I want to try different sleep patterns. "Polyphasic sle

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I am not a native user of English so the word combination
Polyphasic sleep stands out as overly academic to me.

I would not know what it refers to without looking in wikipedia.

They say

It one thing to just test it but a totally other to really know
what patterns that one would settle with and most likely
highly individual and depending on others that one deal
with daily.

A lot of Job or other places where one live
don't make it easy to suddenly take a long nap
in the middle of the day.

I am past 65 now but when I where around 25 I tested
to take naps in the middle of the day at my job and
boy that where not popular at all. Some hated me for it.

Now being a retired old man with none to care about
I can experiment to my hearts delight.

But still not easy to know what works for the body.
To be able to read the signals from the body.

And time consuming too. Yesterday I went too far.
I had taken a too long nap in the day and it where
almost impossible to go to sleep the coming night.

So more than 45 minutes seems to be a bit too long sometimes.

I should find logs from people who work in places where
they take turn watching over a Ship or sailing a small boat.

Or pilots or lorry drivers? or other such jobs that require that
one sleep not so regular intervals.

Do you guys have any experiences to share. What works best
for you? Longer than 45 minute naps?

I read recently that until the 16 or 17 hundreds, people followed the normal body pattern of sleeping several hours at night, waking for several hours during which they did more stuff, and then went back to sleep for several hours. I forget why people stopped following this normal bio pattern and switched to one approximately 8 to 9 hour sleep period. However, there are still places that practice nap times, mostly in warmer climates, as it is too hot in the middle of the day in those places, to safely get any work done.

Because of several health problems I now have a very irregular sleep wake cycle. It doesn't matter work wise, as I am no longer able to work. I rarely sleep more than 4 to 6 hours at a time, so I have to sleep again more often. I have no set schedule, but sleep when I really need to and eat when I am hungry. It is inconvenient to have such an unset pattern when I want to go out, though, and most of the world follows a set pattern. I am sometimes best able to go out when every place is closed, or everyone else is asleep, so naturally there is no point in going out then. Unfortunately, a modern 8-9 hours sleep at night pattern is not possible for me, so I do what I can when I can.

I read that humans are supposed to sleep one time in a day, our brains are not wired to sleep more than that a day (like 2 sets 4 hour sleep times in a day). For naps you should take between 30-90 minutes, anymore and that would through off your sleep cycle. If someone requests I can try to find the pdf that was talking about this, but I would rather not. Would take a while to find.

Didn't places in Europe have mid day siestas until not very long ago?