How to Sleep Less and Become More Productive

How to Sleep Less and Become More Productive

Everyone has 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. However, some of us get more things done than the others. How is this possible? Well, one of the ways it to work faster. Another method is to spend less time sleeping, but still feels just as rested in order to have more time awake to do more things.

There are multiple different methods of sleeping, but I’m going to discuss the 3 I have experimented with:

Monophasic Sleep: 8 hours at night (any 8 hours between 9PM-5:59AM)

Biphasic Sleep: 6 hours at night with 20 min power nap in the afternoon (nap any timebetween 12PM-5:59PM)

Polyphasic Sleep: 3 hours sleep at night (any time between 9pM-5:59AM), 20 min power nap in the morning (any time between 6AM-11:59PM), 20 min in the afternoon (any time between 12PM-5:59pM), & 20 min in the evening (any time between 6PM-8:59PM)

In the first style (Monophasic Sleep), I usually need 8 hours in order to get fully rested. This is the one most people do and in my opinion, it’s a complete waste of time. In this style I normally sleep at 11AM and wake up at 7AM during the time I was still in school and had classes. I’ve been doing this for most of my life until I started working full time and wanted some time to work out at the gym.

By working full time and wanting to have the time to work out, I switched to the second style (Biphasic Sleep). In this sleep cycle I sleep at 11PM and wake up at 5AM. I work from 6AM to 2:30PM. Then I eat and take a nap from 3:10PM to 3:30PM in my car where it’s quiet. This has worked quite well for me, giving me an extra 1 hour 40 minutes every day while still feeling just as rested. Eating no carb cheese before sleeping at night helps a lot as it has casein protein, a slow digested protein.

In the third style (Polyphasic Sleep), I just wanted to see if it was possible to only sleep for 4 hours total and still get fully rested. I do this by sleeping at 2AM and wake up at 5AM. My first nap is at 10:30AM to 10:50AM during my lunch (2^nd meal of the day) at work. My second nap is at 3:10PM to 3:30PM after my 3^rd meal of the day. My third nap is at 8:30PM to 8:50PM after my last meal. This works very well also, but I didn’t like napping at work in my chair in front of people so I stopped. I would say this is the most efficient way to sleep if you have a lot of things you want to do in your life. However, I chose biphasic sleep because I don’t want to sleep in my chair at work.

All the other sleep cycles sleeping with a total time of less than 4 hours may work in theory, but it’s extremely difficult to execute it in real life. It's not practical is what I found when I did the research. Many bloggers have tried it and could not keep up with it, so I didn’t even bother to test them out.

Here are all the variations: