How interesting. Just as the weekend approaches when I am to attempt polyphasic sleep, Steve Pavlina, I guess the world’s most well-known polyphasic sleeper, has decided to give up.
Like all others, his reasons aren’t due to disliking polyphasic sleep. He just finds certain aspects of it inconvenient. Significantly for me, he eventually tired (no pun intended) of all his extra time during which the rest of the world was asleep. And 20 hours works days weren’t fun, so he had a lot of time to kill.
So this is an interesting trend. It seems that everyone I’ve read about being a successful ultrashort sleeper end up giving up after around six months, all citing purely social issues. The question is: what changed? Is it possibly some sub-conscious reaction against long term polyphasic sleep? Perhaps the brain does need the extended rest to be able to sustain the creativity required to fill in so much time.