Diary of a Polyphasic Sleeper
Around the time I began experimenting with polyphasic sleep, I began keeping a log of when I was actually going to sleep. Since days were blurring together, a record of my naps was very useful in trying to translate how my waking hours mapped onto days as the rest of the world experiences them. The blue areas represent time I went to sleep. The dark blue represents time I recalled dreams upon waking (and therefore know for a fact that I had achieved REM sleep).
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I believe this log was also helpful in formulating the hybrid schedule that I am attempting now. Looking at this graphic, there were a few things I noticed right away. I was struggling to staying awake in the wee hours of the morning, while having almost no difficulty during my traditional waking hours. I also noticed that I remembered my dreams upon waking most often at 8am. Sometimes I would recall dream in the earlier hours of the morning, but never during the day.
I combined this information with the subjective observation that I wasn’t accomplishing anything useful or entertaining during the early morning hours that I fought to keep my eyes open. It was pretty intuitive, then to imagine getting a sold chunk of sleep from midnight to 4:30am (estimated 3 or maybe 4 REM cycles) and hang onto a couple of naps. 8am is an obvious choice because of the known success I’ve had hitting REM. Noon was chosen as the second nap time largely because it is easy to slip out during lunch when I am at work.
Note that the dark blue areas are almost certainly not the only times I reached REM sleep. Those are simple the times I remembered a dream upon waking. Particularly in the stretches where I was asleep for several hours, I’m confident I had one or more REM cycles. It’s likely that some of the 30 minute stretches that appear the lighter shade of blue covered areas of REM sleep that I just can’t verify.
Polyphasic Hybrid
I’ve been thinking about an idea for a hybrid somewhere between the Uberman schedule (the specific polyphasic schedule I’ve been trying) and regular monophasic sleep. As I was easing into polyphasic sleeping, I was taking two naps during the day and then sleeping for a modest chunk of the night. I remember that didn’t feel too bad.
I’m picturing a core sleep from midnight to 4:30am with naps at 8:00am and noon. The 4pm and 8pm naps are the ones that I’m the most likely to stay awake through right now anyway. And from midnight to 4:30 I seem to have a great deal of difficulty staying awake.
I think this alternate schedule would give a little more flexibility. If social stuff was happening, I think I could stay up past midnight and shift my sleep a little later without being blown out the next day. It gives me a wide chunk of time to naturally be awake from 12:30pm to midnight every day, which seems ideally suited for social engagements, even when traveling out of town. (And truthfully, I think I’d have a little more flexibility on when those naps occurred. If 9am and 2pm were the times sleep was available, I expect that would work since I would have stored up some energy from my core sleep.)
It still gives me the advantage of “stealing” a few extra hours out of the day in the early morning when the rest of the world is snoozing. I’d be sleeping 5.5 hours a day and should get 5-6 REM cycles. (6 being the target of the Uberman schedule, and 5 being what I think I got on a monophasic schedule.) The only question is if my body would be smart enough to jump to REM sleep for the short daytime naps when I was sleeping for a longer period each night. I think it might, based on what’s been happening over the past few weeks.
Since I’d still be getting up and going to work by 5:30, I’d still be leaving for the day at 3 (which I really like).
I think I could adapt to this pretty easily, since it’s very close to what I’m doing now. If it does work, than I would be getting some of the best elements of polyphasic and monophasic sleep.
Polyphasic Sleep: Confessions of an Oversleeper
Prior to Wednesday night, it had been three weeks since I had what I would consider a full night’s sleep. There were many occasions where I slept longer than my prescribed 30 minutes, but Wednesday I was drawing on the sandman’s drought for 8 straight hours. When I’ve told people this today, the first question seems to be, “Do you feel super rested?”
I can say that I didn’t feel super anything. I didn’t feel anymore rested than I did the day before. In some ways, I felt a little fuzzy. I had a hard time focusing on more complex tasks. I did skip my lunchtime nap, though. It’s not that I don’t think I could have fallen asleep, but I came into work very late. I didn’t want to be eating dinner here at the office. Hopefully, this won’t magnify the mistake and screw my schedule up even more.
I didn’t actually mean to sleep 8 hours. The alarm clock I was using requires you to flip a switch to move between “normal function” and “setting the alarm time”. I switched to set the alarm time and played with the arrows until I landed on just the right time. I then promptly forgot to flip the switch back to normal function and crawled into bed.
So what have I learned? I had previously wondered about the ability to handle an occasional change up in the polyphasic schedule. If I had a big day coming up without a lot of chances to get away, could I just get 8 hours of sleep the night before and make it through the next day without nap interruptions? Based on today, I’d have to say the answer is a qualified no. It might actually be possible, but I would be trading off too much of my ability to function in exchange for not needing to take any breaks.
Another interesting quirk came up. Historically, I have required my home air conditioning to be set no higher than 71 degrees Farenheit during the summer in order to be comfortable. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten a little chilly in the morning and bumped the thermostat up to 74. I had previously attributed it more to the changes in my diet, than the changes in my sleep patterns. When I woke up from my 8 hour hibernation, I felt sticky with sweat. Yesterday at work, I was noticeably less comfortable with the temperature. Even worse today. The pseudoscientific answer I can give is that when I’m immobile for so many hours, my body has to start producing internal heat to keep my system running smoothly. (Note the complete and total lack of scientific basis for that emotionally satisfying conjecture.)
What’s most weird about my experience is the vague, ethereal body of polyphasic sleep knowledge mentions people who plan an occasional extended period of sleep (sometimes called “reboots”) on a weekly or monthly basis. Maybe the key is that these reboots not be 8 hours long, but I don’t feel like my day was any improved from the extra sleep I got last night.
What Constitutes a Satisfying Polyphasic Sleep Episode?
My goal as a polyphasic sleeper is to fall asleep quickly and awaken refreshed. There’s two parts to that goal. Falling asleep quickly seems to revolve mostly around how tired I am and how supportive my environment is for sleep. If I lay down on a bed in a dark, quiet room when I’m beat, I may asleep before I’ve finished adjusting the pillows.
If I’m too tired and the room is too comfortable, then I have a hard time waking back up. This is most common in the wee hours of the morning when everything is dark and quiet. My body does not seem to be familiar yet with the concept of stopping sleep at the end of a REM cycle if the moonlight is still shining in the window, so that’s the most likely time for me to oversleep.
I had probably my best sleep since starting the polyphasic schedule at 8am this morning. I went out to my car (I was at work), kicked off my shoes, and put the tail end of the pillowcase over my eyes. (The car is not the most comfortable place to sleep, but at 8am I’m usually ready enough to sleep that it doesn’t matter.) Less than 15 minutes later, I woke up after the natural conclusion of a dream. I felt like I had slept for hours. I was alert and relaxed.
My body didn’t even attempt to move to the next stage of sleep. I just woke up. Get in, get the REM, and get out. Maybe it’s because the car was just uncomfortable enough that I didn’t want to stay asleep. What I think is even more likely is it was approximately the time of day that I’ve been waking up to face the day for most of my life. It could be that oversleeping at that time of day has more unpleasant consequences (losing my job) then oversleeping at night (losing a few hours).
I’d love to identify the variables that made that experience so restful and duplicate them throughout the day. I’m not sure Katy would let me sleep in my car all the time. I suspect that isn’t the most important variable, though, anyway.
One notion might be to intentionally oversleep a little in the early evening. I’m not sure if that would work, and I’m not sure I’ll try it. The one time I’ve done that before, I was awake for the entire night without the sleepiness I normally experience at that time. The intent would be to train my body to stop primarily associating the time from midnight to 4am with sleep. (One of the things I learned at college is that it is definitely possible to break that association.) I don’t really have any idea how many days I would have to keep that up before it had a lasting effect on my ability to be alert through the night. Since the trade off would be losing a few hours of the evening (my primary time with Katy), I’m not really interested in doing it for an extended period of time.
Abrupt ending.
(Re)Set Polyphasers to Stun
It is in the wee hours of the morning as I write this, and I am wide-awake. Why? This past weekend we visited with my wife’s family and my adherence to a polyphasic sleep schedule was haphazard. I truly expected this meant that I was starting from scratch with my attempts to adjust my sleeping patterns. If that’s not the case, then why?
I think the approach that I took last week, might not be the best one for me. I took a week off from work and attempted to make a complete switch to the new schedule. The problem was, I had so much time on my hands that I ended up being bored. When I'm bored, the attraction of sleep is astoundingly amplified. I repeatedly overslept in the early morning and couldn’t make much progress. This week I am going to work everyday. Since so much of my time is eaten up at work, I don’t have quite so much time to spend at home running out of things to do. In about an hour I’ll start getting ready to go to work, and I still have a healthy list of things I’d like to work on.
I think this alternate approach is going to make it much easier to adjust to the schedule. Viva la polyphasia.
