Oversleeps & Lack of Motivation + New Schedule

This week has been interesting. I started off with the Everyman 3 schedule, but ever so gradually I've been oversleeping more and more. The problem I've been having is that for some reason I'm not having good quality naps during the day and I'm feeling really shitty. At times I haven't even been able to sleep. It's frustrating me to no end, and it's causing me to oversleep during the night. This week I've slept an average of 5.7hrs, which is pathetic. I may aswell be back on my original biphasic, I'd gain an extra half an hour on that, and it'd be twice as easy.

Today is the final straw. Last night I woke after 3hrs naturally, and then for some reason I stayed awake for about ten minutes and then decided to switch all my alarms off and go back to sleep. I think I figured I'd wake naturally after another couple of hours. Well, you could imagine my panic when I woke from a really nice dream, and saw light seeping in through my eye mask. I'd slept eight fucking hours, straight through, and I was still in the same position when I fell asleep.

I'm not impressed. Especially as I had reason to wake up early. It's not as if I'm out of things to do. Right now I half-way through watching Supernatural, True Blood, Misfits, and Queer as Folk, plus I wanted to start on Stargate Universe. On top of that I'm writing a Supernatural fanfic, and I plan it to have at least around 120,00 words. I have two months to write it before the new series comes out, meaning I have to write at least 3000 words per day. As I'm writing it on iPod that can take between three to four hours, although I've been splitting the writing itself up. But that's not the point. The point is, I got nothing done last night and it's really irritating me.

In order to make up for all the oversleeping I've been doing I've decided to pull an all-nighter, I have lots of writing to catch up on after all. Eight hours should pull me through easily, perhaps with a couple of short naps, although I sure as won't be taking them during the night for fear of not waking up again afterwards. I remember the last time I slept 6hrs accidentally. It pulled me through for twenty hours before I had to force myself to sleep. Of course though, this will create a sleep pressure to sleep more tomorrow night. I've decided to go with this. I once read an article about a guy who was on polyphasic sleep, but had to return to monophasic. However, he found that eight hours could sustain him for two days, and now he only sleeps every other night.

Using this, I've decided to fast for at least 16hrs to reset my body clock, and then start on this strange way of monophasic sleep. That way my body can be satisfied with a full night of sleep. Plus it should be easier to stay up in the night as initially I'll have lots of energy, and I won't have to worry about waking up properly from a nap and doing stupid things such as switching all my alarms off and falling back to sleep. This sleep schedule hasn't been tried very often, although those people who have tried it show varying success with it. Some people even do it naturally as they have a rare 48hr body clock. So I think it's worth a try. I want to see how it compares to regular monophasic. There would be many advantages to this over polyphasic such as:

-No need to take naps in the day if you're unable to take them
-No need to nap during the middle of a party. You'd be staying up all night and morning anyway.
-No need to stop in the middle of what you're doing to take a nap.
-No trouble with unnatural sleep inertia.
-No need to rearrange your life to fit in with everyone else. It's more natural.
-Possibly being able to have up to half a day to yourself for projects, excetera.

As can be seen, most these advantages are nap based. I want to experiment with it though, because it could really help those people who need extra time but can't afford to nap in the day. I'm going to start with about 8 to 9 hours every other night, which will give me a healthy mean of about 4.5hrs per night. I'll probably do that for about a month. I want my sleep cycles to rearrange themselves naturally first, if they will rearrange themselves as I'm not exactly going back to sleeping normally. At the moment I fall straight into REM and cycle through every 45 to 60 minutes, which I'm not sure is healthy. I think last night I had about ten cycles, which is twice the normal amount. But that's what compressing my sleep polyphasically has done to me. I don't regret it though, it seems like it would be much more efficient as I'm getting all the important sleep at the beginning instead of the end.

I think though, if that goes alright I might do one of two things. I might either gradually cut my sleep down to six hours every two days, or stay with the nine hours, but let it hold me out every three days, perhaps with a couple of short naps. I do believe though, that six hours every two days would be more practical because nine hours of sleep can't be gotten very night.

It's gonna be weird though. I've actually only ever done one all-nighter in my whole life, and I passed out after 27hrs, which I know isn't particularly impressive. I was always afraid of all-nighters. I'm not so much anymore thanks to all my experimenting with polyphasic sleep, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to hold out a lot longer this time, but I have to admit the thought of staying awake all night still gives me chills. I'm not sure why, it's just always been one of those things for me. I really hope though that I can contribute something to the polyphasic community by doing this. It's not a polyphasic schedule in and of itself, but it could certainly be a very good alternative.

Everyman Spamayl Adpation - Day 8

Last night I skipped my evening nap as I didn't feel tired thanks to that oversleep in the afternoon. The next nap I took after that was at 11pm, which went as normal. I was okay all night, no problems. I went to bed at 3am feeling a little hyper, as I'm still not used to going to bed so early. I got woken up by my smart alarm at 4:45am and was feeling a little tired but preocuppied myself with some more youtube fan vids until it was time for my next nap. For reference, I haven't had any hallucinations in the last 30hrs or so, which I really see as an improvement.

For some reason though this morning, I decided to take two naps back to back, which I think really ended up as three naps back to back and about half an hour after that of microsleeping due to laziness, but I'm not really sure as it was all a little blurry. I probably didn't actually sleep more than half an hour extra all together, I'm not sure. My need to stay in bed and think in the morning is my downfall. But I forgot that I'd had so many naps in the morning back to back, and so come my afternoon nap when I couldn't fall asleep even after 20 minutes I got really worried. I didn't feel tired, but I've fallen asleep to every afternoon nap for the last month now, so of course I was a little worried. But then I remembered all the back to back naps I had in the morning and it kind of astounded me. It really does work then with this SPAMAYL approach, that if I need to skip a nap later in the day, then I can take it back to back with the last nap and be fine.

Considering I may have had three back to back naps then I may not be able to sleep for my evening nap as well, but we'll see at the time. I shan't really be worried about it. If for some reason I have just instantaneously lost the ability to nap then I can just go full on SPAMAYL for a day or two and that should fix it, as I'll be so tired that I'll have to sleep during the naps. But that's a far away possibility at the moment. Otherwise, I've come to an average of four naps per day, this here is a pie chart I compiled of the times I'm roughly falling into sleeping:

I was initially worried about that large gap in the morning but two days into the schedule and it's caused me no further problems. I can go the whole morning with no tirednes, completely alert until the early afternoon when I just have to crash for 15mins. This is about 3hrs sleep altogether. I know that at the moment it's not exactly consistent (I'll make an excuse as it's the weekend), but the point is for the last four days or so I've been sleeping around 3 to 3.5hrs with no problems, except for hallucinations early on. I really love this schedule. It's the best I've been on as of yet. Also, it feels like the day almost never ends as the only credible amount of time I sleep for is the early-mid morning for a couple of hours. It's a very nice feeling. I have no plans to come off this schedule, or this amount of sleep. It agrees with me perfectly. Tomorrow I'll continue sticking to the schedule as I was before the weekend and we'll see what follows.

Polyphasic sleep Schedule - Day 25

Day 25:

I know yesterday I had planned to write a lot but now I can't remember what I was gonna write so this'll probably be really short.

Yesterday it got to about 3:30pm and I realized that I'd forgotten to take my nap. I only realized that though because all of a sudden I was super tired and couldn't stop yawning. I decided to go for a nap then and there. and surprisingly I fell asleep within five minutes. I woke up five minutes later though before falling straight back to sleep. This happened about three or four times. I remember waking up for the last time with the phrase "remember I had a dream," running round and round in my head. I can't for the life of me remember what the dream was, although I have a nagging feeling that it was Doctor Who related. On top of that I couldn't get back to sleep after 20 minutes exactly, but I didn't really mind. I think I'm gonna shorten my naps to 30 minutes in future rather than 45.

I went to sleep last night at 1:10am and woke up at 6:50am. I slept a total of about 5 hours and 20 minutes considering it probably took me about twenty minutes to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. Last night though I actually got tired enough,, no more strange hyper-ness. Today though I've been feeling super lazy all day. I got through two episodes of Supernatural before 8:30am instead of writing this journal and exercising. I didn't exercise yesterday either. I might do some later. Otherwise, I don't particularly like going to bed at 1:00am, I've got used to falling asleep at 2:30-3:00am, which I prefer. If I go to bed that late though then I can't wake up earlier. So in a way it does feel like my day has been shortened, although this is only psychological and it doesn't feel bad as such.

Another weird thing I've noticed is that towards the evenings it feels like my brain is expanding, like a constant pressure coming from inside, from dilated blood vessels or something. This may be down to higher blood pressure levels due to increased Cortisol from sleep deprivation. As for my eyes, the weird swelling on my bottom eyelid disappeared but for some reason it moved to the top eyelid. I have no idea what that's all about. Also, my eyes do have slightly dark shadows underneath, but they're pretty much invisible in comparison to when I was sleeping 4.5 hours a day. I really want to go back to 4.5 hours a day with one long 45 minute nap actually, maybe even 3 to 3.5 hours with a one 1.5 hour nap, but I really can't fit all those naps into my day around my family. And of course I don't want anyone to see the black circles under my eyes that would ensue if I changed to such schedules.

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