I haven’t slept a normal night in over four years. Somehow, I feel better than I used to.
When I started Rootly , my sleep broke. US customers needed me in the morning. Features needed shipping at night. My brain refused to stop planning in between. I wasn’t grinding on purpose. I was building a company across time zones, and my body just… adjusted.
At some point I noticed I wasn’t sleeping badly. I was sleeping differently.
The pattern that emerged
It started without a name. I’d crash around 1 AM, wake up on my own around 5 or 6, work through the morning, then hit a wall after lunch. Instead of fighting it with coffee, I started giving in. A two-to-three-hour nap in the early afternoon. I’d wake up sharp and have a full second wind that carried me past midnight.
None of this was planned. It kept happening on its own.
I eventually looked it up. There’s a name for it: biphasic sleep. A shorter core sleep at night plus a dedicated nap during the day. There is historical evidence that segmented sleep existed in some pre-industrial contexts, though not in a neat “everyone used to sleep this way” sense. The point that stuck with me was simpler: human sleep seems more flexible than the eight-hour-block story suggests.
Two streaks of eight hours
My typical day now:
- 1:00 AM – 5:30 AM · Core sleep (~4.5 hours)
- 5:30 AM – 1:30 PM · First work streak (8 hours)
- 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM · Nap (~2–3 hours)
- 3:30 PM – 11:30 PM · Second work streak (8 hours)
- 11:30 PM – 1:00 AM · Wind down, reading, light tasks
That’s ~7 to 7.5 hours of sleep, which still lands in the range mainstream adult sleep guidance recommends. And ~16 working hours. Two full work days in one calendar day, each starting fresh.
That second morning is the whole trick. Most people fight through the 3 PM slump with another coffee. I sleep through it. By 3:30 PM I’m starting over, rested.
Why it works (for me)
I want to be careful here. I’m not prescribing this. There’s a real difference between “I sleep 7 hours and feel great” and “I sleep 7 hours and I’m slowly building a deficit I can’t feel.”
A few things make me think this rhythm actually fits my body, rather than just masking exhaustion:
I wake up without alarms. From the core sleep and from the nap. If I needed to force myself awake, I’d worry.
The afternoon crash is the system working. Around 1 PM, my energy tanks. Hard. That used to be a problem. Now it’s just the cue to nap. The strange part: I sleep better during the afternoon nap than at night. I come out of those 2 to 3 hours feeling more rested than after my core sleep. I have no good explanation for this. It’s been consistent for years.
That said, long daytime naps aren’t a good sign for everyone. They can point to sleep debt or an underlying sleep issue . Research on napping is mixed, but nap timing and duration seem to matter a lot for whether you wake up restored or groggy (review , meta-analysis ).
Four years and counting. That doesn’t prove anything on its own. People can adapt subjectively to restricted sleep while still showing objective deficits (Van Dongen et al. ). All I can honestly say is I haven’t noticed the warning signs: no degraded focus, I don’t get sick more often, my mood is stable. I treat that as something to keep watching, not as proof.
Weekends self-correct. If my body needs more, I sleep more. The nap stretches. Or I wake up at 7 instead of 5:30. I don’t force the schedule on days where it doesn’t fit. The body gets a vote.
I don’t think any of this would have happened with a 9-to-5 job. The startup created the pressure that broke my monophasic sleep. What surprised me is that the schedule that came out of that pressure works better than what I had before.
The tradeoff I don’t talk about enough
This schedule is terrible for a social life.
Weekday dinners don’t work. 7 PM is the middle of my second work streak. Drinks after work? My “after work” is 11:30 PM. Friends figure this out fast, and over time the invites get less frequent.
I chose this. I’m not sure it’s the right choice. Building Rootly is the most important thing in my professional life right now, and I’m reluctant to give up the rhythm. But there’s a cost. Relationships need presence. Presence needs overlapping schedules.
Maybe in a few years I’ll wish I’d protected my evenings the way I learned to protect my naps. I don’t know yet.
Then agentic AI almost broke it
For four years, the system just worked. Then I started using AI coding agents and the cycle cracked.
I wrote about this in a previous post. Agentic coding triggers dopamine loops that make it hard to stop. Biphasic sleep turns out to be especially vulnerable. The whole system depends on honoring signals: crashing at 1 AM, napping at 1:30 PM. When your brain is lit up watching an agent refactor a module at 1 AM, you don’t feel the crash. You push through. When you’re in the middle of a promising prompt chain at 1:30 PM, the nap gets skipped.
It was subtle. The core sleep drifted later. The nap got shorter, then disappeared. Suddenly I was on 4 hours with no second sleep. I felt fine in the moment (dopamine does that), but after a few weeks: worse judgment, shorter patience, a foggy feeling I hadn’t had in years.
The fix was simple. I had to treat the schedule as non-negotiable again. The agent can wait. The prompt will still be there after the nap. Obvious in theory. Harder in practice when you’re deep in a flow state powered by variable reinforcement.
I’m mostly back on track. But four years of a working rhythm can unravel in weeks if you stop protecting it.
What I’d tell someone considering it
Don’t force it. Every “polyphasic sleep hack” article from the 2010s telling you to set seven alarms and power through the adaptation period is nonsense. If your body doesn’t naturally gravitate toward split sleep, you’re just sleep-depriving yourself with extra steps.
And if you’re routinely needing long daytime naps, don’t romanticize it. It might be a good rhythm for you. It might also be sleep debt, fragmented nighttime sleep, or something worth getting checked.
If you’re already waking up early, already napping in the afternoon, already noticing your sleep splitting on its own, maybe stop fighting it. Give the nap a real slot on your calendar. Protect it. See what happens.
The safe version: make room for the nap, check whether it improves your energy without wrecking your night sleep, and back off if it doesn’t.
I found an extra morning hiding in my afternoon. Four years later, I’m still not going back.