when I was in college, there were some people on the internet who claimed that you could

train yourself to sleep as little as two hours per day. Keep in mind, this was back in the early
2000s when we all still believed random shit we read on the internet.

Here’s how the story went: There was a hyper-productive sleep

schedule that had been discovered by military scientists. They were
testing the limits of sleep deprivation on soldiers and made this
startling discovery. Supposedly, great historical figures like
Napoleon and Da Vinci and Tesla followed the same sleep
schedule and it’s why they were so productive and influential in
history.1 Supposedly, anybody (i.e., you and me) could achieve this
state of daily hyper-productivity. Supposedly, all we needed was
enough willpower to barrel through days of sleep deprivation and
“acclimate” to this new superhuman schedule. Supposedly, this was
all true and verified and somehow made sense.

Supposedly.

The scheme was called “The Uberman Sleep Schedule,” and here’s
how you did it:

 Sleep follows the 80/20 Rule—that is, 80% of your recovery

comes from 20% of the time you’re unconscious. Conversely,
80% of the time you’re asleep, you’re a lazy piece of shit.
 This uber-efficient portion of sleep is called REM sleep and
only lasts approximately 15-20 minutes at a time.2 That means
for every two hours that your body is asleep, really only the
last 20 minutes or so is “useful” sleep. Thus, when you sleep
eight hours during the night, only 80-100 of those minutes are
actually causing you to feel rested and restored. 3 People on
the internet decided this was inefficient and needed to be
fixed.
 What the military scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if
you’re severely sleep-deprived, your body will immediately fall
into REM sleep the second you pass out. It does this in order
to compensate for its lack of rest. People on the internet
decided this was incredibly efficient.
  The idea of the Uberman Sleep Schedule was that if you took
20-minute naps, every four hours, around the clock, for days
and weeks on end, you would “train” your brain to fall into
REM sleep instantly the moment you lay down. Then, once
your REM sleep was over, you would feel rested and restored
for the next 3-4 hours.
 As long as you continued to take 20-minute naps every four
hours, you could effectively stay awake forever.
Congratulations, you were now an Uberman. Here, have a
gold star.
 But there was a catch: supposedly it took 1-2 weeks of intense
sleep deprivation to properly “adjust” to the Uberman Sleep
Schedule. You had to stay up all night, every night, forcing
yourself to only sleep for 20 minutes at a time, six different
times per day. And if at any point you screwed up and
overslept your nap, all would be undone and you would have
to start over.
 PS: Caffeine is not allowed. And alcohol might as well be
suicide.
 Therefore, the Uberman Sleep Schedule became this kind of
decathlon of willpower among internet self-help people—an
ultimate test of one’s self-discipline with the ultimate pay-off:
an extra 20-30% of productive waking hours per day, every
day for the rest for your life. That’s like having an extra two
days each week, or an extra three and a half months per year.
That’s insane! Over the course of one’s life, that’s over a
decade of extra waking hours. Imagine everything you could
accomplish with an extra decade of life, all while everyone
else is asleep.

Words:-

Random

Productive

Willpower

Recovery

Effectively
deprivation

Screwed

Self help

Insane

Accomplish

Immediate

Compensate

Ultimate

overslept