Buckminster Fuller’s 1943 sleep hack: two hours a day, split into half-hour naps
“Sleep is just a bad habit.” So declared Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion house, in a 1943 TIME article announcing his latest innovation: Dymaxion sleep.
Fuller’s theory was that humans have a primary store of energy that replenishes quickly and a secondary reserve that takes longer to restore. So instead of depleting both and crashing for eight hours, why not nap for 30 minutes as soon as your primary energy runs out — before you ever tap the reserves? He trained himself to recognize the first sign of fatigue (when his attention began to wander) and immediately take a half-hour nap. These intervals came about every six hours, meaning he slept just two hours total per day.
He kept this up for two years and reported “the most vigorous and alert condition I have ever enjoyed.” Life insurance doctors examined him and found him “sound as a nut.” The only reason he quit was that his business associates insisted on sleeping like normal people, and he couldn’t coordinate schedules with them. Working for the Foreign Economic Administration during World War II, he reluctantly returned to conventional sleep — but told TIME he wished the nation’s “key thinkers” could adopt his method. He was convinced it would shorten the war.
The article notes that sleep researchers of the era found some support for the idea: studies showed sleepers are quietest in the first two hours, then grow progressively more restless. A Colgate University study found people awakened after four hours were just as alert and resistant to fatigue as those who slept eight hours, though they did lose accuracy and concentration.
Buckminster Fuller did some amazing work in a some areas but in others it has to be said that he was what we'd call today a total crank. If you've ever read him and thought "this sounds like jargon-filled gibberish", then you would be correct.
Fuller's Dymaxion sleep schedule worked for him for a while but in the long run it can be really, really bad for you. Especially if you are adopting a polyphasic sleep schedule such as this in order to reduce the number of hours that you usually sleep. Or bodies and brains evolved for optimization over millions of years are not machines that we can simply "hack" with little tricks like this. (ditto for the vitamin and supplement industry)
Please do not try to adopt this sort of sleep schedule without careful research and consulting with your (hopefully actual, science-based) doctor. There are possibly serious health risks to doing this and I'm rather disappointed in my otherwise beloved Boing Boing for not providing any cautionary language or skeptical counterpoint to this story.
a bit too close to what has been characterized as trump's adderall fueled sleep cycle