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 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 - Days 15-17

These last days have been good, so to speak. I've been falling asleep straight away at 2:30am, waking up at 7:00am to do some exercise and then having a 45 minute nap in the afternoon. According to my sleep graphs I've been sleeping like a brick for the most part, gaining at least 70% of deep sleep per core. But now I've hit a fork in the road.

I've now been functioning perfectly on only a maximum 5 hours sleep for two and a half weeks, but every time I look in the mirror all I see are these terrible black circles, black holes, under my eyes. It is a bit odd seeing as I would say that I actually feel more awake throughout the day on 5 hours sleep than I do on 8 to 9 hours sleep, but I can't keep on ignoring this.

The circles under my eyes are now so bad that even concealer won't cover them up and I'm worrying constantly that they'll be fixed there permanently. For reference, if I was a hermit and living on my own then I wouldn't mind so much, but now I think my mum is starting to worry. And it just looks plain ugly for everyone to see. I need to get more sleep, but the problem is I don't really want to.

I love this sleeping schedule and function amazingly on it. I really don't want to stop, especially so soon in, but the truth is these black circles under my eyes are a sure sign that I do need more sleep. I won't be going back to my old 8 to 9 hours of sleeping but I will be sleeping more. I'll still be doing the biphasic thing too, because I really enjoy that, but I'll be sleeping enough so that I could miss a nap and not suffer from it.

Grudgingly, here is my new schedule for the week, with length and nap length shown in brackets:

Mon- 2:00am to 7:30am (5.5h + .5h) = 6h
Tue- 2:00am to 7:30am (5.5h + .5h) = 6h
Wed- 2:00am to 8:15am (6.25h+.5h) = 6.75h
Thur- 2:00am to 7:30am (5.5h + .5h) = 6h
Fri- 2:00am to 8:15am (6.25h+.5h) = 6.75h
Sat- 2:00am to 9:30am (7.5h + .5h) = 8h
Sun- 2:00am to 9:00am (7h + .5h) = 7.5h

To those who aren't polyphasically sleeping it probably still seems like not nearly enough to survive on, but for me it seems like too much. Either way, it's something I have to do for the sake of my aesthetic health. My average amount of sleep over this last fortnight has been about 4.75 hours of sleep. This new schedule will raise my amount of time sleeping to about 6.75 hours. That does mean I'll be losing about 2 hours of waking time per day, which grieves me to no end, but it's still gives me about 2 hours more per day than before I started sleeping polyphasically. 6.5 hours is seen by experts to be the optimal amount of time sleeping for women, so I'm hoping a week or two of this new schedule will begin to fix those dark circles under my eyes.

I'll still update every so often, especially with experimenting with my new schedule. All I'm trying to find is my optimal amount of time asleep.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 1

I've decided to experiment with a Polyphasic sleeping cycle. Basically, without going too much into detail, it means that if I split my sleep into scientifically proven periods of time over the whole day, like naps, rather than sleeping all in one go I could theoretically sleep as little as two hours per day and have no ill effects for it, well, after the supposed initial transition period that is.

I've decided to do the Everyman 3 cycle. This means I'll sleep 4.5 hours every night, and in conjunction with that have two 20 minute naps separated throughout the day. Altogether I'll be sleeping an average of 5.2 hours per day. I figured this was perfect, not too easy, not too hard. It should gain me around three hours extra time per day.

The transition phase is the hard part. I'll be going through some major sleep deprivation that'll last from anywhere around two weeks to two months whilst my body is adjusting, so this will be like a mini daily diary on my progress.

Day 1:

I've been up since 8:00am. I went to bed at around 3:30am the 'night' before falling asleep almost instantaneously due to being so tired. Overcoming boredom was the hardest though. Reading is difficult when you're tired, so I ended up procrastinating my time away on social networking sites really. I almost gave up from boredom alone.

I saw it though, however. My first 20 minute nap was due at 2:30pm but I couldn't fall asleep and the alarm went off before I could even relax. I guess it's only normal, my body's not used to sleeping at such an obscure time.

My second 20 minute nap time was just recently at 10:00pm. I was more tired by this time so I managed to slip into a hypnagogic state, but I still couldn't fall asleep, despite almost being on the edge. However, I did feel more refreshed afterwards.

General sleep deprivation symptoms over the course of the day include: Headache, light-headedness, zoning out, neck strain, dry eyes, sensory overload, being hungrier than normal.

It's now 11:00pm and I've got around another 4.5 hours before I can turn in for my core sleep. After that light relaxation of a nap earlier I reckon it shouldn't be as hard as it was last night. Plus, I'm gonna be using the time this time to write more fanfic. I'm feeling surprisingly good and optimistic.

Note: I've been in a generally positive mood all day, so no irritability signs... Yet.

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