Real Life Game Skill (Warlock): The Lich Pact — How I Slept 3.5 Hours a Day for 2 Years and What It Cost Me

In 2011, my CTO Stephen Johnson had been stuck on a database architecture problem all day. The rest of us went to bed. Stephen didn’t.

He stayed up all night while we slept. By 5 AM, when I woke up, he’d solved it.

“I figured it out,” he said, like it was nothing.

This wasn’t unusual. Four of us shared that startup apartment, and Stephen was on a polyphasic sleep schedule: napping in short bursts throughout the day, awake when the rest of the world was unconscious. In those quiet hours, he kept solving one product hurdle after another for the company.

I wanted that power. What I didn’t know was that getting it would cost me something I couldn’t see on my stat sheet.

Table of Contents

• About Yu-kai Chou
• The Skill: Lich Pact (Warlock Class, Tier 3)
• Zombie Week: The Ritual
• My Two Lives as a Lich
• The Passive Skills (How Long Do They Last?)
• The HP Cost: What the Science Says
• The Strategic Calculation: When to Activate the Lich Pact
• The Practical Guide (If You’re Going to Try It)
• The Lich’s Honest Confession
• Related Reading
• FAQ

Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.

Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

TEDxLausanne · Gamification to Improve Our World17 min

The Skill: Lich Pact (Warlock Class, Tier 3)

In 10,000 Hours of Play, I introduce the concept of Real Life Game Skills: abilities you can actually develop in real life, categorized by RPG class archetypes. Just like in games, some skills are common (most people can learn public speaking or basic coding), and some are rare, high-risk abilities that most people will never unlock because the cost of entry is too steep.

The Lich Pact is one of those rare skills. It sits in the Warlock class.

In games, a Warlock is the class that trades Hit Points for power. You sacrifice something precious (health, life force, years off your clock) in exchange for abilities other classes can’t access.

A Lich takes this to the extreme. In D&D and fantasy games, a Lich is a wizard who voluntarily kills themselves through a dark ritual, binding their soul to a phylactery. They come back as undead: skeletal, terrifying, free from sleep or food. They sacrifice their living body for something most humans can’t have: unlimited time.

That’s polyphasic sleep framed through the 10,000 Hours of Play lens.

You voluntarily enter a state that feels like death (they call the first week “Zombie Week” for a reason). You sacrifice HP. In the harshest lab protocol, the one participant who lasted long enough to measure showed growth hormone crashing. Beyond that, the long-term cost of a real-world Everyman schedule is still under-studied. That uncertainty is the real danger.

But if you survive the ritual, you gain 4 – 5 extra waking hours every single day. That’s 1,500+ extra hours per year (roughly three-quarters of an entire work year), extracted from the void of sleep.

The question isn’t whether you’ll gain power from the Lich Pact. It’s whether you can survive the ritual to claim it — and whether the HP you burn is worth what you get.

Zombie Week: The Ritual

The Max Planck Institute in Munich, one of the most prestigious research institutions on Earth, tried to study this. They recruited 10 healthy young volunteers to attempt the Uberman schedule: six 20-minute naps per day, no other sleep. Total: 2 hours in 24.

Nine out of ten dropped out within the first month.

The researchers called it a “devastating” impact on participants’ lives. And these were highly motivated volunteers who came to the lab specifically because they wanted to try polyphasic sleep.

That first week is the ritual. Your body doesn’t know you’re doing this on purpose. It thinks you’re being tortured.

Hallucinations hit. Thinking turns to sludge. You walk into walls. Your mood craters. Every cell in your body screams at you to just go to bed like a normal person.

Many of my friends tried it. Every single one failed during Zombie Week. The only person besides me who made it through was Stephen.

90% failure rate in the lab. Every single one of my friends who tried it failed — except Stephen and me. This is not a productivity hack you casually try on a Tuesday. This is a pact.

My Two Lives as a Lich

The First Pact (2011)

I started with the Uberman schedule, same as Stephen. Six naps a day, 20 minutes each. I survived Zombie Week.

For two months, it was extraordinary. I had so many extra hours that I didn’t know what to do with them all. I played competitive games. Watched entire TV series. Exercised. Worked. All in the same “day.” Because the day never ended.

But Uberman has a brutal constraint: you must nap every 4 hours, no exceptions. Miss a nap window and your entire system crashes. I had to schedule every meeting and movie around my 4-hour nap windows. I often slept in my car between commitments. My entire life revolved around the schedule.

So I evolved the pact. I shifted to the Everyman schedule: a 3-hour core sleep at night plus two 30-minute naps during the day. Total: about 4 hours of sleep per 24.

This was sustainable. The 3-hour core gave me enough deep sleep to recover physically. The naps kept me sharp throughout the day. I did this for a full year. Not in a lab. Not for a study. I was building a startup and putting in more productive hours than anyone around me.

I stopped only because I got food poisoning. My friends got it too, so it wasn’t the sleep. But the illness broke my rhythm, and I decided not to re-enter the pact.

Shortly after stopping the pact, I created the Octalysis Framework in 2012. The pact did not build the framework, but it gave me the runway of extra hours to keep my startup alive long enough to get there. Within a few years after that, I wrote Actionable Gamification, started lecturing at Google and Stanford, and built my authority in gamification from scratch.

The Second Pact (2017)

My wife was pregnant with twins. Symphony and Harmony were on the way.

I knew what was coming: two newborns at once. So I re-entered the pact before they arrived, to prepare. If my sleep was about to be destroyed anyway, I’d destroy it on my own terms first.

This time, something interesting happened. My body remembered the first pact. I adapted faster. And I discovered I only needed one 30-minute nap instead of two. Total: 3.5 hours of sleep per day.

I did this for another full year. During that time, I continued speaking at top universities around the world, grew my consulting business, and managed the chaos of twin infants without losing my mind.

One of the best perks: jet lag immunity. When you’re on polyphasic sleep, you’re already decoupled from the solar cycle. I’d fly from California to Tokyo to London, and as long as I got my 3-hour block and one nap somewhere, I was fully functional. No adjustment period. No lost days. Other speakers would arrive wrecked; I’d arrive ready.

The Passive Skills (How Long Do They Last?)

Here’s what nobody tells you about the Lich Pact: even after you break it, some abilities linger.

Instant Nap. I can fall asleep in under 2 minutes, anywhere, anytime. I set an alarm for 20 minutes, have vivid dreams, and wake up at minute 18, before the alarm. My brain learned to compress the 60 – 90 minute path to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep into a fraction of the time.

Sleep researchers have a name for this: Sleep Onset REM Periods (SOREMPs). Normally this only happens in narcoleptics and severely sleep-deprived people. I trained my brain to do it on command. Years later, the skill was still there, though I can feel it slowly fading over time.

Jet Lag Resilience. Even on a normal sleep schedule, timezone changes barely register. My circadian system learned to be flexible during the pact, and some of that flexibility persisted.

These buffs didn’t cost me anything extra. They lingered for years after I stopped. But I’ll be honest: they’re slowly fading. The instant nap still works, but not as reliably as it did five years ago. The Lich Pact gives you lasting buffs, not permanent ones.

The HP Cost: What the Science Says

Here’s where I have to be honest. The Lich Pact has a price, and science is starting to measure it.

Growth Hormone: Crushed in the harshest protocol. In the 2024 Max Planck polyphasic study, the one participant who lasted long enough for endocrine measurement showed growth hormone release dropping by more than 95%. That does not prove the exact same magnitude for every real-world Everyman experiment, but it is the clearest warning light in the literature.

During my two years on the pact, my growth hormone was almost certainly suppressed. Did it cause lasting damage? I don’t know. I was in my late 20s and early 30s. Young enough that my body had reserves to absorb the hit.

Cardiovascular and Long-Term Risk: Still murky. A 2021 National Sleep Foundation consensus review screened 40,672 potentially relevant papers and found no evidence supporting benefits from polyphasic schedules, while linking them to a range of adverse physical-health, mental-health, safety, and performance outcomes.

Longer daytime naps in cohort research also tend to correlate with worse outcomes, but that literature is mostly measuring habitual nappers on top of normal sleep, not someone deliberately compressing all sleep into an Everyman-style protocol. That distinction matters.

The important nuance: most of these studies measured people who nap on top of normal sleep. My naps weren’t extra. They were the only sleep I got. That’s a fundamentally different metabolic equation.

Cognitive Function: Hard to call. The literature here is too thin to settle the question cleanly. What it does suggest is that the simplistic story, “you instantly become useless,” is not the whole picture. The danger is that you are still operating under a brutal biological constraint while trying to judge your own performance in real time.

My own evidence is messy but personal: after the pact, I created the Octalysis Framework, wrote books, lectured at top universities, built a consulting business, and kept doing high-level design work with global organizations. Whatever the cognitive cost was, it did not stop me from producing meaningful work.

Was I Nerfed? This is the honest answer: I don’t know. Was I nerfed and still accomplished all that? Or did I accomplish all that because I wasn’t nerfed? I can never run the counterfactual. That’s the nature of the pact. You pay in a currency you can’t see on your stat sheet.

The Strategic Calculation: When to Activate the Lich Pact

I don’t recommend doing polyphasic sleep for 40 years. The HP drain is real, even if we can’t fully quantify it yet.

But here’s where the 10,000 Hours of Play framework comes in. Every human has a finite pool of Hit Points. You’re spending them whether you know it or not: stress, bad food, sedentary living, emotional damage, environmental toxins. Most people drain their HP passively, on things that generate zero experience points (XP).

The Lich Pact is a deliberate HP expenditure at a moment of maximum use.

Think of it like a raid boss fight. Your guild is at the final boss. The boss is at 10% health. Do you pop every cooldown, burn every consumable, sacrifice your HP for one massive burst of damage? Yes. Because winning the raid is worth more than the resources you spend.

That’s what polyphasic sleep is for. Not a lifestyle. A sprint tool.

Good times to activate the Lich Pact:

• You’re finishing law school or med school and need 3 extra months of study time
• Your startup has 6 months of runway and you need to ship the product
• You’re writing a book on a tight deadline
• You just had twins and your sleep is going to be destroyed anyway

Bad times to activate the Lich Pact:

• You’re “curious” and want to try it for fun
• You’re already healthy and productive on normal sleep
• You have no specific high-stakes goal that justifies the HP cost
• You’re over 40 (recovery capacity decreases with age)

The Practical Guide (If You’re Going to Try It)

I’m not your doctor. This is what worked for me.

Consider starting Uberman, then falling back to Everyman. This is counterintuitive. Uberman has a brutal dropout profile. Why start with the hardest version? Because if you survive it, the adaptation is deeper. Your brain gets forced through the most extreme sleep compression and learns to drop into REM almost instantly. When you “downgrade” to Everyman after a month or two, it feels effortless by comparison. It’s like training at altitude and then competing at sea level. That’s what I did both times, and it’s why Everyman felt so sustainable, and why the second time around, I only needed one nap instead of two. The harder ritual produces a stronger adaptation. But if you do not trust your willpower to survive Uberman’s Zombie Week, starting Everyman directly still works. You’ll get most of the time benefit with far less suffering.

Prepare for Zombie Week. Clear your calendar. Tell people what you’re doing. Don’t drive. Don’t make important decisions. The first 5 – 7 days will be the worst week of your life. This is the ritual. If you survive it, you’re through.

Protect your core sleep. The 3-hour block is sacred. Miss a nap and you’ll feel it. Miss the core and you’ll crash. Set alarms. Tell your roommates. Build your life around the schedule, not the other way around.

Have an exit plan. If you feel actually sick (not just tired — sick), stop. If your work quality drops below baseline after a couple of weeks and does not recover, stop. The pact is not worth it if you’re producing worse work with more hours.

The lingering skills are real. Even if you only do the pact for a few months, you’ll likely keep the instant-nap ability for years. It fades slowly over time, but it’s a meaningful buff that outlasts the pact itself, especially valuable for frequent travelers and anyone who needs to recover quickly from bad nights.

The Lich’s Honest Confession

I activated the Lich Pact twice. Both times, it was during the most critical launch windows of my career. Both times, I built things during the pact that are still generating returns over a decade later.

Was it worth the HP? For me, yes. The Octalysis Framework became the foundation of my career. If polyphasic sleep cost me some hidden HP, the trade still ended up net-positive for my life.

But I got lucky. I’m in the small minority who made it through the ritual. I had a specific, high-use reason for the extra time. And I stopped before the pact became my identity.

The Lich Pact is real. It works. It costs more than most people are willing to pay, in a currency most people can’t afford to spend.

Choose wisely.

The Lich Pact is a Tier 3 Warlock Skill from the Real Life Game Skill system described in 10,000 Hours of Play. For a Rogue-class counterpart that works by rewriting who you believe you are, see Masquerade: Identity Roleplaying and the Power of Becoming. For the broader book-length system, start with Yu-kai’s books.

Related Reading

• Leveling Up Your Productivity, if you want more output without making a biological blood pact.
• Life as RPG, for the bigger philosophy of turning life into a deliberate game instead of a random grind.
• Self-Gamification Paradox, if the real bottleneck is motivation rather than available hours.
• The Startup Revenue Equation, if the raid boss you are fighting is startup runway, not sleep.

FAQ

What is polyphasic sleep and does it actually work?

Polyphasic sleep means splitting sleep into multiple blocks across the day instead of taking one long nighttime stretch. It can work in the narrow sense that some people can buy more waking hours for a while, but the dropout rate is brutal and the cost is real. I would treat it as a high-risk strategic tool, not a clever lifestyle hack.

What are the health risks of polyphasic sleep?

The clearest warning in the research is major hormonal disruption in the most extreme lab protocol, and the broader review literature does not show a clean health upside. The real problem is not that science has proven every specific disaster. It is that the long-term cost of a disciplined Everyman-style schedule is still under-studied, so you are making a trade with incomplete information.

How long does it take to adapt to polyphasic sleep?

The first week is the brutal part. In my experience, and in the tiny extreme-schedule literature, that is where most people break. If your cognition, mood, or judgment keeps sliding after the first couple of weeks, stop. More waking hours are not useful if the quality of your mind collapses.

What is the Everyman sleep schedule?

The Everyman schedule is the classic core-sleep-plus-naps version of polyphasic sleep, usually a 3-hour core block with one to three short naps across the day. It is far more realistic than Uberman, but it is still a serious biological stress test, not something I would recommend casually.

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