I've had a great three weeks of being biphasic, learning about my sleep and how best to optimize it. I came across an interesting chart showing the times of our natural dips in our circadian rhythms throughout the day. Here's the picture:
It got me thinking. Over the last few weeks and looking back over my life I've noticed dips at:
-6:30am
-9:00am
-11;00am
-1:00pm
-3:30pm
-5:00pm
-6:30pm
-8:00pm
-11:30pm
-01:00am
-2:30am
-05:00am
Obviously the early morning ones i'm not so sure about at the moment, but I've noticed I've become tired at those times in the past when I've done all-nighters. As for the dips themselves, these are the normal amount of dips an average person has in a day, but most of them aren't noticeable, they're brief and shallow, I've also noticed that when we're not sleeping we tend to unconsciously fill some of those other dips with either food or exercise, probably to replenish ourselves.
Personally my two biggest dips occur at 3:00pm and 11:30pm, and I wondered if there was a way to sleep even less by utilizing those, considering the fact that at the moment I've been going to sleep at 12:30am instead, not too difficult but definitely full of tiredness. After some consideration I've decided to go triphasic.
I don't think I've mentioned triphasic sleep before, and that's probably because for some reason it's not very often experimented with. I still think it's quite a young schedule in comparison to the other schedules though so that could be why. Simply put, it involves sleeping 1.5 hours evenly separated over a period of three times per day. This basically gives you about 4.5 hours sleep average.
The way it works is that your body is designed to have certain sleep stages better at certain times of the day. Ever wondered why you always have crazy-assed dreams in the morning yet you can't remember the first couple of hours of deep sleep? Although I don't remember the exact scientific reason it's like that due to the way our body's are designed. Stage 2 sleep is also more effective during the late afternoon/early morning, depending on your body clock, and despite what anyone says, logic dictates that we have stage 2 sleep for a reason, and need it.
By sleeping 1.5hrs in the morning you get mostly REM sleep. By sleeping 1.5hrs in the afternoon you get mostly stage 2 sleep, and by sleeping 1.5hrs at night you get mostly deep sleep. Although it's not the minimum of 4 cycles, and only 3 cycles instead, it's supposed to work by compressing the time ever the more efficiently. On this schedule it's also supposed to be the easiest to switch back to monophasic if you can't get an afternoon nap, although for me if that happened I'd probably just go biphasic and have an evening nap after dinner instead.
Here's a graph I found depicting the cycles of triphasic sleep against those of monophasic sleep:.
As you can see it looks to be very promising.
This is a nap based schedule, and is also one of those schedules where every nap needs to be as equidistant as possible otherwise it won't work. After a few calculations, I've come to the conclusion that a wake-gap should be around 6.5 hours long, although at most it can be extended up to 8 hours. Any longer and it won't work. This would be almost perfect for me. I actually have two cycles in the first two hours of my sleep so I've decided to have my first nap as a 2 hour core and my third mid afternoon one as a 1 hour nap to make it more even. For now my times will be as thus:
~11:30pm - 1:30am
~06:30am - 08:00am
-3:15pm - 4:15pm
Obviously for now this is a guestimate and may shift over the next week or so, but I've done it so that my longest wake/gap doesn't precede 7.5 hours. I'm thinking that maybe my 11:30pm sleep may go back another half an hour or so but I'm not sure yet. I realize that 11:30pm is my strongest urge to sleep and that there's a strong chance I'll sleep through even ten alarms, so I've decided to take that one half-sitting up, to get my body to realize it's just a nap.
I've also *cough* reactivated *cough* the sleep as android app that measures my sleep cycles and wakes me up at my lightest sleep. It's one of the best apps I've ever come across and unfortunately it only has a 14 day trial before it needs to be bought. Fortunately for me I've figured out how to continue using it for free. For anyone else who has this problem, all I did was uninstall it and reinstall it again. I didn't think it would work, but lo and behold it restarted the 14 day trial. I hope that helps anyone else out there who has this same problem. Obviously, and fortunately, Android aren't as up tight as Apple, as I doubt for one second that would work on my iPod. I'm inspired to try it now.
Anyway, I digress. I really hope this will work. It'll give me an extra 1.5hrs average on top of what I already have, giving me an extra 4 hours as compared to monophasic sleep, effecting cutting my needed time asleep by half. I've heard that the adjustment period is practically non-existent, especially if you start well rested with the afternoon nap, but either way I'm not gonna go cold turkey again this time. When I first switched to biphasic I found I would accidentally sleep extra, and have a more SPAMAYL type approach for when I had tired periods. I also found that those tired periods naturally disappeared by themselves once I was adjusted, and it cancelled out virtually any adaption period, so that's what I'll be doing again.
The last thing is, that doing this schedule would mean that I would no longer have to suffer from jet lag. I have family in Mexico, which is a six hour difference backwards, and I found the jetlag a bitch. It's difficult to enjoy a holiday suffering from sleep deprivation. I figured this schedule would cancel that out as I would just sleep at the same times in my time zone, maybe shifting it by a couple of hours for practicawl reasons, virtually eliminating any jetlag.
-11:30pm would become 5:30pm
-6:30am would become 12:30am
-3:15pm would become 9:15am.
These are all practical times for me, maybe shifted an hour or two, especially as in the morning I tend to be alone and in the afternoon Mexicans tend to have a siesta (nap) anyway.
So that concludes my ginormous essay on triphasic sleeping and I hope it'll be useful for anyone else looking to start it. I'll be yet again keeping a daily log and hope that my first post will be around 5:30am. I really hope I survive.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
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