Heidiphasic Sleep: Six Months Later

It has now been about six months after I started my heidiphasic sleep schedule, and I am in the process of getting back on to a monophasic schedule once again.

Obviously, as I have been sleeping heidiphasically for six months, the schedule worked for me. I was able to operate normally on an average of six hours of sleep a day. The primary reason I switched to heidiphasic sleep was because of school. I don't like to go to bed early, and getting up at 6 wasn't conducive to staying up late. Enter, heidiphasic sleep. The schedule allowed me to stay up until 1 every day and still operate as I normally would. Albeit with two naps in the middle of the day.

I am getting back to a monophasic schedule now because school is over. I don't need to wake up at 6 in the morning anymore, and so don't need to be on a different sleep schedule. I can just go to bed late and get up late, as my body actually likes to do. Now, after six months of the schedule, I am tired of it. I hate feeling tired when I get up all the time. The feeling goes away after a few minutes, but it's still very hard to actually get up in the morning. Also, the 4 o'clock nap has more than once gotten in the way of things that need to be done, which resulted in the nap being skipped, or the jobs getting put off.

As has been said before in articles about non-monophasic sleep schedules, polyphasic sleep schedules have a very hard time meshing with normal society. We are a monophasic society. Everyone goes to bed at night and gets up in the morning. If you don't then you're either weird, or have a sleep disorder. I do think that humans would get a lot more done if we were polyphasic, but a culture-wide change like that will never happen, so it's a moot point.

Concluding, heidiphasic sleep is quite possible for humans to do--some people argue on the possibility of polyphasic sleep working for people--it increases free time, and allows a person to sleep less in a day and still operate at full power. It also can be hard to fit into your schedule, it is easy to miss naps and feel very tired and be hard to be around, and the human body isn't designed to have that little sleep, so waking up is always a chore. If the pros outweigh the cons for you, then I would indeed recommend heidiphaic sleep to anyone.

With that, I conclude my longest and most successful sleep experiment.