For most people, sleep deprivation-whether it’s from polyphasic sleep or other reasons-will just continue to pile up, eventually taking a toll on health. It’s true: Some people really can function well with less than the recommended eight hours of sleep per night, Avidan says, but they’re the exception to the rule. That could result in consequences to your endocrine system and metabolic function. “When you start realigning and re-shifting the percentage of sleep stages throughout the normal sleep period, you end up shifting a lot of different physiologic functions that are very tied to sleep stages,” he says. People who don’t get at least seven hours of sleep each day may even be at higher risk for chronic conditions such as diabetes and obesity, Avidan says, because research has shown that sleep deprivation disrupts hormone levels and spikes your blood sugar and appetite.Įven if you can game the system and slip right into REM sleep, doing so isn’t natural, and the other cycles of sleep likely do have value, Avidan says. “If individuals who sleep in a fragmented fashion end up sleeping less overall, that has health consequences,” including cognitive impairment, memory problems and a higher risk of accidents, he says. “There is very little data-none whatsoever in the medical literature-of carefully designed clinical studies demonstrating that polyphasic sleep has any advantage in human sleep medicine,” Avidan says.

Alon Avidan, the director of the University of California Los Angeles Sleep Disorders Center. Many polyphasic sleepers believe the other phases of the sleep cycle are unnecessary, and that by eliminating them, they can spend more productive hours awake. Dreaming, memory storage and mood regulation happen during REM sleep, while slow wave is the deepest, most restorative stage of sleep. Proponents say that spacing out slumber can maximize the amount of time you spend in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and slow wave sleep, since the body defaults to these stages when it’s tired. Another schedule consists only of 20-minute naps spaced throughout the day, totaling two to three hours of shut-eye per day. The length of the core sleep and the number of naps varies, but people on this schedule spend a total of three to seven hours asleep. There are many different polyphasic sleep schedules, according to the Polyphasic Society, but one of the most popular involves a longer “core” sleep anywhere from 90 minutes to six hours, supplemented by 20-minute naps. Polyphasic sleepers, meanwhile, snooze in short bursts throughout the day instead of sleeping all night. Most people are monophasic sleepers, meaning they get all of their rest in one long chunk, typically at night.

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