Everyman Spamayl Adaption - Day 7

Last night went without a hitch again using my new technique to stay awake. I had one hallucination upon waking this morning when I looked at the clock for the time, where I saw creepy red hands reaching out for me, but I shook it off, did some stretches, and carried on with my obsessive stalkish fan-girling behavior over Supernatural on youtube. I actually only had four naps yesterday which seemed to feel a lot better. I don't actually feel the need for five naps anymore.

My morning nap went alright as planned, but I had a little hiccup in my afternoon nap. I couldn't find my phone and I only had a short time period in which to nap, or so I thought, so I decided to use my iPod alarm to wake me up instead. Except it didn't wake me up. I don't know what happened, but I think having earplugs in prevented it from waking me up fully like it should have done, despite it being right next to my head. I ended up sleeping for an hour before my sister appeared and realized and woke me up. It is a little weird too because I didn't even feel tired this time when I went to take a nap. I took it just for the sake of keeping the equilibrium.

So today I think I'll just skip my evening nap as it'll be a miracle if I could sleep for it at all anyway, before carrying on as normal. It's only an oversleep of a grand total of half an hour anyway, not too much of a big deal. I realize this probably puts back my progress a little towards total adaption, which is a shame. Hopefully though I shouldn't have any trouble sliding back into my schedule. It seemed easy enough a few days ago, and it's not as if I overslept for a couple of hours or something. I remember dreaming a lot during the nap, but to be honest it felt like it was full of stage 2 sleep, not exactly productive. Not to mention that it killed most of my afternoon. I don't feel like I've had an afternoon at all today. It doesn't feel very nice. On the other hand it feels like I've just started a new day, like I've just woken up afresh in the morning. I guess that's down to sleeping so long. It feels a little odd.

Energy level wise though I don't actually feel any different compared to say if I'd only slept 15 minutes. It did feel quite pointless. I actually believe I prefer this Everyman 1.5 schedule to the standard triphasic I was praising so highly before. It's a god send, although apparently not as natural as triphasic, which is probably what I would've fallen back into without an alarm. Also, if I were to oversleep at all I'd prefer it to be in the day rather than in the night where it's harder to stay asleep for ridiculous periods of time. I don't really know how long I would've slept for though if I'd been left to sleep for how long. Thank goodness it didn't get to that.

So today has been a little disappointing but I am trying to look on the bright side. I've certainly learned from this. No earplugs if I plan to wake up to my iPod alarm. For reference I found my phone as soon as I woke up by accident...

Everyman Spamayl Adaption - Day 6

Progress!

Yesterday I found I only needed to take 5 naps. I took naps at 7am, 2pm, 7:30pm, 10pm, and 12:30am, along with my core at 3am. However I found myself extremely tired during the evening, around about 5pm, I was literally falling asleep on my feet. I could've done to have a nap there instead but I rarely can there. I know it'll get better though. After a week or so my body should improve the quality of my afternoon nap to help me ride out the whole afternoon and early evening without becoming ridiculously tired. Otherwise no blackouts or oversleeps! Well, not per se, as I'll write below, but generally the last 24hrs have been extremely good. It didn't hit me as hard as I thought it would. Usually in any adaption day 2 is always my hardest so now I know I'm out of the dark and actually have a chance at making this work. It should be plainer sailing from here on out.

I found myself taking micronaps during the early hours of the morning. I was having mild hallucinations too, although now I have experience with them I recognized it for what it was at the time and shook myself right out of it. I tried many things to keep me awake. I tried watching tv as if it's something I'm really interested in it'll wake me up, but I found that I couldn't let it stream without having a million micronaps, and I was having difficulty getting any links to actually work, probably as I was so tired. In the end I found going on youtube and fangirling over some Supernatural fan vids worked. It woke me instantly as obviously fangirling is a dangerous business. I joke, but I guess it's something to do with the onslaught of happy endorphines. It took me about 2hrs to figure out that this was the only thing that was going to keep me awake, but lo and behold 2hrs after this discovery and I was still just as awake. I hadn't experienced anymore microsleeps or hallucinations, or not even the urge to sleep. It was miraculous. I did this first thing in the morning too and I was awake instantly and stayed like that for the rest of the morning. I had no problems. It's definitely my new stay awake trick. Hehe. Me gusta.

I took my core at 3am. The night before I found that waking up after 1hr45mins felt a little premature, so I set my alarm for 2hrs instead with a half an hour gap for my smart alarm to wake me up in. I woke up just before 5am feeling like I'd woken on time. I guess I'm good to go with a 2hr core, with four or five 15 minute naps. So altogether I'm sleeping about 3hrs, which was my initial goal. I'm getting no light sleep now, perhaps 20 minutes at most, and that's a stretch. The first hour cycle of my core was all deep sleep, followed by 20 minutes of my second cycle in deep sleep before being followed up by about 40 minutes of REM sleep. 40 minutes of REM I think is sufficient for a person to live on, but I believe the reason my core is more deep sleep heavy is because although I can't be certain for sure, I think that around the first 5mins of each nap is REM sleep, which would make up for another 20 to 25 minutes. I can't be certain for sure because it's all at the beginning, I can't remember and I have no zeo, but today I decided to take a short timed 5 minute nap to help me through the large morning wake period and I awoke in the middle of a dream, which was the last in a series of separate dreams. So that's why I believe at least the first 5 minutes of my naps are REM, whilst my core is cushioning all my deep sleep.

One weird thing I found though is that I keep waking up with hiccups recently. I recently  read someone else's Uberman adaption log who said they get this too, but that it went after a few days. I can't for the life of me figure out why this is but it is annoying for sure. The only other thing I have to report is about my idea of setting an alarm every half an hour during the night and morning hours just in case I blackout or oversleep. In the night I didn't need it as I managed to prevent myself from blacking out, but it came in extremely useful in the morning. I have a tendency to want to stay in bed and think for at least half an hour, and it's usually the cause of all my oversleeps. I think I went through about 2 or 3 backup alarms spaced five minutes after each other before finally realizing I needed to get up and move. I did a few stretches before going on youtube to try out my new stay awake trick and was okay until my morning nap. I don't know why exactly but my morning nap always feels so freaking long, like I've been sleeping for another 2hrs. I woke up and again stayed in bed in order to think, out of habit. Of course if it hadn't been for my alarm set every half an hour I would've overslept, as by the time the alarm went off, 10 minutes after initially waking, I was already in stage 1 sleep. So all these alarms were definitely a good idea, and now with my new stay awake trick, tonight should be a breeze!

Triphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 1

Today was the first true day of my new triphasic sleep schedule. I almost scrapped it at the last moment but my curiosity got the better of me and I figured that if it didn't work I could always go back to biphasic.

I started with a nap in the afternoon the day before, but as it was the weekend I'd slept an hour too much the previous night and for the first time in weeks I couldn't fall asleep during the day. I like to think my body is adjusting better to the less sleep seeing as I still only had about 6 hours of sleep, but still, for beginning my triphasic schedule it was a little detrimental.

Come night, I slept from 11:20pm to 12:50am easily, giving me 1.5hours sleep exactly. I was surprised that my smart alarm woke me after 1.5 hours, expecting to be woken up at the two hour mark as my first two cycles seem to be both only an hour long. It was weird because I woke up thinking I'd over slept and that my alarm didn't wake me up (which has by the way never happened with this "Sleep as Android" app) and I went to check the clock and saw it at about 12:15. I couldn't believe it. Before I checked the clock I swear I'd slept about 4 hours.

I almost decided to get up there and then but I figured that if I wanted this to work I needed to start as rested as possible and then work my way down. I remember the alarm going off at 12:50am with me thinking I was still awake, not initially realizing that I'd slept an extra half an hour. That was probably because I must've fallen back to sleep too fast to register it and then woken up in light sleep.

Here's my graph:

As can be seen the first hour was quite deep, then I get practically blown away by super deep sleep during the last half an hour. I'm guessing during that stage my brainwaves were at a frequency of 0.5hz at least.

The morning was surprisingly easy to pass. Too easy in fact. I've never felt so awake as such a wrong time. It did initially take about an hour for my body to completely wake up though, despite my mind being super awake. I had no trouble reading. In fact my sister had a bit of insomnia last night and annoyingly, because I hadn't told her about my experiment, and consequently hadn't told her not to tell my mum, I had to pretend I was asleep for about half an hour at around 3:00am and then another hour at 4:00am. The point is, I was lying down pretending to be asleep for about an hour and a half altogether and I didn't even feel a hint of sleepiness. I just spent the time thinking. I have told my sister now though so hopefully no more hours wasted there.

It got to about 5:20am and I found myself bored as my next nap was coming up and it was too late to start something mentally strenuous, yet my sister's insomnia had put my plans behind schedule. I basically found myself with nothing to do for about 40 minutes. I decided to go to sleep at that time anyway. I was so awake that I figured it would probably take me that long to fall asleep anyway. In fact because that's round about the time I've been waking up on biphasic for the last 3 weeks I wondered whether I would manage to sleep at all. I did though. Here's my sleep graph:

I fell asleep after about the twenty minute mark, and woke up at 6:30am, probably because I'll often wake up at that time on biphasic too on the weekdays, and then again at 7:30am because that's the time I tend to wake up on biphasic during the weekends. I couldn't fall back to sleep for probably another 20 minutes at 6:30am but I did. Again it was all very strange. I didn't feel that need to catch up on built up sleep pressure. That nap felt like it was pretty much all stage 2 sleep, and of course according to my graph I only had about five minutes REM time.

I woke up at 7:30 pretty much unable to believe that it had only been two hours. Granted, it wasn't the most restful sleep due to my biphasic cycle having to reset, but it certainly felt good. It had actually felt like I'd had a long good night of 8 hours monophasic sleep, except I have 5 hours free time in the middle and I feel better upon waking up. I have to emphasize again how incredibly weird it felt. I've never experienced anything like it. I slept 3.5 hours altogether and yet split up like that it feels two times better than when I was trying to do Everyman 4.5, with 4.5 hours core sleep towards the end of the morning.

I wouldn't say that my morning energy levels are as good as they were on biphasic, but they feel more even around the whole spectrum. I do feel slightly drunk, and my eyes are a little puffy underneath but I wouldn't say I'm tired. I still feel two times better than when I did on monophasic. I also have a feeling that I'll sleep a treat at my 3:00pm nap, in five hours. I do find it difficult to sleep more than 30 minutes during the day though, so if that happens I'll just add an extra 30 minutes after dinner, when I have my next sleep-able deep.

I keep thinking this is too easy though. I know some people say that they had virtually no adaption time and maybe that's the case here, but either way I keep waiting for the punch line. I wouldn't really say I'm dedicated to this as such, I'm only doing it for curiosity, yet with my smart alarm and the way things are going at the moment I seem to be having a really easy time. I definitely recommend the smart alarm. It hasn't failed to wake me up ever, no matter how long or short I've had my core sleep in the past. It's absolutely perfect.

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Polyphasic Sleep Week 5

Today marks the end of my fifth week conducting this polyphasic sleep experiment and the third week of sleeping biphasically. It's been a good week. Very stabilized and normal. I'm still feeling twice as good than I was on monophasic. I no longer have high levels of background anxiety, something I wasn't expecting, the dark circles under my eyes are now virtually non-existent, and my health is twice as good. My muscles and bones don't ache half as much as they did before, and of course my mind is more alert throughout the day. I rarely feel sleepy. You'd think it'd be the opposite but it's not weirdly enough.

I now have an application to compile graphs for me and measure how much sleep I'm getting average. Over the last week it reports that I've had an average of 6.2 hours of sleep. This average obviously went up on the weekend, which by the way, I regret. Friday night I slept-in, waking up naturally after 7 hours, almost 2 hours more than usual and although it was the best sleep of my life I felt super ill all day. I really should stop doing that.

Earlier on in the week I was having trouble with the correct times to wake up as I'd become pretty reliant on my smart alarm to wake me up at the right stage and because I was falling asleep too fast, under 5 minutes, I found myself waking up in deep sleep. I had to shorten my core sleep from 5.5 hours to 5.1 hours. That fixed the problem and I felt ok again.

As for my mid afternoon naps, they are a force to be reckoned with. I love them. They no longer feel like an inconvenience, I absolutely love them. Now that my body's adjusted I have an average of 15mins sleep, although occasionally I'll still sleep up to an hour, just because it feels so good. I've also started dreaming at the beginning of my mid afternoon naps, which is an odd experience to say the least. It feels like I slip straight from wakefulness into dreaming, and although I don't actually realize that at the time, it's made the beginning of about half my naps this week pre-lucid. I'll often question whether I'm awake or asleep, often to wake myself up twitching realizing that I was actually asleep and dreaming. I call them micro-dreams, brief periods of REM unlike hypnogogia.

Wrapping up, this schedule is the best I've ever slept, and I highly recommend it, but now my curiosity is getting the best of me and I've decided that from today I'll be going triphasic, which I'll go into in my next post.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Days 28 to 30

Day 28:

End of day 28, when I last wrote my schedule, was the beginning of the weekend and it was a little erratic to say the least. I got extremely tired around 5pm and ended up taking a nap for an hour. I don't tend to put on the alarm for naps during the weekends seeing as it is the weekend and all, I try to give my body as much time as it needs to replenish itself over any sleep deprivation. Not just that but despite the fact I sleep more in the nights I tend to find myself about ten times as tired in the days during the weekends. Maybe I'm more tired because I sleep more those nights, it's difficult to tell at this stage.

Day 29:

After taking an hour nap I couldn't fall to sleep till about 3am, and even then I had to force myself asleep. I figured I'd sleep-in till about 10am at most. Well I couldn't sleep in at all. For some reason I had a really restless sleep and woke up at the 5.5 hour mark without need for the alarm. I tried falling back to sleep but I was just too restless. I was a little disappointed seeing as I barely had a sleep-in the night before either, but it didn't bother me so much. What did bother me was the fact we had family visiting for Father's Day and I couldn't find time to take a nap. It was much too noisy even if I had found time. I was super tired and grumpy, probably from having less quality sleep than normal. Also I'm hormonal so it's kind of expected.

Day 30:

I couldn't wait to get to sleep last night, I was so tired. I watched X-Men Origins Wolverine before heading off to sleep at 12:30am. I did originally intend to sleep 5.5 hours but for some reason it was taking me a while to fall asleep and so I reset my alarm for six hours, also hoping to make up for any sleep I lost on the weekend. It's kind of ironic really how I'm sleeping better during the weekdays.

It's now 4:15pm in the evening and I just had a 20 minute nap. It was a little noisy and I was woken a couple of times but I still think I got around 10 minutes sleep. It's amazing how fast I can fall to sleep now during the day, sometimes even under a minute in the right conditions. Otherwise I've been feeling okay all day, no sign of yesterday's tiredness or the day before.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 28

Day 28:

So yesterday I forgot to take my nap because I was busy with something on the computer. That means I didn't do any exercise either and therefor I was really tired by the time dinner came around. I didn't want to take a nap then though because I knew it would keep me awake all morning. In the end I decided to take a 15 minute nap and keep it short. I feel asleep within 5 minutes and woke up just before the alarm, giving me a good 10 minutes of sleep.

That seriously perked me up and I didn't start to feel sleepy again till about 2:00am. I decided to go to sleep and not set any alarm and just wake up at whatever time: The thing is I'd stupidly forgotten to deactivate my weekday alarm and I ended up having my sister waking me up at 7:15am by dumping my phone on my bed. It had been vibrating since 6:00am! I switched it off but I didn't know whether to go back to sleep or not.

I'd had about 5.25 hours sleep at that point and considering this is around the period of my fourth sleep cycle that I usually wake up in I was all perky and awake. I considered staying awake and just having an extended nap in the day, but I find it difficult enough to find napping time in the day as it is.

I decided to stay in bed and try to fall back to sleep. It took me about half an hour to fall back to sleep, that's how alert my mind was. I don't think I've ever found it so difficult to go to sleep. I almost gave up but couldn't be bothered to move and eventually slipped into a light sleep. I remember waking up a couple of times before I fell into deeper sleep and was woken from a dream at 9:30am by my mum.

I was in bed about 7.5 hours but I reckon I slept around 6.5 hours altogether. It's a little weird. If someone had woken me up at the 7 hour mark before this experiment I would've been extremely pissed off at the disturbance. Now though I don't feel grumpy at all from the disturbances and I still feel like I've had a good sleep.

I do feel a little weird from the feeling of being in bed all day but seeing as I was disturbed twice it's not that pronounced. It actually feels like I woke up, had a brief waking period, and then had a 1.25 hour nap. I don't think I should be needing a nap in the day lest I feel like being awake all morning again. I think I'll do lots of exercise to tire me out and make all that extra sleeping time worth while. Maybe this sounds weird but I'm not sure I like sleeping anymore than 6 hours anymore, maybe 6.5 at it's max. I do feel absolutely fine on 5.5 hours of sleep.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 22

Day 22:

So yesterday I was hyper again, not to mention today too. I'm starting to think that this isn't due to my body adjusting to this sleep schedule but due to something else. My mum's started giving me these herbal Rhodiola tablets to help combat my summer depression. The tablets aren't supposed to work for about a month, but those days where I was feeling down and depressed and slept 8.5 hours I'm pretty sure that's because I'd forgotten to take the tablets. Either way though, I'm not complaining, I genuinely feel good, although slightly more insane than normal.

Yesterday it got to mid afternoon and although I felt my body's natural down peak I I wasn't tired, and seeing as I'd woken up late in the morning I decided to pass the afternoon with some exercise and take my nap later after dinner. When evening came I still wasn't tired and ended up meditating in bed for 35 minutes before being disturbed. Again, me not being tired during the day may be a side effect of the tablets, or 5.5 hours really is sufficient now to pull me through the day, or maybe it's the two combined.

I didn't even get tired till about 2:00am, so I'm really starting to think it's the tablets. I went to bed at 2:30am, giving myself 30 minutes to get to sleep. That was a mistake. I fell asleep pretty much instantly and ended up sleeping for 5.75 hours, waking up at 8:30am, which frankly felt like an eternity. It also woke me in the middle of my fifth dreaming stage. I should've really woken up before that. Next time I'll give myself 15 minutes to fall asleep and 5.25 hours to actually sleep. That's more of natural time.

I didn't use the sleep monitoring app last night, and unfortunately there's only three days trial left on it, two of which my mum and sister want to try. Today I'm not sure I'm gonna take a nap because I want to fall asleep earlier, around about 1:00am. Either that or I'll try and nap in the mid-afternoon. I want to wake up early in the weekdays, 7:00am latest, to do some exercise, and also to get other interesting things done like writing, studying, reading, watching TV whilst it's light and I'm more awake. I realize that in the winter this'll change but I'll figure that out when it comes.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 12

Day 12:

Yesterday I found it incredibly easy to stay awake in the early hours of the morning before my core sleep. I think this is both down to the fact that I had mu first proper twenty minute nap earlier in the day and also the fact that despite the tiredness my body has actually got used to sleeping at 3:30am. I initially planned to go to sleep at 2:00am, but I was too energetic and it took me half an hour of conscious effort to help me become tired.

When I did eventually fall to sleep I remember it being incredibly restless, waking at least a couple of times during the night. All my core sleeps so far have been quality, yet this one wasn't. The only thing I can think of to put this down to is the fact that my body had already acclimatized to being awake until 3:30am. A couple of nights should fix the time difference though.

Here's a picture of my sleep cycles for the night:

According to the information not shown on the picture, I slept an average of 4 hours and 45 minutes. The reason for it being 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes is because I set the smart alarm to wake me up at my lightest stage of predicted sleep within half an hour either way of my designated alarm time. I woke up instantly, and so far this app has seriously impressed me.

According to the statistics, out of the 4.75 hours I was asleep, I spent about 2 hours of it in deep wave sleep and about 1.5 hours of it in REM, meaning the other 1.75 hours were spent on transitions stages. Personally I'm not completely sold on the idea of totally eliminating these supposedly less useful stages of sleep, the last thing I want is to die an early death due to thus far inconsequential data. The interesting this is though, when you look at my graph and consider the amount of REM I actually got.

According to this graph and the detailed statistics, I went through all five stages of sleep in 4.5 hours, as can be seen by the fact that apparently I slept the scientifically recommended amount of REM stage sleep in that short amount of time. Now I'm starting to see why I was finding it hard to nap during the day; for some inexplicable reason my sleep stages have actually repartitioned and compressed themselves during my core sleep. That's not normal. I've seen many sleep graphs posted on the internet of long experienced polyphasic sleepers and they still only go through about the average of two to three cycles with no more than 45 minutes of REM in that same period of 4.5 hours. Maybe I'm actually just naturally resilient to sleep deprivation or something and only now I've had the chance to find out. I'll be keeping an eye on this for sure, maybe last night was just a fluke.

As for my nap, that didn't go too great today. I got to about twenty minutes before I was, unknowingly to her, disturbed by my mum. I decided to try again twenty minutes later and managed to fall into a light dream for about five minutes before being disturbed yet again! I gave up after that, there was just too much going on and there was no way I was gonna get much more sleep done my laying down. It left me feeling irritated and grumpy though for about an hour afterwards.

Other than that, and the still horrendous black circles under my eyes, I've been feeling fine. I haven't been feeling sleepy or tired or anything. Apparently week two is supposed to be the hardest yet I seem to be breezing through it, and that's without barely any day time sleep. I have literally been living on 4.5 hours monophasic for the most part of the last two weeks, if you consider the fact I just can't nap during the day. I would be concerned about the REM rebound but that should've happened by now, and technically if my body is somehow actually squashing all five cycles together in such a short core sleep, then supposedly I wouldn't need the day time nap. I have to admit though, even if I don't sleep during the day it's nice just to switch my brain off for a while. It seems to have become more of a meditative exercise than anything, which is just as beneficial as actual sleep in its own ways.

I have 3.5 hours minimum before I can drift off to sleep for the night. My eyes are feeling somewhat dry tonight, but I think more than anything that's down to the lack of water I've had today. Over all I still feel quite alert. As for tomorrow morning, I think I've decided to skip the sleep-in for now and carry on with the schedule, I don't want to confuse my body and thereby my sleep cycle test results.

Also, I feel like this tweaked schedule is a lot better, due to it being more in sync with my body's natural inborn circadian rhythm. I've written down a list of things I've always wanted to do, but have never had the time nor the energy to do, and I've loosely arranged them around the extra waking hours in my life and the best optimal times for that specific activity. I say loosely because I've given myself a total of three hours to procrastinate through the day on the internet. So with that included, this is a brief outline of what I currently want to achieve during a period of 24 hours:

7:00am-8:00am ~ I'm going to take up martial arts for self defense, going along with a morning workout video thing. This is is to get my blood pumping and to fully wake me up to be awake and alert for the day to come.

8:00am-2:00pm/2:30pm ~ This is when I have to get ready and do some homeschooling. I have both breakfast and lunch in this time period.

2:00pm-2:30pm/2:30pm-3:00pm ~ Read a book. This is because it's the time right before my nap, and personally I don't find reading at all that much stimulating. I feel it's a good activity to wind down to sleep from.

3:30pm-4:30pm ~ Learn Russian for half an hour or so between this time period. My mind will be tired but ready to tackle new problems after my short term memory being wiped clean and given a new slate thanks to the nap.

4:30pm-7:30pm ~ Make dinner, eat, do house jobs, chat with family.

7:30pm-9:30pm - Write fiction/write music. This has always my most creative phase of any 24 hour day and I can do incredibly creative things during this time of day.

9:30-10:30~ Get sent to bed (yes I'm 18, yes I know), and use the time to write my blog, ect.

10:30pm-2:00am ~ Catch up on the tv shows I never watch. This is quite a relaxing period, and personally I can't stand doing anything too creative before sleep, it interferes with my ability to get to sleep.

The main thing I want to get out of this really is learning how to use all this extra time effectively. There's no point of me gaining all this extra time just to wile it away on double the amount of pointless procrastination. I think many people don't prepare for this hurdle of polyphasic sleeping when they start. They enjoy all the extra time, yet have no idea what to do with it because it's onslaught is so sudden, and they have no idea how to loosely schedule it around their body's own natural circadian clock. I have been a victim of this over the last couple of weeks and that's why I've finally ventured to do this scheduling my day thing.

Otherwise, I'm intrigued as to how tomorrow will go. Everything's going well so far but I'll probably return with another log anyway, albeit a much shorter one. Untill then.

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