Is Sleep Really Necessary?
What if I offered you the chance to extend
your life by 10 years? I'm talking about extra time throughout your
life, starting now. This offer affords you a whopping 25 percent more
time to excel at your job, bond with the people you love, indulge in
your dreams, or just chill.
Is that something that might
interest you? If it's not, stop reading and go to bed. You see, sweet
slumber is the dead zone from which you'll reclaim that valuable time.
I'd
been adding items to my to-do list at a much faster rate than I was
checking them off when I heard about the Uberman sleep cycle. This
extreme form of polyphasic sleeping involves 20-minute naps every 4
hours. (A monophasic sleep pattern would be your typical 8-hour block of
sleep every 24 hours.) Some converts to Uberman claim that after an
adjustment period, usually lasting anywhere from a week to 3 weeks, they
feel no less alert than they would have if they'd been clocking 8
hours a night. (If your sluggish workout routine is dragging you down,
then check out the Better
Body Blueprint, which will chisel your core and trigger your
testosterone in just weeks!)
Leonardo
da Vinci is said to have followed a sleep pattern akin to Uberman.
Maybe that's what allowed him sufficient time to design prototypical
versions of the helicopter, hang glider, parachute, and submarine, and
paint the Mona Lisa and Last Supper. In fact, geniuses and military
leaders throughout history have been linked with polyphasic and
unconventional sleeping habits—Napoleon, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla,
and Winston Churchill, to name a few. Who knows how different our world
would be today if these men had bunked down at sunset? I wasn't
looking to invade Prussia, but I thought I could at least use some extra
time to renew my driver's license and figure out my taxes.
I
was encouraged in this pursuit by Claudio Stampi, M.D., Ph.D., the
editor of Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of
Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep. In the early 1980s, Dr. Stampi began
researching polyphasic sleep after he noticed his fellow long-distance
sailboat-racing comrades adopting a polyphasic sleep pattern with
minimal impairment. Since then, the elusive Dr. Stampi has been dodging
interviewers (like me) and seeking ways to reduce sleep.
I
asked W. Christopher Winter, M.D., a board-certified sleep-medicine
specialist and the medical director of the Sleep Medicine Center at
Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, if he considered
any of this to be a good idea.
He didn't. "All kinds of
things could happen to individuals who are sleep deprived," he told me.
"Changes in blood pressure, heart rate, hormones, glucose metabolism,
temperature regulation, and appetite can be seen quite quickly."
And to boot, Dr. Winter says, certain theories even tack death onto
that laundry list of results: "The sleepless individual is probably
cold [due to increased energy expenditure], so hypothermia could be an
eventual cause of death. So could catabolism—that is, an increased
metabolic rate and protein breakdown—and susceptibility to disease from a
weakened immune system."
I kept on calling experts until I
found one who would at least offer some measure of support for this
plan. Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D., the author of Take a Nap! Change Your
Life, stopped far short of a rubber stamp, but she did at least find an
analogy that gave comfort.
"As infants we were all vociferous
proponents of polyphasic sleep," she noted, "and in late adulthood
we're prone to more frequent napping. It leads me to think that the
only reason we don't check out for refreshing 20-minute naps in the 60
years in between is because we've learned not to."
It was a lesson I would try to unlearn.
I'm a pretty good candidate for an unconventional sleep schedule. I
live alone, I have free-form work hours, and I'm in good health. I also
had a ton of TV to catch up on. So I scheduled any appointments or
meetings around my naps (at 2 a.m., 6 a.m., 10 a.m., 2 p.m., 6 p.m.,
and 10 p.m.). I beefed up my Netflix subscription and bought a "learn
Spanish" CD-ROM, along with sheet music to Eddie Van Halen's most
blistering guitar solos. In my suddenly overflowing spare time, I would
become a culture-vulture Uberman in the flesh.
The first
night, I crawled into bed at my usual time and left it 20 minutes later
without having slept at all. So I kicked things off with a 2:30 a.m.
screening of Raging Bull. The movie's final 20 minutes were accompanied
by birdsong. I took a dawn stroll around the neighborhood (a first
while sober) and returned to my apartment just in time for my 6 a.m.
Ubernap. I dropped off quickly, though the buzz of my alarm just 20
minutes later drove murderous urges throughout my exhausted body. But
relief was only a bath, a breakfast, and two Sopranos episodes away.
