4-Stages Adaptation Model

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Revision as of 14:02, 23 November 2020 by Sekvanto (talk | contribs)

This is the most popular and up-to-date model of adaptation at present, which was developed by the members of the Polyphasic Sleep Discord Community.

Most popular polyphasic schedules are based on natural sleep patterns of human. It's, first of all, biphasic schedules, which were wide spread both before modern time and nowadays; Everyman, which uses the mechanism of power naps; Dual Core, which is based on Segmented sleep pattern, popular in the pre-industrial society; and schedules with even more cores, which are based on a similar mechanism as Segmented sleep. Monophasic sleep became popular relatively recently, after the industrial revolution.

New sleep schedule requires an adaptation, which includes repartitioning of vital sleep stages and teaching the brain to use another type of sleep. By the community observations, the process usually is mostly similar for different individuals, which allows us to construct a stage-like model for this. The model contains 4 stages, which gradually transit one into another. The whole process takes roughly 4-8 weeks in average, though in some cases this might be much longer.

Stage 1

Staying awake is easy during this stage when sleep deprivation still hasn't kicked in. Falling asleep usually is difficult for naps and easy for cores, assuming the person isn't insomniac and the scheduled core doesn't start earlier than the habitual sleep before. Repartitioning hasn't started yet, so the sleep quality is the same and in monophasic sleep, presumably with 90-minute uncompressed cycles. This stage is also beneficial for adjusting to new sleep habits.

The duration of Stage 1 is shorter for the schedules with a low total sleep time or for individuals with preexisting sleep debt. This doesn't shorten the whole adaptation process though, usually just making Stage 3 and 4 longer. Insomniacs might find skipping this stage helpful since it's much easier to fall asleep on the later stages, but generally this isn't recommended. The benefit of falling asleep faster doesn't compensate the higher risk of oversleeping and longer period of having intense sleep deprivation symptoms.