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What Happens When You Sleep for Just 4 Hours a Day?

What Happens When You Sleep for Just 4 Hours a Day?

What happens to your body if you follow the Polyphasic sleep method and just sleep for 4 hours per day and take short naps throughout the day?

Polyphasic sleep refers to sleeping multiple times – usually more than two. This is in contrast to monophasic sleep, which is one period of sleep over 24 hours. A common form of biphasic or polyphasic sleep includes a nap, which is a short period of sleep, typically taken between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm as an adjunct to the usual nocturnal sleep period.

The term polyphasic sleep is also used by an online community that experiments with alternative sleeping schedules to achieve more time awake each day. However, researchers such as Piotr Woźniak warn that such forms of sleep deprivation are not healthy. While many claim that polyphasic sleep was widely used by some polymaths and prominent people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and Nikola Tesla, there are few reliable sources supporting that view.

Sleep and Sports

While sleep has been identified as an important aspect affecting performance current interventions are based largely on clinical experience and evidence derived from research in other fields. One attempt to research sleep in athletes is the Pittsburgh sleep quality Index. A global score of 5 or higher is considered to indicate poor sleep quality.

A different research tried to identify preferred biorhythm for athletes and found that only 10 percent of them were the extreme evening type, meaning they were the type that’s actually suited better going to sleep at odd hours of the night. While about 30% athletes were the early morning type.

How does napping effect training recovery?

Sleeping is a huge necessity when subjecting your body to intense exercise. It’s hard to say what’s the ideal amount of sleep because it might be dependent on one too many variables. The usual amount of sleep a young adult needs is seven to eight hours for optimal performance. However this figure does not include serious training and as such the need for extra sleep might soon arise after taking up bjj.

One of the Bright Side writers decided to adjust his daily routine to leave only 2-4 hours for sleep! Do you ever think about how cool it would be if there were more hours in a day?