. Polyphasic sleep technique is considered one of the ways to increase our wakefulness at the expense of the hours we spend in sleep.
Most people's sleep is monophasic. We sleep once a day, mostly at night. The idea of sleeping multiple times a day didn't come out of nowhere. So, for example, babies sleep, interrupting their sleep during feeding. Residents of southern countries also like to take a nap during the day. This tradition is due to the hot climate. This afternoon nap is called a siesta. Polyphasic sleep also exists in the animal kingdom.
It is believed that the use of the polyphasic, or, as it is sometimes called, polyphasic, sleep technique can increase the waking time up to 20-22 hours, depending on the selected mode.
There are several such modes:
Biphasic (biphasic) - once at night (5 hours) and once during the day (1.5 hours), totaling 6.5 hours of sleep and 17.5 hours of wakefulness.
Everyman (normal person's mode) - 1 time at night (1.5-3 hours) and then 3 times for 20 minutes during the day, totaling 2.5-4 hours of sleep and 20-21.5 hours of wakefulness.
Dymaxion (dimaxion mode) - 4 times for 30 minutes every 5.5 hours, totaling 2 hours of sleep and 22 hours of wakefulness.
Uberman (Superman Mode) - 6 times for 20 minutes every 3 hours 40 minutes, totaling 2 hours of sleep and 22 hours of awake.
However, at a serious scientific level, polyphasic sleep has not yet been adequately researched. Naturally, the above sleep patterns should not be recommended for adolescents and children. Reducing the sleep rate is also unacceptable for diseases of the cardiovascular system.
Do not forget that in the world of monophasic sleep, sleeping several times a day can be really uncomfortable. Our life is synchronized with those around us, relatives, friends, work colleagues. It is not always possible to choose a place and time for sleep, and it is imperative to observe the polyphasic sleep schedule, otherwise skipping one of the sleep segments is fraught with a breakdown of the entire regime.
What is sleep
To conclude whether it is possible to deceive the body, it is worth understanding how difficult sleep is. The great Russian and Soviet scientist, physiologist, creator of the science of higher nervous activity, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, noted that sleep is not just rest, it is an active state of the body, which is characterized by a special form of brain activity. While we disconnect from the outside world and see dreams, our body lives its own life. Processes not fully understood by scientists are taking place in the body.
There are two phases of sleep: slow sleep and fast sleep, it is also called "paradoxical". The first phase lasts 60-90 minutes, the second - 10-20 minutes. During the night, slow and REM sleep cyclically replace each other about four to five times.
We fall asleep and fall into the first stage of slow wave sleep. In each of the four stages, a person falls into sleep deeper and deeper. At first, it's a nap. Muscle activity decreases, heart rate and respiration rate decrease, body temperature drops, and metabolism slows down. But the eyes can still make slow movements.
In the second stage, the decrease in tonic muscle activity continues, the body temperature continues to fall, and the heart rate slows down. The eyes are already motionless. In the third stage, the depth of sleep increases, and the person plunges into deep sleep. The deepest sleep in this phase is in the fourth stage. The last two stages are often combined under one name - "delta sleep". It is already very difficult to wake up a person at this time. 80% of dreams occur at this particular time.
It is believed that slow sleep is associated with the restoration of the body's energy costs. At the same time, in the phase of slow sleep, the information received during the previous day is consolidated, and it is with this that the intensive work of the brain is associated.
But 20-30 minutes of deep sleep pass, and the body jumps into the second, less deep, stage of the slow-wave sleep phase, as if trying to wake up. Instead, however, he enters the next phase of sleep - REM sleep.
In this phase, the electrical activity of the brain is similar to that which it has in the waking state. However, due to a strong drop in muscle tone, the body is completely immobile. In this phase, the eyes of a person make rapid movements under the closed eyelids.
REM sleep, in contrast to slow sleep, is accompanied by an increase in the activity of various body systems. As soon as REM sleep begins, processes occur in the body that are completely opposite to slow sleep: the body temperature rises, the heart rate and respiration increase. In men, a characteristic feature of this sleep phase is an erection of the penis. A characteristic feature of REM sleep is vivid and emotionally colored dreams. And although dreams can be accompanied by both REM and NREM sleep, similar ones occur only during REM sleep.
After 10-20 minutes, the REM sleep phase is again followed by the 2nd stage of slow sleep. A new cycle begins. The body goes through the third and fourth stages of REM sleep, returns to the second and again enters the REM sleep phase. As already mentioned, during the night there can be 4-5 such cycles. Moreover, the third and fourth stages (deep slow sleep) are most pronounced in the first two cycles. In subsequent periods, deep NREM sleep occurs only sporadically or disappears altogether. At the same time, the duration of the phases of REM sleep in the last cycles increases by the end of the night, and the phases of slow sleep, on the contrary, are reduced.
It was noted that the distribution of sleep time into phases depends on age. REM sleep accounts for half of a newborn's sleep. But already during the first year of life, the duration of REM sleep decreases sharply, while the duration of slow wave sleep hardly changes. In an adult, the percentage of REM sleep is only 20-25% of the total.
Morning is approaching, and the harbingers of the end of sleep appear: a person in a dream often changes his position, the body temperature rises, the level of the hormone cortisol rises. The body is preparing for a new day.
Proponents of polyphasic sleep reject the need for slow wave sleep for humans. The restoration of the body, in their opinion, occurs during the phase of REM sleep. Applying the technique of polyphasic sleep, a person increases the wakefulness time by reducing the phase of slow wave sleep.
To master the technique of polyphasic sleep, you need to learn how to enter REM sleep as soon as possible. When we change sleep patterns from monophasic to polyphasic sleep, it is the lack of sleep that prompts us to plunge into this phase immediately, without going through all the stages of slow wave sleep. This is how you save time.
However, observations show that people who experiment with reduced sleep duration rarely switch to continuous polyphasic sleep. In the beginning, using the polyphasic sleep technique always gives good results. They sleep little, but at the same time they are vigorous and healthy. But some time passes, and they all return to monophasic sleep. As a rule, it is worth skipping one scheduled sleep period - and the person breaks down.
In reality, which often does not coincide with theory, such a short time is not enough for the body to reach the deep stages of slow wave sleep and rapid phase. But it is at these stages that vital hormones are produced that are responsible for the state of health. The negative effects of prolonged sleep restriction are akin to those of insomnia. Those who, for some reason, sleep less than the body needs, have circadian disorders, hormonal disorders, depression and various diseases.
By the way, about the circadian rhythms of our body. This is essentially our internal clock. They determine the intensity of various biological processes in the body: the production of hormones, thermoregulation, the work of digestion, and so on. The circadian alternation of sleep and wakefulness depends on the light. It gets dark - melatonin is produced, the action of which makes us sleepy; the sun rises - cortisol wakes us up. Melatonin and cortisol are two important hormones involved in sleeping and waking up.
Melatonin is called the "sleep hormone". The maximum values of its concentration in the blood are observed between midnight and 5 am. It is produced in the pineal gland at nightfall. In the morning, its synthesis stops, and cortisol is released into the blood. This hormone wakes us up and gives us the vigor necessary for a new day.
Nature has tried and created a complex mechanism for the restoration of the body. Attempts to interfere with it for extra hours of wakefulness, as a rule, lead to nothing good. Much better to think about the rational use of time …
By the way, isn't it because Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo because he slept so little? Perhaps, if he devoted more time to sleep, he would not have made fatal mistakes in the most important battle of his life.
Sergey Sobol