I know I wrote at the end of my last log that I wouldn't update till the end of the week but I've had quite an eventful day today and decided that it needed to be written.
Yesterday I wrote that I'd decided to shorten my core sleep from 4.5 hours to 3.5 hours because I figured it felt more natural and I wanted to see if it would help me sleep in the day. Well, today I had my first oversleep. I haver never ever slept through an alarm before, it's just not possible because I'm such a light sleeper, so it was quite a shock to say the least. I got woken up about twenty minutes after the 4.5 hour mark though so no major deal.
However, I've discarded with the 3.5 core sleep idea. I was going to persist through it, but then I looked in the mirror and realized my eyes looked like they were half hanging off. It's incredible that an hour less of sleep doubles the dark circles under my eyes, but to be honest I'd rather have an hour extra sleep than walk around looking like a zombie. So I came up with a new schedule.
Polyphasic sleeping schedules don't have to be set in stone. Personally I think it takes a bit of experimenting with because everyone is different and everyone has a different circadian rhythm. What I'm trying to do is to adjust my current schedule to one that is compatible with my own circadian rhythm and with my own life.
For me 3.5 hours of sleep per night is a no go, not to mention my napping troubles during the day. Instead I've decided to stick with the 4.5 hour schedule but with two major differences:
-First, I'm going to be putting my bed time back by about an hour or two, meaning I'll also be waking up an hour or two earlier. I believe it's easier staying awake when there's light coming from outside, rather than trying to fight my body's natural urge to sleep when it's dark; I've noticed that due to the struggle for consciousness I can't get anything at all done in the early hours of the morning, which goes against the point of doing this experiment at all.
-Second, because I'll be going to bed earlier, having an early night nap would be counterproductive, so I've decided to discard that nap all together and go biphasic. This also means that I'll be sleeping for twice the time during the nap in the middle of the day, meaning I can get to sleep in sufficient time.
My body has already adjusted to only living on 4.5 hours of sleep and to be perfectly honest it feels amazing, much better than when I was sleeping 8-9 hours per day. Add that to the fact that now I'll be sleeping twice a day, which is also the body's natural sleeping state, I reckon I could keep this schedule up forever. As a note though, now that my body's adjusted to 4.5 hours sleep I've decided that come the weekend I'll have the classic sleep-in, consisting of anywhere from 5.25 hours to 7 hours, just because sleeping in is nice. It'll be interesting to say the least though whether or not I'll wake up after 4.5 hours unable to sleep in.
Today I've started with this schedule. I slept from 3:30am to 8:20am meaning to wake up at 7:00am. When I realized how inconvenient it is I changed my schedule and went for a nap at 3:00pm, and that last 45 minutes. I really wondered whether I'd get to sleep and whether laying there would be a waste of time, but it wasn't. I woke up from my alarm after sleeping about twenty minutes, feeling groggy and disoriented, though an hour or so later and it had really perked me up.
I've seen a lot recently about this Zeo sleep monitoring headband thing that monitors your sleeping patterns and decided to see if there was an app on android for it that could be used via the inbuilt accelerometer. I came across a few, deciding to use a trial one. I doubted that it would actually work but I placed my phone under my pillow anyway and when I woke to my alarm I immediately went to check it. This is what it shows:
The high levels of green on either side indicate normal waking activity. The straight levels indicate wakeful rest. The bumps slightly going up either indicate brief movement or REM sleep, the sleep state in which we dream. Towards the last third of the graph you can see the straight line beginning to change to a deeper wobbly pattern. This I believe is stage 1 sleep. I was out for around twenty minutes apparently and had no idea that I'd actually gone. It felt much shorter than it actually was, but after the last ten days of not being able to nap in twenty minute increments it felt glorious.
This graph is not actually as detailed as it should of been seeing as I had it set to core sleep mode instead of nap mode. I have no idea how it's so accurate seeing as I was dead still the whole time, not moving at all. Maybe it picks up my breathing patterns or something. Either way, I'm going to be using this at night too and learning about my own natural circadian rhythm. Apparently if you indicate the cycle in which you want to be awoken it has the ability to automatically set the alarm to wake you up when you're in your lightest stage of sleep during that particular cycle, thereby preventing oversleeping.
Right now it's coming up for 7:45pm and I have to say that that extra nap has woken me quite sufficiently. I've got around another six hours left until my core sleep and I really hope this adjusted schedule will stick, hopefully I'll wake up at the right time in the morning. I think I'll set up multiple alarms just in case. All together I should be back to sleeping my original intended amount of 5.2 hours per day, thereby still earning me at least another 23.5 hours of wake time per week. We shall see.
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