Good article. I hope some of these 'brogrammers' read it and realize that programming 20 hours a day is not only shortening your lifespan. It is, literally, making you more stupid.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a statistical analysis of a large project to see when changes that generated bugs were actually performed. I've long suspected that when you see particularly silly bugs committed by people who really do know better there is usually some explanation that can often be that they are tired/stressed/distracted.
[NB I know myself that I can do particularly silly things when tired so I will sometimes let myself spend a long time investigating a problem but I won't fix it until the next day.]
I've had projects where we had to send people home because they became a such a noticeable burden.
Personally I wanted to force people out of the office much earlier on one of them because pretty much nothing got done when people were staying late, but it left everyone more tired in the morning, but the CEO was of the "more hours == more work done" mentality and wouldn't listen.
This is interesting actually. I remember a time I stayed up all night trying to get a script for a game working (hobby project). I was hacking away all night until early morning and I just couldn't fix the issues. After a good sleep, I'd fixed the issue and got it working as it should within an hour. The lesson for me was that I shouldn't put my health on the line for these types of things; it doesn't help in actually making progress and it could set my performance back weeks.
Another big lesson, which is more general and took a few more mistakes, was the value of stepping away from a problem after intense conscious focus on it. This may or may not mean sleep on it but just means taking your mind off it and let the back of your head tick away on it. I think this might actually be the source of "eureka" moments too, which means flashes of ingenuity are not exactly what they seem!
I've read multiple accounts of people who have done it for several months[1][2][3][4]. I have seen only one account of someone quitting after the initial adaptation for any reason other than convenience.
I have also read some accounts[5] of people who quit polyphasic, but go back to it in various forms when they have time constraints (and apparently adapting back is not very difficult once you've done it once; my guess is that the ability to nap efficiently is not lost, and is the main stumbling block to getting started).
So if by "not sustainable", you mean "very hard to fit into a monophasic sleeping world", then yes, that's true. If you mean "after a week or two, you'll feel exhausted", then yes, that's also true. It takes longer than that to adapt.
If you mean "it's not enough sleep even after you adapt", then where are the posts you're talking about?
Please don't be a sarcastic asshole. pstuart [Edit: not you] said you saw "posts" that showed it was unsustainable, and provided no citations at all. The fact is that there currently isn't a body of peer reviewed evidence to look at about the long term sustainability of polyphasic sleep.
But it doesn't take much evidence to refute an absolute claim like "polyphasic sleep is unsustainable". If someone is sleeping for 2 hours per night for a five months and says they feel energetic, that's damned compelling. That isn't "It really seemed to cure my headache!" It's "I am still functioning normally after 20 weeks with only 2 hours of sleep per night."
You also can't reasonably compare the priors of homeopathy and polyphasic sleep. If homeopathy worked, we'd have to toss out just about all of the theory behind physics and medicine and start over from scratch. Polyphasic sleep doesn't contradict current scientific knowledge.
I'm also not sure if the "sarcastic asshole" comment is called for. Not only is the stuff I said not sarcastic, insults of that nature are also clearly against the rules.
I am sorry that I came across as insulting. I interpreted your putting "citations" between quotation marks and then calling them impressive as sarcasm. I'm not sure how else to interpret it, but I will accept at face value your assurance that it was not intended that way.
I did not intend my statement as calling you an asshole. Rather, I perceived your comment as assholish. I assume that you are not an asshole, so I was requesting that you not act like one.
A handful of anecdotes does not make your case. Polyphasic sleep with very little overall sleep (eg six short naps a day) is not sustainable. Our bodies require more sleep to function at peak performance.
I tried out polyphasic sleep in 2006. I spent a lot of time before, during, and after reading all the research I could find. I found no research on long term polyphasic sleep (short naps). There is some short term research that shows it can work as a temporary solution when regular sleep is not possible (eg solo sailing competitions). Everything I've read from sleep researchers has said that they think it's completely unsustainable because you're constantly in sleep debt and you're probably negating sleep mechanisms they're not aware of yet (such as the original article here).
My personal anecdote agrees with the researchers. I was able to do it but I always felt about 80-90% normal, like I was functioning at a lower level. I felt cold all the time, possibly due to incorrect hormone levels from lack of sleep (pure speculation).
Eventually the sleep debt caught up to me. I started sleeping through my alarm. 25 minutes of sleep would turn into 2 hours. At least once I turned off an alarm on the other side of the room and went back to bed with no memory of doing it.
I recommend trying it if you can fit it in your schedule. It was a very interesting experience and taught me a lot about sleep. You need to dedicate at least a month, a week or two isn't enough to "adjust" (which never truly happens).
It's not just a handful of anecdotes though. I gave a handful of anecdotes that I was able to round up in about 5 minutes of searching. I don't think that the opinion of researchers, uninformed by hard data, and your single anecdote is enough to counter that.
> I found no research on long term polyphasic sleep (short naps)
That is correct. The research doesn't exist. That's why I said "eh, maybe" in my original comment. Whether or not polyphasic truly can work in the long term for most people is not a settled question. It is completely possible that the anecdotes of people who are successful in the long term simply have an unusual genetic predisposition to needing less sleep. There is a plausible rationale for a selection bias on multiple levels to explain the anecdotes; people who need less sleep may be more interested in sleep hacking, and they would be far more likely to make it past the initial adaptation period.
It's also far more likely that polyphasic sleep schedules that include at least one period of "core sleep" are sustainable (e.g. Everyman) than nap-only schedules. And at the extreme end you have biphasic sleep, which gives 6-7 hours and actually has some historical evidence to back it up.
Of course, biphasic won't get you a 20 hour workday. Everyman can, if all you do is sleep and work. That's going to be unhealthy for other reasons, but whether or not it's unhealthy because of sleep deprivation is an open question.
