

Rachel McConnell suffers from the curse of a creative mind. She's always running out of time for projects. Outside her work at how-to site Instructables, she couldn't manage to wedge in enough hours for welding, crafting, and the projects spinning out of her hacker collective. "I have 50 million side projects," she said. "I'm learning electronics hacking right now."

So she did what any self-described "antisocial geek" would do: She found a way to stop sleeping. Or more specifically, she attempted a so-called polyphasic sleep pattern, in which a couple hours' worth of short, timed naps throughout the day are supposed to replace a whole night of sleep.

There are various types of sleep regimens floating around the internet, but the one Rachel tried was called the Uberman (though she's not much for the name).

It works like this: you break up the 24 hours of the day into 4 hour chunks. At some point in each 4 hour set, you take a twenty minute nap; the total amount of sleep adds up to about two hours. The schedule meant she'd have to sleep some during the workday, which her bosses approved, as long as she documented her progress on the how-to site. Her boyfriend was even up for trying to match their schedules.

McConnell began her sleep regimen, and at first things went well.

"I was able to get more done. I was up at three in the morning thinking, 'Ok, what can I do now?'" she said. "I was able to make significant headway on my enormous to-do lists. I would go out on bicycle rides in the middle of the night."

But by day five, her experience was already starting to deteriorate, even as she held out hope that her body would acclimate to the new sleep schedule.

"Despite the feeling awful part of the time, I am definitely getting things done," she wrote. "If I don't acclimatize and feel crappy half the time like now, it is not worth it."

Indeed, she made a few changes to her regimen, adding sleeping time, but about 17 days in, McConnell got sick and decided to quit the sleep experiment. In her farewell note, she summed up her experience, "My current belief is that polyphasic sleep is a method for handling sleep deprivation as well as possible, but that it likely does not provide enough sleep for an average person."

That polyphasic sleep helps the horribly sleep-deprived is the only positive conclusion about extreme sleep regimens that can be backed up by the limited scientific literature on the topic. Open-ocean sailors provided the data for a 1989 study that showed under continuous work situations, in which a full night of sleep is not available, "best performance results" were obtained by sailors sleeping for periods between 20 minutes and one hour and for a total of about 5 hours a day. A more recent study of truckers found that irregular shift drivers tended to move into polyphasic sleep as "a strategy to cope with sleep deprivation."

Still, McConnell hasn't given up on finding the sleep pattern that's right for her, instead of just the one the rest of the world uses. Her new plan is to get on a 28-hour cycle, staying awake for nineteen hours, then sleeping for nine. That would give her an extra couple hours of waking time and because twenty-eight divides evenly into 168, the number of hours in a week, six of her days conveniently translate into seven calendar days for the rest of us.

McConnell is planning to try out the new sleep regimen in the next couple of months, so keep an eye on her Instructables page if you want to follow along.

Image: McConnell on Day 3 at 4 AM. Composite by Alexis Madrigal.