Polyphasic Sleeping, Days 8-12 (Tuesday through Saturday)

It's been a somewhat chaotic week for staying on the sleep schedule. I think what started it was taking extra back-to-back naps during the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday - I should space out naps from each other by at least 90 minutes. Twice now I've ended up sleeping through the night (including last night, between Friday and Saturday - I went to bed at 1:30AM [late for my nap] after eating a large meal and woke up at 8:30AM), while other days I've successfully slept only polyphasically. Either way I've felt fairly functional, and I've been napping during the daytime (8AM, 12PM, 4PM, 8PM, etc) regardless of how much or little I slept the night before.

I'm going to try sleeping on the couch or floor or something for the night portion of my cycle starting tonight. I think my bed is making it much to easy for me to fall asleep and stay asleep. I found another mode for my watch that causes it to beep once a minute in the five minutes until the alarm goes off, and then beep for 20 seconds; that might be more likely to wake me up. 20 seconds is kind of short; I've slept through it before even when I wasn't trying polyphasic sleeping. I need some sort of alarm that's much more insistent and has a tendency to repeat at five minute intervals unless some fairly sophisticated process is used to disable it (requiring a fairly awake and thinking brain).

The front living room has also been rigged up with curtains blocking it off from the bedrooms, and it has a full-spectrum 80W flourescent light, so I'm going to try spending the next few nights in there so I hopefully don't feel so sleepy from 2-6AM. I'm trying to eradicate the day/night rythm, and go entirely to a 6-7 times per 24 hour period sleep cycle, regardless of light/darkness - that's the theory, at least. We shall see how it goes!

Polyphasic Sleeping, Days 6-7 (Sun afternoon, Monday)

Day 6 (Sunday late morning to end of day)
Since I took that extra 30 minute nap on Saturday around noon, and then forced myself to take all my other naps for that day at the regular times, I haven't felt as tired, even when running past my regular nap time by as much as an hour. I think that it might have repaid some of the sleep deficit I incurred when I was first adjusting to this sleep schedule. In the afternoon I completed some more of the website project I'm working on (something new for TerranRobotics.com, though it won't be going live for a week or two yet), played with the cats, watched a video, et cetera, and felt fine. Also answered some more e-mail (or maybe that was this morning).

(I also tried to find a used 20-40GB Quantum Fireball Plus, Maxtor D740X/similar, or Seagate 7200.7 (a particularly reliable model, according to StorageReview's Reliability Database) hard drive on eBay for no more than $0.50/GB, but no luck - it seems that there's been a bit of an upswing in demand this past week, and the drives are all pretty consistently going for $0.75-$1.00+ per gigabyte. Oh well, demand has to trail off eventually. Yes, I couldn't resist talking a little bit about computer equipment :)

Day 7 (Monday)
I figured out how my brain is trying to trick me into going back to bed sometimes when my alarm gets me up. Somehow, when the alarm went off, I found myself fiddling with the alarm trying to turn it off and thinking that it was signalling that it was time to go to sleep. This happened around 4AM today, if I'm remembering correctly. Once the rational part of my brain chipped in and said "Wait a minute, how does an alarm indicate that it's time to go to bed?!" I didn't have much trouble waking up and getting up. Funny ;)


I gather that it's a very good idea to start off on polyphasic sleep with no sleep deficit. So the idea is to get a good night's sleep the night before, then start napping during the day after a good nights sleep to kick off the polyphasic sleep schedule. When I made the decision to try the polyphasic sleep schedule, it was late in the afternoon, and I hadn't been napping that day, so I had to wait until the following day to start it (although I was chomping at the bit to go). I'm glad I did wait until the following day and then start taking the naps after my full nights sleep - I think it made things easier. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I'd been any more tired while trying to adjust to it.

For the most part, adjusting to this sleep schedule wasn't as bad as I had expected*, but some times I had to be very mentally determined to make myself get out of bed. I think one of the things that kept me going was that I was determined to keep at it even if I slipped up and overslept a few times, or "fell off the wagon", so to speak, and I knew that if I went back to sleep now it would only prolong the agony of the adjustment period.
* - (Bear in mind, I'm completely abstaining from caffeine and stimulants, and during the most difficult part of the adjustment period I was staying away from sugar - something I think I'm going to resume doing anyway, since sugar tends to make me irritable regardless of what my sleep schedule is).

One of the nice things I've noticed about this sleep schedule is that since I'm taking breaks for a nap every four hours, my performance doesn't decline appreciably the longer I've been awake. Contrast to sleeping from 11PM-7AM, and then being up all day - as a monophasic sleeper, I tended to grow more tired after about 3PM. Furthermore, since I'm getting refreshed every four hours on the polyphasic sleep schedule, if I get into a foul/depressed mood during one of my waking periods, chances are I'll feel better after my next nap, and it won't have a chance to last the whole day.

Polyphasic Sleeping - Days 4-6 (Fri & Sat, Sun morning)

Day 4 (Friday)
Involved a bit of sitting and staring off into space trying not to think about how tired I was, but mostly I worked. I'd passed a pretty lousy night the night before, having eaten more than I should have during the wee hours of the morning (hey, I was hungry!) Not feeling quite as desperate for rest when I lay down to take a 30-minute nap as before, mainly because I'd accepted that I can fall asleep in the first ten or fifteen minutes.

Day 5 (Saturday, yesterday)
It feels a little weird calling it yesterday, because I can remember it - it feels like last evening was in this waking period, even though I've slept twice since then.

During the wee hours of Saturday morning, I spent most of the time learning about the Drupal CMS and installing it on my testing webserver. So, although I may feel tired at times, it mainly affects my motivation to work and makes me disinclined to try to make decisions (though I am very cautious by nature), but I can still absorb and put to use technical information (my brain is functional).

I was awfully tired on Friday, and had been planning on adding in an extra (seventh) nap sometime during the day on Saturday. However, instead of putting at least a 90 minute gap between the two naps, I ended up having my noon nap and then resetting my alarm for another 30 minutes right after it. I guess my tired brain can rationalize anything when it's just been woken up by an alarm. I felt groggy after that, but I livened up again after my 4PM nap.

Saturday evening, I was talking with some people about computers, and had difficulty breaking away (computers...too much fun...to resist talking about). After I passed my 8PM nap time, I started feeling progressively more tired, until I made myself head home, and ended up arriving home just a few minutes before 9PM. Then I felt compelled to wait for an eBay auction that was ending in the next 22 minutes. The eBay auction exceeded the price I had been willing to pay, so I turned in at about 9:15PM. When my alarm awakened me at 9:45PM, once I woke up I felt fine.

There has been some grogginess in the first 5-15 minutes following the naps, but it seems to be growing weaker, so the temptation to go back to bed is much easier to resist now. (Note: never, ever, lie back down.) Furthermore, it feels like I'm sleeping longer during the nap times, even though the actual amount of time hasn't changed. The first few times it happened I jerked awake when my alarm went off thinking "Oh no, I've overslept!" even though my alarm was plainly still beeping.

Day 6 (Sunday morning)
I wasn't particularly productive this night, but that would probably be mainly because I didn't start working on something that would keep me engaged. Getting started is the main thing.

I've noticed the past few nights, each night the deep point of my former sleep cycle has been growing less pronounced. The first couple of days, I could really feel it hit at 4AM - I wanted very much to stay in bed (I didn't, because I knew I would sleep through my next alarm if I did). Now, I just feel a little more tired when I wake up from my 4AM nap than my other naps, and it wasn't particularly distinguishable this morning. Pretty soon, I'm hoping that my day/night sleep cycle will be balanced out, so that I feel as awake at night as during the day.


I confess when I started writing this post I was having a hard time keeping track of how many days it's been since I started this experiment. Do I count from when I woke up from my last full night of sleep (Tuesday at 8AM), or do I count from when I would normally have gone to sleep but instead started doing the polyphasic thing? (Tuesday at 10PM) I'm going to stick to what seemed to be my original assumption, flawed as it may be, that Day 1 began when I woke up from my last full night of sleep (and so, of course, I would have felt entirely normal on day 1, having had eight hours of regular sleep the night before). If you think it should be the other way around, feel free to mentally subtract 1 day from all my day numbers (so my Day 1 would become Day 0). If I didn't think it would change my post URLs (OK, it doesn't), I might modify the titles myself.

Polyphasic Sleeping - Day 3

In my previous post, I talked about beginning an attempt to become a polyphasic sleeper. I'm now on day 3 (roughly 64 hours since my last full night of sleep), sleeping only three hours per planetary revolution, and I don't feel that bad. Perhaps a bit more brain-dead than day 2, but still quite functional.

Today, I swapped circuit boards between a couple of hard drives (this required going to Sears and picking up an appropriate T8 torx screwdriver) and got one hard drive functioning, tested a failed hard disk and recertified it, studied an Adobe Photoshop book, took a walk, disassembled and tested a laptop battery pack (risky - may explode if shorted), retouched and file-size optimized a bunch of images and then converted them into a PDF document, read through a new 54-page webcomic, and posted a new piece of art to my deviantART account, among other things.

I still have to update my website, but I think that will have to wait for "tomorrow" (next waking period, from 12:30AM-4:00AM). It's about 11:50PM at the moment, so I'll be going to sleep at 12AM, and up again at, you guessed it, 12:30AM. It's a good thing I have dual alarms on my watch - I've been using a 30 minute countdown timer, backed up by an alarm set to go off at a specific time about 2 minutes after the countdown timer, and several times I've only been raised by the second alarm going off.

Polyphasic Sleeping - Day 1 & 2

I'm currently trying to become a polyphasic sleeper, which is where instead of sleeping for one block of roughly eight hours in one night, one takes six or seven short 20-30 minute naps in a twenty-four-hour period (the Uberman Sleep Schedule). Allegedly the body will learn to go into REM sleep, which is the most necessary form of sleep*, almost immediately when one starts a nap, and one will need much less sleep overall (3 hours or less per planetary revolution). However, there is an adjustment period of at least a week, more like two.
* - (However, cravings for certain nutritional supplements, such as grapes, to make up for the lack of other types of sleep are reportedly common, and one is well-advised to take heed and serve the cravings)

It's currently Wednesday afternoon. I started taking 30 minute naps at four-hour intervals throughout the day Tuesday (yesterday). I was already used to taking a 30 minute nap at 4PM most days prior to starting this, which may have helped somewhat. However, I tend to have a lot of trouble falling asleep most of the time, especially at night, oddly enough. 2AM-6AM was the worst; as you can imagine, there was much groaning when my alarm went off after a mere 30 minutes at roughly 4 in the morning.

One of the worst things one can do on this sleep schedule is to miss a nap, or be more than an hour late for a nap, especially twice in a row. I'm pretty flexible on timing at the moment, so that doesn't pose a difficulty. If I manage to land a full-time job (8hrs/day), however, I'm going to have to use part of my lunch to catch a 12-noon nap. One of the positive aspects of this sleep schedule is that you can fall asleep (deliberately) almost anywhere when it's time for a nap, even if you weren't previously accustomed to sleeping outdoors, say, or in a moving vehicle.

Another one of the worst things you can do on this sleep schedule is to sleep late. Longer than 30 minutes (or even 20-25 minutes for some people) will tend to leave you feeling somewhat groggy for the next waking period. It's especially inadvisable to oversleep during the acclimation period, as it will slow the process and just make things more difficult. So I was rather concerned when I woke up from my noon nap today not sure whether I had slept through my alarm or whether it was still going off or what. I was pretty confused, but once more of my brain came online it appeared that I'd only overslept by 2 minutes.

Still, I'm going to have to be careful. From what I hear, I'm going to be getting really tired tomorrow, and I don't want to stretch this adjustment period any longer than it needs to be - I hate being short on sleep, and I really want the quiet time during the night so I can work without interruption. My watch has dual alarms, so maybe I'll set a backup alarm to go off a minute or two after the first, in case I sleep through one. Once I've adjusted to the schedule, from all accounts, I should sleep 20-30 minutes and wake up naturally without even needing an alarm, as long as I'm taking my naps on time.

One last thing - I'm abstaining from any stimulants such as caffeine or chocolate, at least during the adjustment period. Caffeine wouldn't have time to wear off in the 3.5-hour period between naps, and I don't need it decreasing the quality of my naps. Furthermore, I'm eating when I first get up from a nap, and never within two or three hours of my next nap - the theory being that if one is still digesting when one tries to take a nap, the digestion will tend to keep one awake longer.

We'll see what kind of a mental state I'm in for day 3 (or 4).