Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 8

For those following along, I’m in the midst of a 30 day experiment with polyphasic sleeping.

I hate polyphasic sleeping.

It’s 9:00pm, I’m exhausted and I’m stuck waiting for midnight before I can go to bed.  Then I have to get up at 4:30am and putter around the house for a few hours until everyone else wakes up.

Two nights ago (Christmas) we got snowed in at my inlaws (who I love).  I didn’t have all my normal entertainment accouterments so I picked up a James Patterson novel about 9pm and finished all 390 pages by 8:00am the next morning.

I found that I love the hours between 5:00am and 7:00am.  It usually takes me a half hour to shake the cobwebs and then I get two hours to myself.  Then for the rest of the day I mostly hate it.  Even the last few days when I feel pretty good, there’s always this underlying fatigue.  My eyes always feel heavy.

So that’s my complaints for the day.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 4

For those following along, I’m in the midst of a 30 day experiment with polyphasic sleeping.

It’s dark except for a single lamp.  I’ve got a cup of coffee in one hand and a book open in my lap.  It’s 5:30am and I’ve had almost an hour of quiet reading since I awoke an hour ago.  It will be another hour and a half until my wife and two boys wake up.

This is why I wanted to try polyphasic sleeping.

As a husband, father and a small business owner I have a lot of constraints on my time.  The extra two and a half hours before anyone else gets up is a wonderful thing.

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Today I felt almost normal.  There’s still an underlying fatigue but I felt like my mind was working normally again and I wasn’t so out of it.  I spent the day at the house and doing some shopping with my 4 year old.

Later in the afternoon I unexpectedly felt exhausted and my eyes grew very heavy.  I checked and it was 4:30pm – time for the second nap of the day.  It was still an hour before I was able to lay down, but I took this as a good sign that my body is already starting to adjust to the schedule.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 3

For those following along, I’m in the midst of a 30 day experiment with polyphasic sleeping.

Today I could tell a marked difference in my mental functions.  I had an extremely hard time focusing on anything and I often found myself going in circles on simple tasks.  Creating this post took me three times as many clicks to get it started.  I’ve already stopped a few times staring at the screen trying to figure out what I was doing.  It also took a lot of mental energy to keep going on a single thing  until it was done.

Getting up this morning was especially hard.  I felt like I was tearing myself out of bed and it took me a half hour to start doing anything productive.  If the goal is simply to exhaust myself to the point that my naps start making up the difference, I’m wondering how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Naps did come easier and I was still able to shake the fog within a few minutes but I didn’t feel rested afterwards.

Thankfully this is the last day I’m in the office for awhile so I have a few days to get acclimated.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 2

For those following along, I’m in the midst of a 30 day experiment with polyphasic sleeping.

A bit of sleep deprivation crept up throughout the day. While I felt pretty good, I had trouble organizing my thoughts a few times and once didn’t filter a criticism to a client as much as I should, and normally would.

Fell asleep a bit quicker on my naps. Woke up fine and shook the cobwebs within ten minutes. No dreams yet which means I’m not getting to REM.

The last few hours before I went to bed last night were interesting. First, I started falling asleep on the coach around 9:30pm and Candace quickly roused me. Then I began to feel a combination of dread and craving for bedtime. I desperately wanted to go to sleep but was not looking forward to getting out of bed after just four and a half hours.

Overall I feel like I’m still running at about 95%.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 1

For those following along, I’m in the midst of a 30 day experiment with polyphasic sleeping.

Today was a piece of cake.

Thanks to a 2 year old that kept waking up and being nervous that I would oversleep, I woke up five minutes before my alarm and rolled out of bed at 4:25am. I felt good and was alert and focused during the day.

Napping was a bit weird. I gave myself a 30 minute window to get my 20 minute nap in but I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep more than 10 minutes both times. It took awhile to drift off. Apparently this is normal and, as I adjust, it will be easier to fall quickly asleep and go straight into REM.

Overall, the day was a breeze. However as a small business owner and father of two youngsters, getting just 4.5 hours of sleep in a day is not all that uncommon. We’ll see how I’m feeling by week’s end.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment

We’re all stuck with the same 24 hours in a day.

Or are we?

I first heard about polyphasic sleeping when I was browsing Steve Pavlina’s blog. He kept a journal of his attempt to sleep less than 3 hours a day. This was intriguing to me and I instantly wanted to give it a try.

There are, of course, downsides. The acclamation period is two weeks of a foggy hell. You have to keep a highly regimented schedule of 20 – 30 minute naps every four hours. This means scheduling your entire life around sleep and even leaving parties to nap in the car.

If you’re late for a nap, it’s hard to catch up. If you miss a nap, you’re exhausted for days.

Considering my current life situation, this wasn’t feasible so a shelved under “some day”.

I recently purchased a copy of 4 Hour Body and read the chapter on polyphasic sleeping. This introduced me for the first time to the different levels of polyphasic sleeping. Basically, for every 20 minute nap you take during the day, you forego 1.5 to 2 hours of sleep at night. Also, on the easier levels of polyphasic sleeping, you can be a little more relaxed with your sleep schedule. If you’re an hour late for a nap, it’s no big deal.

Now this I can do!

Starting tonight, for the next (at least) 30 days I am going to run my life on the Everyman 2-Nap polyphasic schedule. This means 4.5 hours of “core sleep” at night (midnight to 4:30am) and then two 20 minute naps at noon and 4:30pm.

Does everybody get the same 24 hours or can you hack your sleep to, in my case, steal back an extra three? I’ll find out soon enough.

Photo by malias