Today marks the beginning of my seventh week sleeping polyphasically. The last two weeks have certainly been a rollercoaster. I've switched from biphasic 5hr + 30min to triphasic 3 x 1.5hr and back to a differing biphasic 1.5hr + 3hr. The first biphasic I enjoyed because of its ease, yet I never felt rested enough upon waking. The second biphasic suits me better, yet currently I can only get about five hours between sleeps, which isn't enough. Triphasic has been my favorite so far, but sleeping three times a day has proven impractical for me.
Each has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Personally I am nope convinced that if I had the flexibility I would flourish on something like a 2 x 2hr biphasic schedule, with a sleep at the same times on opposite times of the day. However, this isn't something I can do, and the problem is adapting to a schedule that works around my 14 hour day gap. Half the time I can get a short nap in the mid afternoon, but it's not something I can be reliant upon.
Personally out of all three I think I prefer the biphasic schedule I'm currently on. Yet it would be so much better if I had the flexibility to go to bed earlier so that my wake gap isn't so long. So I've come up with another plan. I've decided that I'm going to keep this current biphasic schedule up for another week at least to see how I feel before cutting half an hour off my nap, as I tend to naturally wake up after anywhere from 45mins to 1hr. And that's not just my sleep monitor talking, I usually remember waking at that time. Although I have no idea how this will affect my morning sleep, as long as I get all my nap before midnight this shouldn't be a problem. They do say an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after.
If it works I wouldn't have to worry about not being able to chat with friends because I'm sleeping too late into the morning. Usually when I wake up they're all tucking themselves into bed, unfortunately. Also, if it works, I would have succeeded in further cutting my sleep down to four hours, which would be awesome. What I'm hoping for is for more deep sleep compressed between my two major REM cycles in my morning core, so that there's not so much Stage 2 sleep in there. However, I won't get ahead of myself yet, this may not work, it's merely a vague long term goal as of now.
Otherwise, I found this free app on my Android that records how much sleep you get and then creates statistics from it. I added all my information from the last 31 days and found it really easy to keep up to speed with my changing sleeping patterns. Here are the main statistics:
-Number of records: 58
-Number of days: 31
-Total sleep time: 180.2hrs
-Average daily sleep: 5.8hrs
-Average time asleep: 3.1hrs
So over the last 31 days I've gained 83.3 hours compared to as if I'd been sleeping an average monophasic night of 8.5 hours. That's equivalent to 5.2 extra monophasic days, if you count an average monophasic day as 16 hours. It feels like having an extra day on the weekend. In fact more often than not on the weekends now I'll find myself confused as to what day it is. Because of the extra time awake it'll feel like Monday on Sunday. It's weird, but I guess my mind will get used to it in time, like everything else.
I have two graphs here from my statistical sleep app. The first is a graph of the amount I've slept over the last 30 days:
The blue line is the amount I've slept per day, the grey line running through the middle is my personal amount needed per day, namely 5 hours, and the green line is how I rated each sleep. Notice the large leaps of blue. They're sleep-ins. Now notice how the rating goes down underneath those sleeps. My sleep quality seems to have overall improved since going triphasic and then back to this other biphasic.
The second graph shows the patterns in my sleep, aka, a visual representation of my sleep times. This spans the last 10 days:
The first couple of days show my old biphasic system, the middle show my triphasic, and the end show my weird mix of new biphasic and monophasic, bearing in mind that I haven't had time to develop much of a pattern here yet.
So make what you will of all that. I shall have to end this blog here because I need to go and make dinner. Basically, this concludes my overview of the end of my sixth week of polyphasic sleep. This is definitely by far my best week as of yet. I just feel incredible over all. Onwards to week seven! (Yes it is slightly addicting! ^^)
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
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