I've always wondered if the polyphasic sleep hackers have girlfriends or wives. It seems like you'd either have to be chaste, or else have a very odd relationship with your significant other. I can't imagine having sex, then taking a 20 minute nap, then getting right back to SEO strategy or whatever it is the polyphasic crowd needs all that extra time for.
The other thing is that I've never heard of a woman trying polyphasic sleep or even being mildly interested in trying it. It seems to be one of those things that only guys with blogs care about.
Steve Pavlina is married, and he describes the effect his sleep cycle had on his relationship to his wife. I can't remember if he discusses sex at all, but you may be interested in finding out for yourself:
Ahem. PureDoxyK, the one who posted about polyphasic sleep on a couple of sites (kuro5hin, everything2) a few years ago, who mostly started the whole craze and who still tries various sleep patterns out, is female: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/about-me/
And Steve Pavlina who tried out polyphasic sleep for quite some time is married.
I've read through Pavlina's polyphasic sleep blog entries and some of PureDoxyK's entries before, and IIRC neither of them went into detail about how it affected their sex lives.
Dude, I wrote a whole page about it, and put it on the main polyphasic page of my site with the link "Polyphasic Sleep and Sex"! What more do you want??!
Having done the polyphasic experience some years back, and having a long-term girlfriend, I can confirm that it does not negatively impact the important things in life.
In fact, because you have so many extra hours at your disposal, you can seem almost magical. You can work 12 hours a day and spend another 9-10 hours doing engaging things with other people in your life.
My time spent polyphasic was massively productive. The software and systems I developed during that time formed the foundation of my business. But then I acquired customers, resellers, contractors, and other business partnerships, which made incompatibility with the rest of the world more difficult to handle.
The other major downside is a distinct lack of flexibility. In a monophasic sleeping pattern, if you have a situation and need to work and/or be on phone calls for 24 hours straight, you can do it easily. In a polyphasic pattern, tiredness hits you like a brick wall if you put off a scheduled nap just an hour or two.
Still, if I was starting a new business from scratch, I would seriously consider going polyphasic again for a few months to build the initial foundation.
… and that's probably one great reason why monophasic sleep 'won' in an evolutionary sense. Robustness usually wins out over efficiency, and not being able to stay awake for a few hours to finish a hunt/avoid a predator/avoid freezing to death/etc. is a pretty big reduction in robustness.
That's an important point. The author says that sleeping "is intuitively an evolutionary disadvantage". That's false, the fact that many species do sleep shows that is is an advantage indeed. Otherwise, there would not be these species.
having done it for a year and a half, I heartily agree with that summary. On monophasic sleep I'm able to recover from soreness & illness overnight thanks to the extra sleep buffered in. On polyphasic sleep I'm both more efficient and more vulnerable and as you pointed out, less flexible.
Yes, hi, only myself and my best friend were the first ones that I know of since Bucky Fuller to do it and write anything about it, and we're both women.
After you get done going to the store and buying some Google-fu (you'll need a lot, it seems), you can also check out the post I wrote in January about polyphasic sleep and sex. Enjoy!
The other thing is that I've never heard of a woman trying polyphasic sleep or even being mildly interested in trying it. It seems to be one of those things that only guys with blogs care about.