Playing catch-up David Zach/Getty
THINK snoozers are losers? Then why not join the world of the sleep hackers, people who have ditched full nights of shut-eye in favour of microsleeps.
was 19 and worried about fitting in all her college work when she attempted the Uberman sleep schedule (see graphic). For the next 6 months, Staver never slept for more than 20 minutes at a time, napping every 4 hours, totalling just 2 hours sleep a day. It’s one of a number of sleep schedules that promise to maximise our waking hours. But can messing with sleep to such an extreme be a good idea?
Sleep – a user’s guide: We answer all the questions keeping you up at night
According to historian of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, breaking sleep into more than one bout is entirely natural. Pre-industrial civilisations around the world are known to have naturally segmented their sleep into two distinct phases, with an hour or two of “quiet wakefulness” in the middle of the night, he says. We’ve done away with this practice, but by this logic, people who experience middle-of-the-night insomnia simply have the natural urge to wake.
Nap time, all the time
That idea was challenged last year when at the University of California, Los Angeles, investigated how humans might have slept in the pre-industrial era. His team visited three tribes of hunter-gatherers in the African and South American tropics. Much like the rest of us, these peoples preferred to stay up at least another 3 hours after sunset – and they . “I’m not saying that biphasic sleep doesn’t happen,…
