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Outside Magazine, April 2005

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Miles to Go Before I Sleep (cont.)

IF YOU EVER NEEDED proof of what sleeplessness can do to a sailor, look no further than the first slide Stampi likes to show clients. In the picture, a blood-red twin-masted racing boat is stranded on its side in the surfline of a remote southwest Australia beach. The boat belonged to exhausted French soloist Jean Luc Van Den Heede, who in a 1994 round-the-world race put his head down for a five-minute nap and woke up when he felt the keel grind ashore. (He refloated the boat and got back in the race.)

Stampi's point is that not only do you have to nap; you have to nap wisely—meaning you have to

Ellen MacArthur sleeps between 4.5 and 5.5 hours in every 24—the minimum amount, Stampi believes, on which humans can get by.

tailor nap times and lengths to your body's specific needs. To help his clients, Stampi had to develop answers to an all-important question: When, how often, and how long should polyphasic sleepers nap for maximum sleep efficiency?

One of the most striking clues from Stampi's data was that sailors hardly ever slept between 6 and 8 p.m. Stampi theorized that the evening "forbidden zone," as he called it, was a vestige of the long-ago era when humans—who were more vulnerable at night—had to spend the early-evening hours wide awake, looking for or preparing a safe place to sleep. It generally made no sense, Stampi concluded, to try to snooze during these hours, because you would be fighting the natural human biorhythm.

At the same time, Stampi also noted sleep peaks that occurred midafternoon and in the wee hours of the morning. This made scientific sense: Humans tend to be sleepiest (or feel "sleep pressure," as Stampi likes to say) then. Stampi thinks the midafternoon sleep bump is also a vestige of early human life, since the heat of the African sun made that a better time to sleep than hunt.

His research also showed that afternoon siestas were chock-full of slow-wave sleep, the type that appears to be most important for recharging the body. To Stampi it seemed obvious that sleep-deprived sailors should try to get at least some of their sleep quota then. The key to napping efficiently, Stampi says, is to get in phase and ride these waves of sleepiness and alertness, so no time is wasted merely trying to get to sleep. "My job is to find other hours of the day for each person where sleep is as efficient," he says, "and to try to find a range of sleeping gears, or nap lengths."

That means getting in touch with your inner sandman. All the monitoring Stampi has done over the years has supported the anecdotal notion that there are two types of people: morning people, or "larks," and evening people, or "owls." The distinction is important for anyone trying to adapt to sleep deprivation. Larks, Stampi discovered, are good at taking short naps but are not as efficient late at night, and prefer a more regular routine. Owls, on the other hand, appear to be excellent at coping with highly irregular schedules, but prefer longer naps. Mike Golding is an owl, and during the 1998 Around Alone, only 23 percent of his sleep time was devoted to naps of less than an hour. Ellen MacArthur, in contrast, is more of a lark and tends to spend 60 percent of her sleep time in naps shorter than an hour. Despite the different styles, both Golding and MacArthur sleep about the same amount while racing, between 4.5 and 5.5 hours on average in every 24—the minimum amount, Stampi believes, on which humans can get by.

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