What I Learned from Five Years of ‘Biphasic’ Sleeping
Sleep hacking has its ups and downs.
When I landed a dream client five years ago, there was just one hitch: I would have to work a two and a half hour shift, starting at 4:30 am. It was well paid, interesting work, and so I ended up accepting, pushing aside my worries of sleep deprivation.
It took me a while before working out a new sleep pattern that made sense for me. Initially, I tried going to bed at 9 pm, but this made it hard to maintain a social life, as most of my friends wouldn’t get off work until 7 or 8 pm. So instead, I started going to bed around midnight and sleeping again from 7 am once I finished work.
The Natural Way of Sleeping
I had, unknowingly, fallen into a routine of biphasic sleeping, or sleeping in two phases. It’s a rhythm that some experts and amateur bio-hackers vigorously defend as being great for health. Research shows that biphasic sleeping improves the quality of your sleep and increases your energy and productivity levels throughout the day.
Today, there is a general assumption that the eight-hour night is the most “natural” way of sleeping, but evidence points to the opposite. Most animals sleep not in one solid block but in multiple periods throughout the day, and psychiatrist…
