What is biphasic sleep?
If you’re like 99.9% of the world, you sleep in one big block during the night. Perhaps surprisingly, then, this is not naturally how people sleep. If it were, we might expect – when looking at the body’s activity throughout a 24 hour cycle – to see a steady curve, with alertness and activity peaking in the middle of the day and respectively picking up and tailing off in the morning and evening. This, as you have probably already experienced, is not what happens. In the middle of the day we experience a dip in alertness, usually after lunch. This is because instead of being a simple curve, our bodies follow the “circadian rhythm”; a repeating pattern of waking and sleeping, alertness and drowsiness in a roughly 24 hour cycle. And that rhythm dips pronouncedly in the middle of the day. Why not, then, instead of fighting against our natural inclination to nap, embrace it and sleep twice a day instead? This is biphasic sleeping – the practice of breaking up your sleep into two stages to s
