Wednesday, 8 August 2012
Oversleeps & Lack of Motivation + New Schedule
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.
Friday, 27 July 2012
Everyman Spamayl Adaption - Day 6
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!
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Spamayl w/Core - Day 1
Today was my first attempt at the SPAMAYL based schedule that I wrote about yesterday. Last night I slept half an hour at:
-10:30pm
-11:40pm
-1:00am
They were half an hour long because even though I gave my smart alarm a 15 minute period to wake me up in for some reason it always woke me at the 30min mark, which I'll now be changing to 25 minutes.
I have to say though that sleeping like this was really interesting. I had a second nap soon after the first because I was feeling quite groggy. I noticed that upon waking from the second nap I felt much more awake. Falling asleep was no problem. When I awoke overtime I felt like I'd slept forever. I don't really understand how sleeping less more frequently feels better than sleeping more less frequently, but it does. My third nap I took because I was bored. Now that was a blessing, not having to wait up pointlessly for my next scheduled sleep. I awoke alert from a vivid dream on that nap, which pleased me to no end. Already I'm seeing benefits.
I noticed I got really tired at about 3am though, which doesn't usually happen. I decided not to have another nap though because I wanted to be tired enough to fall asleep for my core. I ended up having a ton of micro-naps. Come 4:30am I fell asleep straight away for my nap. The entire last hour was REM, although I don't remember it because I woke a little late at 6:20am just as I was falling back into deep sleep.
Now. I ended up oversleeping. I haven't woken up before 7am in over six weeks so of course the first thing I would do is look at the clock and think, omg. Why. Even though I felt awake enough I decided to just go back to sleep and have a normal three hour core and wake at 7:30am instead. So it figures that I forgot to set my alarm and I woke naturally at 8:30am drenched in sweat. Somehow that always seems to happen, and although whenever I oversleep I never have my sleep graph running, it seems like I got straight back into deep sleep for that hour before waking.
So altogether I actually slept about 6hrs. I'm not too bothered though, I felt like that sleep in was due for a long time, and is a good way of feeling rested when about to attempt another extreme schedule. I didn't feel awful when waking either because it was all taken in parts. In future though I'll probably just have a nap an hour after waking for some more REM. All in all over the first three naps and 90minute core I recorded, I had about 2hrs of deep sleep, an hour of REM, and twenty minutes of light sleep. Of course then I accidentally slept an extra 2hrs so it was probably more than that in total.
I had a tired period a couple of hours ago and so decided to prepare by having an afternoon nap. I had about 10 to 15 minutes of light sleep. I may refrain from having an evening nap though, even if I'm tired because I've already slept so much, and sometimes it can still take me up to half an hour to fall asleep at night if I'm already so well rested.
So concludes my weird first day of a SPAMAYL type schedule.
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Thursday, 12 July 2012
Back to Triphasic - Day 6
Today, in comparison to yesterday, I've had a very good day. I woke last night after 45 minutes sleep with minimal inertia. I stayed up most the night watching Supernatural. Come 4:30am I fell asleep straight away. In fact it was one of those sleeps where I fell asleep so fast that I woke again about an hour later wondering why I was still awake, not realizing I'd actually fallen to sleep. It was pretty weird. It took me about ten minutes to fall back to sleep, before I woke up again at 7:20am.
As a side note I believe that from looking at my sleep graph today I've had a lot more REM sleep than I have done for the last few days. As one of my side projects I've actually been inspired to learn about occultism, and one of the exercises involve having a dream diary. At first I wrote it off as not being able to remember anything, yet miraculously after contemplating it for five to ten minutes loads of different dream images and feelings from my core sleep came back to me. I'm hoping I can use this to hone my polyphasic dreaming. From there I'm hoping to go onto lucid dreaming, as many polyphasers do, although that's still a very long term goal at the moment.
The morning core itself was very good in quality, the first half was all deep sleep, and the second half was mainly REM and lighter sleep. I still felt quite tired for the first couple of hours on waking though, although not so much so that I was in danger of accidentally falling asleep. Come 2:30pm and I wasn't tired, yet through all my experience of polyphasic sleeping I've learned to make myself tired and ready to sleep at the switch of a thought. From the moment I think "I need to be tired now," it takes ten minutes before I become so tired that I can't stand. I went to bed at 2:45pm, yet for some reason after it taking me about ten minutes to actually fall asleep, I woke up twenty minutes later. I was incapable of actually sleeping longer. I did try but nada, zilch, no luck. I currently feel great, I'm just slightly concerned for how I may feel later on in the day. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I just really didn't need more than that. I really don't understand what happened there.
Altogether over the last 24 hours I've actually only slept 4 hours, which has to be a record for me. It feels odd, because I feel fine enough, better perhaps. It will be interesting to see how I fare tomorrow and whether my body decides to try and make up for it or whether it really just didn't need all that extra sleep. The only thing I'm concerned about is how there should only be two different sleep times throughout the day, and sleeping 20 minutes in the day makes that three different times instead. Every so often it's fine I'm sure, but all the time and it's more likely to confuse the body. We'll see how it goes anyway.
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Monday, 25 June 2012
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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Sunday, 24 June 2012
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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Thursday, 14 June 2012
Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 26
Day 26:
Yesterday I had no problems. I wasn't even tired in the day so I decided to forfeit my nap again and do some exercise instead. I got tired a bit earlier in the night though. It was a struggle to keep my eyes open till 1:00am. I did though.
I woke up at 6:30am in the morning, giving me 5.5 hours of sleep. Being awake so early in the morning to me still doesn't actually feel that early and actually I'm thinking I prefer being awake in the early mornings compared to the late nights. It's very peaceful and calm, and of course my tranquil isn't being disturbed by tiredness. as it would do later in the night. My mind's a lot more active and creative early morning. Due to this I still think I could wake up an hour or two earlier in the morning. I don't know why exactly but it feels like time goes super fast first thing in the morning.
I know initially I wrote that I was going to move my bed time back a couple of hours and then I decided that I hated it, but my body's already adjusting to being awake earlier in the morning, meaning that although I still don't really want to to go bed too early, I'm too tired to argue with my brain. In future I'll just fall asleep when I get tired, after all, I do have a time frame of about 4.5 hours to choose from. And if I fall asleep at 11:00pm and wake up at 4:30am then all the better. It will be at least a very interesting experience.
A note for reference, I've been very probe to being emotionally unstable since I changed my hours asleep from 4.5 to 5.5. I don't know why this is exactly. I did read somewhere that too much REM sleep can cause depression, but that sounds pretty much impossible in relation to my situation. Sure, I've been getting twice as much REM sleep with just an hour extra sleep a day, but that's still at least half the amount compared to the amount people sleeping a normal 7 to 8 hour night have. Only thing I can think of is how my body got adapted to hardly having any the first couple of weeks and decided it didn't like it being doubled a while later. But that still doesn't make sense because when I was on 4.5 hours of sleep a day I wasn't getting nearly enough and should've had an REM rebound.
Otherwise, I'm thinking this experiment should be called something more along the lines of "super short monophasic sleep with a biphasic option to nap during the day depending on how I'm feeling." I've noticed that 5.75 hours is enough to ride me out the whole day perfectly yet 15 minutes less and I get super tired during the mid-aftertoon. Weird.
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Saturday, 2 June 2012
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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