Biphasic And Polyphasic Sleep Puns

I'm in my 30s and for probably a good 20 years, my body has naturally settled into polyphasic sleep.

If I sleep at midnight, I'll wake up about 4-5am feeling very rested and ready to tackle the world. However, at around 6-8am I'll be sleepy again and need another 2-3 hours of sleep.

Then by mid-afternoon, I'll need anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours of sleep depending on how I did the previous night.

Adapting to the rest of the world has been difficult. For example if I'm with other people, we usually have a 12-8am bedtime which means I wake up too early and get very drowsy by mid-morning because I missed my second sleep cycle.

At work, I often have to be on the game 9-5pm solid so I'm also super tired in the afternoon. At best I might be able to sneak out for a quick 15 minute nap in the car if things aren't too busy.

I've tried many things like eating a lot less for lunch and powering through with caffeine. Those help a little but leave me feeling grumpy and headachy by the end of the day.

Was wondering if you have similar experiences . It seems the world is not friendly to those with biphasic or polyphasic sleep needs?

So I’m a uni student who most likely has DSPD (self diagnosed, but I’m pretty sure at this point). My current uni for some reason has lectures starting at 8 am every day. Due to corona these are online lectures atm. Because I usually sleep from 4 or 5 am to about 1 am it’s pretty much impossible to fit these into my usual sleep rhythm. So I had an idea and that is waking up after a few hours of sleep to attend the lectures and then going to bed again and sleeping for the amount of time I need to have slept about 8 hours in total. So far this has worked well (except for it being brighter when I go to bed again for my second sleep phase which makes it a bit harder to fall asleep, although it’s still much easier and faster than trying to force myself to fit into a “normal” sleep schedule which leads to me not being able to fall asleep for many hours so that I end up sleep deprived), although I kinda worry about when I need to do stuff in the early afternoon or sth. Has anyone else experimented with this? What have your experiences been with this? Any advice?

I wanna know if it’s as beneficial as they say or if there’s a few dangers/warnings?

Is there a certain age you have to be (I won’t give my irl age)

What’s the margin of error for sleep time I don’t have to sleep EXACTLY 5 hours/ take a 90 min nap. How many minutes can I afford sleeping less or more than the time.

Should I take the nap 7 or 9 hours waking up?

Is melatonin safe?

Or any notes I’m missing. I’d like to know what I’m getting into before attempting.

I don’t have problems after being able to sleep. My main problem is falling asleep during the night, so I have been thinking if biphasic sleep or polyphasic could be a good method to win the battle against insomnia while it could be considered as “cheating”.

I’ve found that even when I do have 7-9 hours of sleep I’m still sleepy throughout the day and can nap 2-3 hours extra. I eat healthy and am I fairly good shape but this slight fatigue I always feel makes it really difficult to complete the tasks I need to. Any extra advice is appreciated

What do you think of alternative sleep patterns?

Let me elaborate, I have been reading up and deeply considering changing to a polyphasic schedule, possibly the everyman or dual core. However, I am in college and many of you probably know this is an interesting lifestyle. My friends and I have been on a psychedelic experience quest and there are still a few things we would like to do. I do not really want to miss out on these experiences as it is my own personal growth as well.

But, would it be possible to switch to the everyman or dual core cycle for over a month or so, then planning ahead to potentially skip a nap get a longer sleep than usual to go on our day long adventure and then revert back to the polyphasic schedule? If someone could tell me more about this or point me in the direction that would be great!

Thank you

I recently started graduate school and I've been having trouble finding a schedule that maximizes my productivity. I've always been a night owl (I don't sleep until 2:30 am at the earliest) and I'm wondering if segmented sleep would be advantageous. I've found that I work best at night (when nobody else is awake to distract me lol) and in the early morning (but I've usually crashed by this point), so I'm trying to find a regular sleep schedule that allows me to work at night without being destroyed the next day.

I'm particularly interested in biphasic sleep schedules (I think polyphasic sleep is probably more difficult to accomplish and may not suit my work style), but any advice is welcome. Has anyone tried biphasic/polyphasic sleep schedules, and if so, what worked/didn't work? Thanks in advance!

There are a few different biphasic schedules, and this one looks like the easiest. I tried 4.5 hours core sleep with a 1.5 hour nap a while ago, but the long nap was too inconvenient. Has anyone tried something like this? Any advice?

9/14: So far so good. Got about 6 hours last night. Not too tired, so I doubt I'll be able to fall asleep this afternoon. Guessing it'll take a few 6-hour nights until I really need that nap.

9/17: Ugh I'm bad at this. Got about 6.5 hours last night. I will go to bed at 2 tonight and wake up at 8. Mark my words!

9/18: Slept 2AM to 8AM. Napped 5PM-5:40PM (gave myself some time to fall asleep). Success!

9/19: About the same as yesterday. So far so good. Waking up was easy; I think I timed the cycles pretty well. I woke up around 7:45AM (before my alarm) feeling very rested. Gave myself a 35-minute countdown for the nap (~15 minutes to fall asleep).

Results: It may be too early to tell, but I think I'm adjusted. That seems to be the strength of biphasic: adjusting is easy, and if you have to skip a nap, you could certainly get back into the schedule in a day or two. The nap is very refreshing and I don't get drowsy again until around 1-1:30AM, and have no trouble waking up again at 8AM. I'll keep this going for a while, and if it keeps working I may have to try Everyman!

I've heard from creatives, particularly people writing, they do their best work late into the night when everyone else is asleep. Super productive people seem to either get up early and work before everyone else is up or stay up late working whilst everyone is asleep. Basing this largely off of the Tim Ferriss podcast guests.

I know from my past experiences when waking in the middle of the night to prepare for lucid dreaming has often left me wide awake and abuzz with thoughts and ideas seemingly with greater clarity than during the day. I sometimes feel cognitively sharper after a shorter sleep 4-5hours compared to an 8 hour sleep, perhaps due to the timing of REM cycles

Anybody experienced with different sleep cycles? Why did you do it and what were the effects on cognition? I've always been curious about trying different ones but my lifestyle (school, then work) has largely restricted that.

I am a college student and I have early morning classes, late nights, and lots of breaks during my day. Right now I try my best to go to sleep with enough time for me to get rest before I have to wake up but I'm not quite able to make it through the day. I've tried taking naps in the middle of my day but they make me feel tired and gross for the rest of the day. I think I might just not be doing this whole "nap" thing in the most effective way. I would like to try a sleep schedule that splits up the hours I sleep more without causing me to lose productivity or the ability to retain lots of information.

https://youtu.be/XTuXDyN7YMo

It was suggested a repost here.

As someone with quite irregular sleep patterns, my lack of sleep over the past few days got me thinking about how different approaches to sleep schedules might affect recovery.

Now the examine.com article about sleep really only talks about how disruptions in monophasic (ie sleeping 7-8 contiguous hours a night) patterns affect hormones, etc.

If one were to take a different approach to sleep (some of which are mentioned in this article for example), would recovery be affected? If one had the freedom to adopt such unorthodox sleep schedules, could they recover just as fast as someone with a normal "asleep 8 hours awake 16 hours" schedule?

Along the same lines, considering the 8 hour approach, is the important part getting 8 hours of sleep total in a given 24 hour period, or must it be CONTINUOUS sleep?

TL;DR: Could athletes recover just as well with unorthodox sleep patterns? Is the important part the number of hours of sleep or the number of hours of continuous sleep?

I've recently started working a paper route. Supposedly if all goes as planned, the shift goes like this, truck shows up at 1am, grab your papers, roll em and bag em in about 20mins, and get on out there and finish the route in about 2hrs or so. So I'd be finishing up my night at about 330am. But last night was first night and it went nothing like that. I got home at about 15 til 6. 😭. I slept less than 2hrs and went to work my other 3 day a week job 9am-430pm. And I felt like crap until I took a small 30-40min nap now I feel great.

So, now I'm curious about adopting a biphasic/polyphasic sleep cycle. I know having both these jobs seems impractical to most people but it fits around other important-to-me things I want to do in my spare time.

So does anyone have any advice or experiences about polyphasic sleep cycles? Is it a valid way to rest? Or is antiquated in our current day and age?

Thanks for taking the time read my dribble drabble, I'm not even sure if it's coherent lol.

Hi, the results and analysis is done: https://medium.com/@michalillich/polyphasic-biphasic-sleep-survey-results-ad894d4f5303

• feel free to correct my language errors
• comments/suggestions welcome
• the survey is still online - if you didn't fill it, you still have a chance (end of the article) Enjoy!

So I've always gotten tired after lunch my entire life, but I managed through some combination of perseverance and coffee. But about 5-6 weeks ago, I started consistently waking up after 4-5 hours of sleep, and have never been able to get back to sleep. This has been ruining my life.

I was thinking that instead of trying to fix my regular night-time schedule, it might be preferable for me to just sleep my 4-5 hours at night, and then take a nap in the afternoon after lunch.

I have enough schedule flexibility that this is feasible.

Anybody else do this?

I had an extremely intense and overwhelming semester last spring and I started sleeping on average 4 hours a night for a solid month. It was exhausting, unhealthy, and burned me out pretty quickly. Since this experience I have had difficulty getting back to a normal sleep pattern. I am considering adopting a biphasic sleep cycle consisting of 4 hours between the hours of 2am and 8am with a second 2 hours between 4pm and 10pm.

I was wondering if anyone has had a successful experience with adopting a biphasic or polyphasic sleep cycle and if they could share. I have done limited research on the subject and would like to couple my continued research and experiment with insight from experienced Redditors :-)

EDIT: The only thing that has consistently worked for me when I can't sleep is reading a book until I sleep. I started reading Sherlock Holmes complete collection so I could get through a short story every night and not have to re-read the same few pages and not progress with the story. However, this doesn't help with the duration of sleep.

Recently my friend started doing the Everyman sleep cycle (3 hours of core sleep and three 20 minute power naps throughout the day), he said starting was hard but a few weeks in he's alert enough to drive and acts normal. Unfortunately school restricts me from doing the Everyman or any of the other more complex polyphasic sleep schedules. However the biphasic sleep schedual is a possibility for me. I'd be sleeping from 2:50AM-6:50AM then coming home around 3:00PM for a 60-90 minute nap. So I just have a few questions for any of the long-term polyphasic sleep veterans out there. Has changing your sleeping schedual increased your dream recall? Can you lucid dream better? Has your alertness decreased? Has your creativity noticeably decreased (anything as minor structures in minecraft, to lacking ability to write music or draw)? Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience / insight into postitive / negatives of polyphasic / biphasic sleep patterns among those diagnosed with CFS.

I'm a student and I'm doing a research paper on the affects of biphasic, segmented and polyphasic sleep cycles and the circadian sleep cycles. I have a few questions, if you answer these you will need to be okay with me using them in my paper (I will not be making any profit off this paper-just need it to pass my class). They don't have to be all answered. *How would you like to be identified in the paper (name, username, etc): *What type of sleep cycle do you sleep in? *Why? *What is your experience with it? (Like, how long have you been sleeping in the type of cycle, how did you feel at first, how do you feel now) *Anything else? Thank you for all who took the time to read this and thanks to all who answer this.

Hi,

I'm curious: Could you post a comment about how long you already sleep polyphasic and what schedule you use?

I would be happy to read from you :-)

It's unnatural to sleep 8 hours at a time, and you remember less dreams

This is probably click bait from Mozilla, but this topic came up recently. Keep in mind, almost nothing about our current social situation is natural. Not monogamy, nuclear families, religion, or even sleeping 8 hours at a time. My theory is all those are from the plants, who enslaved us with agriculture. But whatever the cause, if you try to escape the social order, your internal dialogue will try to come up with arguments for why you should not. Don't fall for it!

https:// www. bbc. com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep?utm_source=pocket-newtab

You'll have to remove the spaces, reddit kept swapping out my picture for the one over there.

***

For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear?

It was around 23:00 on 13 April 1699, in a small village in the north of England. Nine-year-old Jane Rowth blinked her eyes open and squinted out into the moody evening shadows. She and her mother had just awoken from a short sleep.

Mrs Rowth got up and went over to the fireside of their modest home, where she began smoking a pipe. Just then, two men appeared by the window. They called out and instructed her to get ready to go with them.

As Jane later explained to a courtroom, her mother had evidently been expecting the visitors. She went with them freely – but first whispered to her daughter to "lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning". Perhaps Mrs Rowth had some nocturnal task to complete. Or maybe she was in trouble, and knew that leaving the house was a risk.

Either way, Jane's mother didn't get to keep her promise – she never returned home. That night, Mrs Rowth was brutally murdered, and her body was discovered in the following days. The crime was never solved.

Nearly 300 years later, in the early 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch walked through the arched entranceway to the Public Record Office in London – an imposing gothic building that housed the UK's National Archives from 1838 until 2003. There, among the endless rows of ancient vellum papers and manuscripts, he found Jane's testimony. And something about it struck him as odd.

Originally, Ekirch had been researching a bo

I've been trying out a biphasic Segmented sleep schedule following the advice shown on the website (in bed around 22:00, two 3.5h cores with a 1.5h wake period in-between and no naps during the day) and I'm having trouble waking up for my wake period.

For the first week I tried this schedule it worked great and I felt amazing during the day, but I had one night where I got no sleep (visiting family and sleeping in a terrible bed) and I've had a crazy amount of difficulty getting my sleep schedule back on track even though I'm typically a naturally segmented sleeper.

Do any of you have tips or tricks on staying motivated and on top of your polyphasic sleep schedules other than sheer force of will? As a note, I'd rather not put my alarm in a different room as my partner has been suffering a bit of insomnia lately and I'd like to avoid disturbing them too much (however, if this is the best method then I'll try it!)

Doing some research, I’ve realized that my body seems to naturally adhere to a biphasic pattern instead of a monophasic (ie: sleeping about 6 hours at night and a 1.5 hour nap midday). I feel the worst when I’m trying to stick to a monophasic pattern (I guess also because it’s what I’ve been told is normal). Has anyone experimented with structuring their days for a biphasic sleep pattern and had any success?

Just found out about this sub and wanted to share.

I’ve had online classes for most of 2019/2020 and about half of 2020-2021 and when I had online class for a while I would start staying up super late, sleep a few hours, attend class half-asleep and then go straight back to bed for another 4/5 hours.

In summer I just had a really fucking weird sleep schedule. I would stay up most of the night, sleep in two or even three segments and be just fine. Now school started again and in the last week I’ve slept about 3 or 4 hours at night, went to school (stayed awake about 8 hours) and went back to sleep from 3 to 7 pm. I’ve studied at night my whole life, always loved being up in the dark and I just think that’s it’s pretty cool that this sun exists and that humans have been sleeping in segments in the past

Just wondered what the sub's take on this might be - there is a prevailing theory (or possibly it's definitely proven, depending on your perspective) that in preindustrial times people slept in two phases, a first sleep and second sleep, punctuated by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night in between. During that time, people got up, visited, read, etc. Once industrialization came along, that sleep pattern seems to have been largely forced out to make way for our current "8 hour chunk" preference.

Is that part of why sleep training/baby sleep in general is so fraught now? We no longer have the biological cycling or the social allowance of chunks of sleep of adults? Were previous generations more OK with the 3/4 hour stretches at night because they were also doing 3/4 hour stretches as adults?

Taking it a step further - when we are struggling with baby's midnight social hour, are we actually retraining a biological norm?

I want to make it clear that I'm not advocating to NOT help your baby sleep longer and independently. This sub has been a hugely helpful resource. I'm just hoping for some fun discussion around this :)

Source: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/biphasic-sleep

Hello guys!

I have never practiced polyphasic or biphasic sleep, in fact, I only learned about these methods a few days ago and got interested.

Today I decided to try the biphasic model of a long nap, ie sleep from 02:00 am to 07:00 am, go to the stage at 8:00, and leave at 16:30. Then nap at 17:30h until 19h.

After the nap, the first problem arose: instead of napping for 90 minutes, I simply dozed off for 60 minutes for no reason. I woke up feeling a little dizzy and until now I am feeling a little groggy. I was wondering, how can I make my body understand that it should be 90min and not 60min? And if this happens again, should I put up with this dizziness until I go to sleep at 02:00 am?

The last question, I was researching about napping and I came across a site that says the worst time to nap is after 3 pm (on this site https://www.healthline.com/health/how-long-should-i-nap#best-time-for-a-nap in the topic "When is the best time to take a nap?" ), which contradicts the two-phase schedule that I have adopted on this site https://www.polyphasic.net/first-shift-workers/ which is the "Siesta with a core after work".

I was worried then, so I wanted to know, is this model good even with long naps after 5 pm?

Thanks.

I don't know what's the cause but since about half a year i always get fucking tired at around 4-5 pm and end up sleeping 1,5-3 hours then I'm awake until midnight and Sleep another 6 hours. I Don't know how healthy this is but i feel like I have way less time to get things done

Hi, everyone. This is going to be a bit of a ramble, but it all ties in at the end, so please bear with me.

I’m 24 years old, AFAB, and I have ADHD, ASD, and delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD). I was officially diagnosed with DSPD in February 2021, but I’ve had it since I was about 8 years old. It’s a circadian rhythm condition.

I fall asleep very late and wake up very late, and I have periods of interrupted sleep where I cannot fall back asleep. I also have brain damage, so my doctor isn’t exactly sure how treatable my sleep condition is due to that.

Treating DSPS is done by shifting your sleep schedule in one-hour increments. For example, sleep from 00:00 to 08:00, and then stay awake until 00:00, with no daytime naps until you’ve reached your scheduled goal.

Then, once you’re used to it, which takes roughly about two to three weeks, you subtract an hour. Now, your new sleep schedule is 23:00 to 07:00. Rinse and repeat until you’ve reached your goal. This technique is called phase shifting and I can’t keep up with it.

I can’t keep a schedule for more than two weeks to save my life. Even when I had a schedule forcibly imposed on me during my school years, I still slept poorly, averaging about 4-5 hours per night when waking at 06:00. My parents are not fully supportive and they think that I’m just not busy enough.

For example, I woke up at 05:00 this morning (9/21), after about four hours of sleep, and couldn’t fall back asleep for about two hours or so. I didn’t get out of bed after that until about 10:30.

Setting alarms don’t work because I always shut them off. I just can’t get out of bed at the scheduled time because I’m still tired. But apparently, 4 hours of sleep doesn’t leave me tired at all. Go figure.

I’d like to have a routine for healthy sleep, but it’s like trying to push two positive magnetic poles together. It doesn’t work, no matter how much I try. I’ve been trying this for seven months.

I’ve already tried sedatives with little success, white noise, melatonin, etc. I can be awake for 20 hours and not feel tired, but I know that this isn’t good for me. It’s as if I just don’t run on a 24-hour sleep cycle. I’m in a state of perpetual frustration and I’m sick of it.

I just want to be able to sleep when I need to, but I don’t know if it’s anxiety or brain rambling that’s keeping me awake. Is falling asleep an action that can be learned?

Has anyone ever tried this? It involves sleeping in two phases (e.g 4/4) rather than a full 8 hours.

I never sleep through the entire night, especially when Xyrem wears off, but I always have trouble waking up in the morning.

I’m thinking about trying it but wanted to see if any other narcos have tried it…

I'm currently 21 and have had insomnia since I was 13/14. I am completely unable to sleep without the assistance of medicine. I've wanted to try polyphasic sleep for a really long time now, more specifically segmented sleep. I am currently a freelance artist, so my sleep time is mostly flexible, but still has some constraints. My current typical sleep time is 4/5am till 12-1pm. I tend to be very drowsy in the day and more productive at night, however, I cannot fully commit to a fully nocturnal schedule either, because the people around me have a normal schedule (not to mention semi-regular medical appointments which are usually morning slots)

I am thinking of trying 8hrs of segmented sleep (4hr sleep, 3hr wakeup and 4hr sleep again) in the beginning, and hopefully if it goes well, slowly cut down to 6.5-7hr of total sleep time. My current idea is maybe sleep from 2am-6am, wake up at 6am, and sleep again from 9am-1pm, I would split my medicine into half dosage each time before I go to sleep. Based on my schedule I can sleep any time between 12am and 2pm, but generally prefer sleeping later because I usually hang out quite late with my friends on weekends, so I put sleep time at 2am to accommodate that. I've done something similar a few times this year when I had to wake up at 8am for my medical appointment, I took half of the medicine at 3am (one hour before my normal sleeping time), and after I came back from appointment at 12noon, I would take the next half of the medicine and slept again until 4 or 5pm.

Also would like advice on whether I can move the sleep times around when necessary. E.g. on a normal day, sleep 2-6am, wake up 6-9am, sleep again 9am-1pm, but on a day where I have special deadline or medical appointment, let's say for example, appointment at 8am, can I shift the timing to sleep 4-8am, wake up 8-11am, sleep again from 11am-3pm, but go back to the normal sleeping time the next day? If I miss sleep for 1 full day (for whatever reason), how should I arrange my sleep to catch up with the sleep debt?

Sleeping one time a day for many hours non stop sucks. Sleeping one time for 6 hours and then afternoon sleep 2-3 hours mid-day is other worldly. I did this in college and was the best thing. I accomplished more and felt refreshed and stress free.

So I just listened to the new years resolution episode and I heard mark talking about Polyphasic sleep and how he did the life hack version for a while and how it made him basically hallucinate and I can kind of relate. Granted, I don't do the version that he did where he was getting so little sleep that he couldn't tell dream from being awake and was hallucinating, but I have been doing a sleep schedule for about a year and a half now where I sleep for 3-4 hours and then I wake up and go about my day for about 7-9 hours and then go back to a 3-4 hour sleep and then repeat and while I haven't had the sleep paralysis or intense hallucinations, I can say that sometimes I get some heightened paranoia at night. I live in a rural area so at night there is practically no light in my house and I also work night shifts so sometimes when I get home from work at 12 am I end up being paranoid about the dark and think that I see shadows of people in the dark. I don't have any light switches close to my front door so I have to walk through my house either in the dark for a good 30 seconds or with my phone flashlight on and so often I'll see a shadow in the corner of my eyes and panic and then shine my flashlight at what I saw only to find that nothing was there. It's honestly a bit terrifying at times but I've been doing this sleep schedule for so long that I find it hard to change it now. Still though, glad I haven't had sleep paralysis. It's one thing for me to see a shadow of a person in the corner of my eyes and be jumpy due to a low sleep schedule, but it's another to be completely unable to move while seeing the shadow people while I'm in my bed. Though if I ever shine my flashlight on one of the shadows only to find that there was actually someone there (or my mind officially breaks from the lack of sleep and I start truly hallucinating someone being there) I swear I will shit my pants and run out of my house screaming like a little girl.

So I stumbled on segmented/biphasic sleep, which means you sleep your regular 8-9h but, as the name suggests, do so in segments of either two or more throughout the day. The theory behind it is that two increments of 4h of sleep each during the nighttime was the standard schedule for humans. 4h during the evening, a few hours of wake time during the night, another 4h of sleep till sunrise. Something something about industrialization causing us to adopt the one phase sleep we know well today.

My question is if anyone on here has any experience with this? I would love to hear about your stories, because I'd like to try this out. My neurologist gave me the green light to try it out and see if it helps me, but I wanted to see if anyone could provide some insight into this.

One thing worrying me is my medication and whether it could cause one of the sleep phases to be of poor quality, since it would be much earlier. Technically I should be fine, since sleep quality itself hasn't ever really been the issue for me, even on medication I've had in the past, just specifically Narcolepsy medication is something I'm not sure about just yet. I wouldn't try changing my sleep schedule before I know how my medication affects me, but I don't want to give myself false hopes for a sleep schedule I might not even be able to uphold in the first place.

Any feedback is welcome and I'm happy about anything you guys are willing to share. And thanks for reading my rambling!

Tl;dr: I want to try out biphasic sleep and want to hear experiences before actually attempting it. Please let me know what yours are if you have any, thank you!

As someone with quite irregular sleep patterns, my lack of sleep over the past few days got me thinking about how different approaches to sleep schedules might affect recovery.

Now the examine.com article about sleep really only talks about how disruptions in monophasic (ie sleeping 7-8 contiguous hours a night) patterns affect hormones, etc.

If one were to take a different approach to sleep (some of which are mentioned in this article for example), would recovery be affected? If one had the freedom to adopt such unorthodox sleep schedules, could they recover just as fast as someone with a normal "asleep 8 hours awake 16 hours" schedule?

Along the same lines, considering the 8 hour approach, is the important part getting 8 hours of sleep total in a given 24 hour period, or must it be CONTINUOUS sleep?

TL;DR: Could athletes recover just as well with unorthodox sleep patterns? Is the important part the number of hours of sleep or the number of hours of continuous sleep?