In my mind, I’m inventing the Lady Macbeth Alarm…

From MrPopTart (best handle ever award!) over at the Google Polyphasic Group:

Want to know the easy way to go polyphasic? Have a reason to. Look at
all of the people who had done it before there were blogs. Fuller, Da
Vinci, Edison. These people did more work and were more fanatical
about things when they were awake than most other people in history.
They coined phrases like "Sleep is just a bad habit" because they
needed to be awake more to complete their projects.

If you’re doing polyphasic on a whim or with nothing to do in those
extra 6 hours, you’ll never have a reason to get up, and so you
probably wont.

…Very astute; been said before of course, but that’s very well-put, and it’s a powerful point so it’s worth saying every once in a while.  As I showed  (however accidentally) it’s even possible for someone who knows absolutely nothing about polyphasic sleep to adapt to Uberman successfully, given a compelling enough reason.

That isn’t to say that people without some crazy life-circumstance forcing them into it can’t be polyphasic.  If you don’t have a compelling reason, how about getting one?  Is there something you value highly that you can devote yourself to for that extra time?  Are you burning to set up an inventing shop, start painting, write that novel, or something else?  You may not be able to work on it all the time while you’re adjusting (especially if it’s quiet or delicate work), but you can use it as your reason to get up, and do something with it every time you wake up, and keep yourself motivated.

In the book, which I’ve spent a good deal of time on this weekend, I compared adjusting one’s sleep-schedule to becoming vegan, or undertaking an athletic regime.  Those are both things that people do all the time, when something compels them to.  But simply deciding to up and adopt a vegan diet, or train for marathons, if you didn’t love something or need something that drove you to do it, would be an almost impossible feat.

Of the people I know who fail at adapting to a polyphasic schedule, the vast majority had nothing to push themselves with — no need, no burning desire, no solemn promise you put a few drops of blood on before burning it in front of your grandma’s urn.  And of the people I know who succeeded, very few didn’t have some compulsion to, whether self-generated or otherwise.  (Well, all desires and compulsions are self-generated to some extent.  You have to let the desire in, and let it drive you.)

Desire, craziness, compulsion, obsession, ambition, need…

…Are your friends!