Today marks the beginning of my 8th week sleeping polyphasically. This week has been pretty rough. Trying to omit afternoon naps was a bad idea. I haven't really much to say on this post but when I first started trying polyphasic I had no idea that I'd still be experimenting with it 2 months down the line. It is a little bit like an addiction, trying to shave off as many hours as possible and yet feel great for it. The few people that I have told are all concerned for my health, but truth be told my health has actually improved for doing this. It's not really something most people would understand without trying it themselves, yet I have to admit it does sound kinda cool saying that I only need to sleep 4.5 hours and feel perfectly fine for it. My napping has improved to the point where I don't really need to worry about whether I can sleep or not. It takes a while to psychologically get used to the idea of sleeping more than once, or even twice a day, but it becomes natural after a while.
What I like is being able to stay up most the night and the day, giving the best of both worlds. On the standard triphasic what I found pretty cool was the fact that psychologically I felt like I was having a full nights sleep yet at the same time it felt like I was always awake and not suffering for it, kinda like one of the vampires from Twilight who never have to sleep, pardon the analogy. I've heard it's the same feeling on the more extreme Uberman schedule too, although more pronounced. It's like watching the world move around you, night becomes day, day becomes night, night becomes day again. It's like the secrets of time itself become known to you. It's a very surreal feeling. Also what I like about that schedule is the fact that time itself seems to stand still, because you always seems to have an eye on it. Eight hours don't just magically disappear in unconsciousness. Altogether it feels like having an extra day or two to yourself for the week. It feels like having 5 days of work and study followed by 3 or 4 days of weekend. I love it.
I have yet to do much useful on polyphasic sleep as at the moment I'm kind of addicted to watching Supernatural. Which means yes, I have been watching it for around about 6 to 8 hours a day. No regrets. But hey, that's what all this extra time is for. If I can't catch up on all my favorite tv shows then what's the point? I have been doing a few other things from time to time though, things I would've no way been able to do whilst having a tv phase before polyphasically sleeping. I've half-heartedly taken up Russian, Japanese, and Latin. There's also all the excerise I've been doing which I never did before. And I've managed to get a bit of reading in, specifically The Republic by Plato, and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Once I've finished my Supernatural phase though I believe that I'll go back to making music and writing some fanfic.
One thing I have found, is that now my body is more adjusted to radically sleeping less, I only have to go through a couple of days of adjustment period when experimenting with other schedules, compared to the week or two it would've initally taken me had I have started from scratch. I don't know if other polyphasic sleepers have this same phenomenon, but I can switch between most schedules now very easily, even if it's a new schedule I haven't tried before. I put this down to the fact that through whatever schedule my body is now trained in learning how to get the best out of any time period of sleep. My body has learned to prefectly optomize it. Being able to nap on demand also probably has a large part to play.
I rarely wake up in the middle of sleep cycles now. Monophasically sleeping I would wake 30 times plus average in a night. I once heard it that the average person wakes 60 times in the night, yet they're unable to remember but a few. As I share a room with my sister, who sleeps about 9 to 10 hours average, I can acertain that this is most likely true. In fact many times she's woken and spoken to me, then fallen asleep again, yet come morning she can't for the life of her remember talking to me. I probably wake up an average of about 4 times per week now during sleep cycles. That's a substantial decrease from at least 210 times waking per average per week down to 4 times. That's really saying something, it's incredible even. This absolutely proves that I'm having excellent quality sleep.
I don't regret the choice to sleep polyphasically at all. I know for certain that my body has adjusted because now when I give my body the chance to sleep-in, I barely sleep past 4.5 hours at a time, and I tend to feel icky for it. The couple of times I have tried sleeping 8 hours all in one go again, I've failed. I'll spend about half of it awake, frustrated by not being able to fall back to sleep, followed by intense tiredness the next day. I absolutely recommend some kind of polyphasic sleeping, even if it's only biphasic. It's a life changer, in a good way.
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