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 - Day 14

Day 14:

I feel like I've been in bed all day. Seriously.

Last night I went to sleep at 2:30am and decided not to set an alarm for the morning. I wanted to see how long my body would let me sleep-in after being poly/biphasic after two weeks. It probably wasn't the most reliable of experiments though seeing as I'd drunk loads of alcohol. I woke up at 8:30am mentally trying to force my body back to sleep to make up for any sleep deprivation I may have built up over the last fortnight, but no such luck.

I woke up bright and dandy after 6 hours sleep, which is incredible compared to sleeping monophasically. To be honest though, sleeping that long after being so used to sleeping 4.5 hours after the last couple of weeks felt like an absolute eternity. It felt like I'd temporarily died or something, it felt that long. Problem was though, I got really tired about two hours after waking. I felt like absolute shit until I had my nap, which is weird considering I slept more, but then again I'd drunk alcohol the night before and the sleep I did have was actually really restless. Here's the graph:

As can be seen, my sleep was quite erratic and not very restful at all. Interesting to note that after the 4.5 hour mark everything starts to go crazy, and actually I do remember waking up after 4.5 hours naturally. Overall though I really was restless. According the statistics I only spent about the half the actual time sleeping in slow-wave-sleep, which I suppose is still a good 3 hours, but it didn't really feel that long.

Surprisingly, today I could barely keep my eyes open leading up to my nap. I started my nap at about 3:15pm and for the first time ever I actually got to sleep under about ten minutes, but then annoyingly I got disturbed by family stuff. I tried getting back to sleep for another half an hour invaded by more distractions before deciding to give up and sort out some stuff.

I returned to bed about half an hour later at about 4:00pm and decided to try again because I was still tired, despite the fact I'd already spent half an hour in bed previously, and the fact that I didn't think I'd fall to sleep again. I decided to try though and put in some earphones and listened to some brainwave entertainment to block out all external noises. Next thing I know I'm waking up at 5:00pm feeling absolutely incredible. According to my sleep graph it'd taken me about 15 minutes to fall asleep, meaning I'd slept for a grand total of about 45 minutes. It actually had felt like I'd slept for about an hour as well.

I won't be posting the nap graphs up though seeing as the first one was all quite erratic due to the distractions, and the second one barely showed any data thanks to me resting my phone too far away from my body whilst I was sleeping.

I've often heard that the optimal nap time is 20 minutes, although it can be as long as 45. For me 20 minutes doesn't cut it, I feel as if I haven't slept at all. After 45 minutes though I feel incredibly rested, if a little groggy, but the grogginess doesn't last long. After about 25 minutes of light sleep a person will fall into the first stage of deep sleep, which lasts about another 20 minutes. Waking up any longer than the combined time of 45 minutes maximum is near impossible and can leave a person feeling awful for hours on end due to it being the deepest stage of sleep. Thankfully I woke up naturally before this deep stage hit, and I've been feeling amazing for the remainder of the day, much unlike the first half of the day.

Like I said at the start though, I feel like I've been in bed sleeping or trying to sleep all day. Technically all together it was only like 7.5 hours, still less than when I was sleeping monophasically, but being in bed for that long really does feel like an eternity now. I feel like I've thrown away most of my day. Sleeping in probably wasn't worth it, although then again the results may have been different had I not have drunken any alcohol, and considering the fact it is sunday I guess it's ok to feel like that. Otherwise, I think I'll do the same experiment next sunday but sober.

Other than that, the only other thing I can report is how I woke up this morning and almost died when I looked in the mirror. The dark circles under one eye had advanced to being a full on bag. I'm pretty sure this was mostly down to the alcohol induced dehydration the night before. After half an hour of the ice treatment though it was ok. Actually the ice helped take away the bruising on both sides too, so until I completely adapt I may use that more often.

I know many people say you shouldn't start messing around with the schedule until about a month or so in until your body is completely adjusted, but a week is actually enough for most people to begin to understand their circadian rhythm and optimize their time around that. For me personally, I now believe that anywhere from 4.5 hours to 5.2 hours of core sleep followed by a 45 minute midday nap is perfect for me, maybe 6 hours when I've had an unusually stimulating day, or on weekends. If I ever had the flexibility I also believe that having 3.5 hours of core sleep followed by either a 1.5 hour midday nap or two 45 minute equidistant naps would work really well for me. For now though, I really enjoy this schedule. Who would've ever have thought that being asleep for six hours would feel like a lifetime.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.