In April 2018, BuzzFeed video producer Ryan Bergara tried to live on a polyphasic "Everyman" schedule: one core sleep of about four and a half hours each night plus two 20-minute naps, or just over five hours of sleep a day. He lasted a week. By the fourth day he described himself as "brain dead", by the end he was getting sick and a gym injury had stopped healing, and he concluded that the extra waking hours were not worth it. That matches what sleep science says: most adults need at least seven hours, and there is no good evidence that chopping sleep into naps lets you get by on much less.
Here is how the experiment went, what polyphasic sleep actually is, and what researchers know about sleeping less.
The experiment: one week on the Everyman schedule
Bergara, best known for the web series BuzzFeed Unsolved, wanted to know whether he could reclaim hours from his night without paying for it during the day. Before he started, he spoke to Jackson Nexhip, author of Polyphasic Sleep and Productivity, who described his own routine: "I'll sleep for four and a half hours and then I'll have two twenty minute naps throughout the day."
He also consulted Dr. Alon Avidan, a neurologist and sleep specialist at UCLA, who told him that adults generally need a minimum of seven hours a night. Avidan warned him about the short-term effects of cutting sleep: slower reactions, trouble with memory and thinking, reduced creativity and a shorter temper. Bergara went ahead anyway and filmed the week for BuzzFeed's YouTube channel.
Day by day: what happened
The first two days were the hardest. Bergara wrote that by day two he struggled to find the energy to exercise or even get through ordinary tasks. Timing the naps around work also proved awkward, since a 20-minute nap only helps if you can actually lie down and fall asleep when it is scheduled.
On day four he told the camera that he was too foggy to do anything. By day five he said he felt somewhat better, but the footage also shows him collapsing into uncontrollable laughter over a mild story about his boss making hummus at home. Giddy, out-of-proportion reactions like that are a familiar sign of sleep deprivation, not of a body that has adapted.
On day seven he gave up and slept. He was coming down with something, and a leg injury from the gym was not recovering. In his write-up he said he now understood "how crucial the proper amount of sleep is for functionality", that he had felt no boost in focus or creativity, and that the extra time awake had not been worth it. He ended up agreeing with Avidan that very few people can function on a polyphasic schedule.
What polyphasic sleep is, and the main schedules
Most adults today sleep in one block at night, which is called monophasic sleep. Biphasic sleep splits the day into two sleeps, typically a longer night plus an afternoon nap. Polyphasic sleep goes further and spreads sleep across several periods, usually with the aim of cutting total sleep time. The best-known schedules, popularised by online communities, are:
- Everyman: a core night sleep plus several short naps. The classic version is three hours of core sleep and three 20-minute naps, about four hours in total; Bergara used a gentler variant of roughly five hours.
- Uberman: no core sleep at all, just short naps spaced evenly around the clock. Versions use six or eight naps of 20 to 30 minutes, for roughly two to three hours a day.
- Dymaxion: four 30-minute naps, one every six hours, for two hours a day. It is linked to the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who reportedly kept it up for two years before returning to normal sleep because his colleagues did not share his hours.
Older versions of this story claimed that the Uberman would add an extra twenty years of waking time over a lifetime. The arithmetic is more modest. Swapping eight hours of sleep for two saves six hours a day, which over 50 adult years adds up to roughly 12 years of extra waking time, and that assumes you could function on it, which the evidence suggests you cannot.
What the science says about sleeping less
There is no scientific evidence that the polyphasic schedules promoted online are effective or beneficial for healthy people. The research that does exist comes from special situations where long, unbroken sleep is impossible. The Italian sleep researcher Claudio Stampi studied solo sailors in long-distance races and found that well-timed short naps helped them keep performing during unavoidable sleep loss. Stampi himself presented this as a survival strategy for extreme conditions, not a lifestyle. NASA-funded work led by David Dinges similarly found that longer naps worked better than very short ones, and that naps taken at night could leave people groggy for up to an hour afterwards.
Public health guidance is clear. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends at least seven hours of sleep a day for adults aged 18 to 60. Getting enough sleep is linked to fewer infections, better mood and stress control, healthier weight and metabolism, and lower risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. It also matters for safety: tired drivers are more likely to crash.
A small number of people seem to need less sleep than average without ill effects, and studies of a few families have suggested rare genetic variants may be involved. They are the exception. For almost everyone else, feeling fine on five hours usually means you have stopped noticing how impaired you are, not that you have adapted.
Biphasic sleep, siestas and the "first sleep"
The original version of this story claimed that people in Latin America sleep five to six hours at night and then take a siesta. That is a generalisation. The afternoon siesta is traditional in many warm countries around the Mediterranean, in parts of Asia and in parts of Latin America, but habits vary widely between countries, cities and jobs, and many people in those regions never nap. Even in Spain, the country most associated with the siesta, fewer people take a daily nap than in the past, largely because of modern working hours.
There is a real basis for biphasic sleep, though. Many people feel a dip in alertness in the early afternoon, and a short nap can help. The historian A. Roger Ekirch has argued that in pre-industrial Europe it was common to sleep in two parts, a "first sleep" and a "second sleep" with a quiet waking period in between, a pattern that faded with artificial lighting. In a well-known 1992 experiment, the psychiatrist Thomas Wehr kept seven men in 14 hours of darkness a day for a month; after catching up on lost sleep, they settled into two blocks of about four hours with two to three wakeful hours in between. Notice, though, that these patterns redistribute a full night's sleep; they do not shrink it.
Practical takeaways if you want more time in your day
- Protect seven hours or more. Treat sleep as the foundation for productivity, not the budget you cut from.
- Keep a regular schedule. Going to bed and getting up at the same times each day, even at weekends, helps your body clock.
- Use naps wisely. A short early-afternoon nap of 10 to 30 minutes can refresh you; long or late naps can disturb the following night.
- Set up the room. Keep the bedroom cool, quiet and dark, and put screens away at least half an hour before bed.
- Watch caffeine, alcohol and heavy meals in the evening, and exercise regularly.
- Talk to a doctor if you regularly struggle to sleep, wake unrefreshed or feel sleepy during the day despite enough time in bed. Sleep disorders are common and treatable.
Bergara's week is a useful, honest small experiment. The hours he gained were real, but so were the costs, and he gave the time back as soon as he could. You can watch the full video below.
Sources: BuzzFeedBlue on YouTube: Ryan Bergara's polyphasic sleep experiment; Wikipedia: Polyphasic sleep; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: About sleep.
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