Polyphasic sleep, defined as multiple sleep phases within a 24-hour period, was popularized by the biohacker and quantified self movements around the late 1990s/early 2000s.

“several times during today's discussion we talked about polyphasic sleep um and the different types of polyphasic sleep that we covered are I wouldn't say conventional but they're um conventional is what are some of the more um esoteric or let's call them high performance Pol polyphasic uh strategies uh for sleep so we've spoken about polyphasic sleep in the natural way it occurs which is during infancy and sleeping like a baby means that you're sleeping in a highly polyphasic way but probably around about the late 1990s 2000s with the emergence of the biohacker movement and the Quantified self-movement there started to become a lot of chatter online about this notion of polyphasic sleep”