Long term effects of Polyphasic

[Marcus Weidner]

I am hesident to send this out to the group as I cannot verify the information as well as I would like, so let me present it as just food for thought and not concrete evidence or information to stake your health on.

 

After starting on Everyman almost a year ago myself and my family noticed that now I was acting just like my dad in that he just drops off to sleep all the time and sleeps for a little bit and then is back up and going again.  Growing up I remember it didn't matter now long I stayed up or how early I got up my father was still up, we all just figured it was just part of how he was a very odd person.

 

Now that I have been doing Polyphasic I have noticed that his schedule very closely resembles a Polyphasic schedule when I am around when he is napping his naps all seem to be between 15-20 minutes, he doesn't use an alarm or anything, technically speaking I think you would call his sleep schedule "free running sleep", but he sleeps about a 1.5 hour core at about 6am every morning then throughout the day he just dissappears and takes a nap.

 

I would like to figure out what his schedule is more precise but he is not one that would cooperate, my mom couldn't nail down the schedule but as she described and I have seen from when I grew up he is about as close as you can get without having an official schedule like we all try and run.  My father has been doing this since his early 20's and he is now in his 70's.  He is both a pig farmer and worked in the woods harvesting trees.  So this schedule was natural for him since he worked in the woods during the day and did the farm work at night, also the house was heated by a woodstove that had to be fed every 2 hours.

 

As for his health, he has been doing something very similar to Polyphasic for about 50 years and he still cuts and splits by hand a truckload of firewood a day to sell, plus some work in the woods still, I wouldn't be able to keep up with him if I tried.

 

Take this as some food for thought as to the possibility of doing Polyphasic over a very long period, but like I said in starting, this is just my observations, there is not any scientific proof to this claim, I have not and most likely will not ever get the chance to observe his sleeping pattern over the course of a week to verify his schedule, but I thought I would pass along what I have observed.

 

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Marcus Weidner

[puredoxyk]

Wow, Marcus, that's a great story -- thanks for sharing! I appreciate
your making sure we know it's just a testimonial, but as such I think
it's still very valuable. If long-term polyphasic sleep is at all
viable, then it seems to me that there *must* be people in the world,
however few, who do it, whether they intended to or not. Your dad
seems like pretty good evidence that this is true! So I think it's
very exciting.

Thanks!
PD

[zade]

I also noticed that quite a few people come up with some kind of
polyphasic sleep pattern. Usually it is due to a busy work schedule.
But I've never heard anyone doing it for 50 years. It might be that
your father is biologically suitable for polyphasic sleeping in the
first place.