#sleep hacking

When I wake up, it often feels like at least twice as much time has passed, maybe even over an hour.

That small white ball on the nightstand is a sleep machine and smart alarm that syncs to the sensor tracker (look closely at the pillows) and helps you fully optimize your slumber!

In a world that never sleeps, millions of people work night shifts, rotating schedules, or early mornings. From nurses and security guards to factory workers and delivery drivers, shift work has become a norm—but it comes at a cost.

Disrupted sleep cycles, fatigue, and long-term health issues are common among shift workers. But what if there were ways to “hack” sleep and regain energy, focus, and balance?

Welcome to Sleep Hacking for Shift Workers—a guide to optimizing rest, no matter your hours.

Read More:

  Entrepreneur has another article on the latest trends and research on sleep or sleep hacking. Despite all the claims, the doctor in this article says there’s really no way you can function optimally on a reduced sleep schedule. The article covers the latest sleep hacking gadgets and trends in sleep hacking including poyphasic sleep.

It will be interesting to see what technology actually is…

Dave Asprey shows you how to hack your brain with light.

Many people may not be familiar with the idea of “sleep hacking,” the idea that you can sleep less and feel just as alert if not more so.

I’ve been experimenting with sleep hacking for a couple of years now, with varying success. It’s always a work in progress, but when it works well, I’m able to sleep six hours out of every 24, and be more productive and more alert than when I sleep 8+. When it doesn’t work well, I find myself sleeping strange hours and catching up on sleep debt late into the afternoon.

So why mess with it?

Well, for one, human beings are not meant to sleep in eight hour blocks. We are biphasic sleepers by design, and should be breaking our sleep up into two or more chunks, no matter how much we sleep.

The more obvious appeal, though, is to save time. Say you sleep 8 hours now (which makes absolutely 0 sense, because you wake up every morning as you’re entering your 6th sleep cycle… But as you wish). If you can successfully learn to feel rested and alert on 2 hours less per 24 hour period, that equates to 730 hours a year, or roughly 1 month. If you can sustain this from age 25 to age 65, the period between your intensive growth / brain development and potential retirement, that is about 3 and a half YEARS of extra waking time. Pretty dramatic, huh? Welcome to sleep hacking.

But it’s not healthy, you say. Well, I’m not sure. Cutting sleep outright is definitely not healthy. Optimizing it and training your body to be more efficient during sleep is another story. Napoleon slept 3-4 hours a night. So did Edison. They both turned out relatively ok.

Imagine this actually did shorten your expected lifespan by 5 or so years (no evidence to prove this… There are too many variables at play). It shortens the end of your life, where your time is less valuable, less enjoyable due to health and mobility limitations, and where you’re sleeping at least 30% of the time. Are those extra 3 years of waking life between 85 and 90 really worth it?

You still come out on top, in my mind.

The trick is to learn to be rested and alert on less sleep… And that’s why sleep hacking is so fascinating.

Dustin Curtis has a cool article about it here: http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

Hopefully more resources to come.

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Update: Dustin has removed the article form his site - not sure why. But, I've found a more comprehensive resource, though it doesn't talk much about polyphasic sleep, that's OK - because the only polyphasic sleep that really works is biphasic, in my mind, and he does cover that a little bit.