Polyphasic Sleep - Week 7!

Today marks the beginning of my seventh week sleeping polyphasically. The last two weeks have certainly been a rollercoaster. I've switched from biphasic 5hr + 30min to triphasic 3 x 1.5hr and back to a differing biphasic 1.5hr + 3hr. The first biphasic I enjoyed because of its ease, yet I never felt rested enough upon waking. The second biphasic suits me better, yet currently I can only get about five hours between sleeps, which isn't enough. Triphasic has been my favorite so far, but sleeping three times a day has proven impractical for me.

Each has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Personally I am nope convinced that if I had the flexibility I would flourish on something like a 2 x 2hr biphasic schedule, with a sleep at the same times on opposite times of the day. However, this isn't something I can do, and the problem is adapting to a schedule that works around my 14 hour day gap. Half the time I can get a short nap in the mid afternoon, but it's not something I can be reliant upon.

Personally out of all three I think I prefer the biphasic schedule I'm currently on. Yet it would be so much better if I had the flexibility to go to bed earlier so that my wake gap isn't so long. So I've come up with another plan. I've decided that I'm going to keep this current biphasic schedule up for another week at least to see how I feel before cutting half an hour off my nap, as I tend to naturally wake up after anywhere from 45mins to 1hr. And that's not just my sleep monitor talking, I usually remember waking at that time. Although I have no idea how this will affect my morning sleep, as long as I get all my nap before midnight this shouldn't be a problem. They do say an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two after.

If it works I wouldn't have to worry about not being able to chat with friends because I'm sleeping too late into the morning. Usually when I wake up they're all tucking themselves into bed, unfortunately. Also, if it works, I would have succeeded in further cutting my sleep down to four hours, which would be awesome. What I'm hoping for is for more deep sleep compressed between my two major REM cycles in my morning core, so that there's not so much Stage 2 sleep in there. However, I won't get ahead of myself yet, this may not work, it's merely a vague long term goal as of now.

Otherwise, I found this free app on my Android that records how much sleep you get and then creates statistics from it. I added all my information from the last 31 days and found it really easy to keep up to speed with my changing sleeping patterns. Here are the main statistics:

-Number of records: 58
-Number of days: 31
-Total sleep time: 180.2hrs
-Average daily sleep: 5.8hrs
-Average time asleep: 3.1hrs

So over the last 31 days I've gained 83.3 hours compared to as if I'd been sleeping an average monophasic night of 8.5 hours. That's equivalent to 5.2 extra monophasic days, if you count an average monophasic day as 16 hours. It feels like having an extra day on the weekend. In fact more often than not on the weekends now I'll find myself confused as to what day it is. Because of the extra time awake it'll feel like Monday on Sunday. It's weird, but I guess my mind will get used to it in time, like everything else.

I have two graphs here from my statistical sleep app. The first is a graph of the amount I've slept over the last 30 days:

The blue line is the amount I've slept per day, the grey line running through the middle is my personal amount needed per day, namely 5 hours, and the green line is how I rated each sleep. Notice the large leaps of blue. They're sleep-ins. Now notice how the rating goes down underneath those sleeps. My sleep quality seems to have overall improved since going triphasic and then back to this other biphasic.

The second graph shows the patterns in my sleep, aka, a visual representation of my sleep times. This spans the last 10 days:

The first couple of days show my old biphasic system, the middle show my triphasic, and the end show my weird mix of new biphasic and monophasic, bearing in mind that I haven't had time to develop much of a pattern here yet.

So make what you will of all that. I shall have to end this blog here because I need to go and make dinner. Basically, this concludes my overview of the end of my sixth week of polyphasic sleep. This is definitely by far my best week as of yet. I just feel incredible over all. Onwards to week seven! (Yes it is slightly addicting! ^^)

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Back to Biphasic - Day 3

Last night I almost had a lapse in will power again. I kept on thinking that if I wanted to feel better I needed to sleep more, and almost went monophasic again. I guess this is years of conditioning at work here. The only way I got past that was to drill it into my head that more sleep creating better health is an illusion. Then I decided that I can't go wrong with one night of biphasic just to be sure. It's not exactly going to kill me. And if I felt worse the next day for half as much sleep then and only then could I make the decision to go back to sleeping monophasically.

Thank God for my spatial reasoning. It was only that that pulled me through. Every weekend I tell myself not to sleep in because I'll regret it the next day. Yet every weekend I end up repeating the same mistake over and over. It really isn't worth it. After sleeping biphasically again last night for 4.5 hours altogether, I feel so much better. I've yawned about three times today, in comparison to the thirty times I must've yawned yesterday. Nothing aches, I'm not sleepy, my mind is clear, and I've felt bright and dandy all day. I'm currently approaching hour 9 after my core sleep of 2.45 hours, the time my smart alarm woke me, and I still feel as good as the minute I woke up.

I definitely won't be doing that again. No way. Nuh uh. That's what she said...

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A Night of Monophasic

Who's the hell was this idea?! I don't even remember why I did this last night. I woke up after my nap after an hour and a half at 12:30am, and I awoke completely awake, with no sleep inertia or anything, yet I just couldn't be bothered to stay awake for a few hours and go back to sleep. I guess I had a temporary lack in will power. But that's ok because it's reminded me how shit monophasic sleep is.

I must have woken up a gazillion times during in the night. In fact my sleep graph is all over the place. I woke up at 3am bright and dandy after a mega dream, and after looking at my sleep graph all I could think was 'fuck'. The last three hours perfectly resembled the last few days of my morning sleeps. That was the good part.

I couldn't sleep for another 2 to 3 hours after that, and if i did fall to sleep I would just wake up again. Come 5am I was able to fall back into some resemblance of sleep again, but it was just this weird mixture of REM and stage 2 sleep. When I awoke I felt like hell. My head felt, and still feels super groggy, I feel dizzy, I feel sick, I can't stop yawning, bearing in mind that I wasn't yawning at all on the other sleep schedules. My body temperature has also gone through the floor. I feel like I'm on fire and it's awful. I have virtually no energy to do anything. Not to mention that after 9 hours in bed all I could think about on waking was "I just want to go back to sleep, I'm so incredibly tired." My eyes hurt, my muscles feel awfully stiff, and I'm already irritated and grumpy because I'm having to do so much in the day without anytime for myself. It feels like my day has been cut in half.

The worse is that tonight it'll probably take me about half an hour to fall asleep tonight. This was the worse idea ever. I feel like shit, completely unrested. I swear this time that whatever it takes I am going back biphasic. Like I said before I would prefer to go back to triphasic but it's pretty impractical for my schedule. So biphasic it is. Whatever it takes. For my sanity.

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Back to Biphasic - Day 2

Last night I decided to give myself a sleep in. To do that I ended up falling asleep at 11:00pm for my nap, and falling asleep at 4:15am for my core sleep. It took me about 20 minutes to fall asleep on my core as only 3.75 hours had passed since I had taken my nap and I was still quite awake. I had to take my core earlier because unfortunately my mum won't let me sleep past 9:00am. It wasn't a major problem though, I just did a low key activity all morning, namely watching Supernatural, so that my mind didn't end up so stimulated that I couldn't fall asleep at all.

Here's the chart for my first nap:



As can be seen, it was pretty restless, and in actual fact I remember waking half way through. Once thing that is interesting is that half way through I seem to be having dreams from a period of anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, and then again at the end for 5 minutes. I can never remember full dreams however, I only ever have fleeting images upon waking. As soon as I try to put words to these images, they get lost and I can no longer recall what they were. I don't actually know why this happens.

My core sleep was about 4.5 hours altogether, giving me a total of 6 hours sleep. I have to say it felt like an eternity seeing as I haven't slept more than 5.5 hours in over a month. I just want to say how bad my back ached when I woke up. Everything felt severly stiff, and I was feeling sleepy all morning, although not tired. Here's the graph:



Key:
4 = Awake
3 = REM (dreaming)
2 = Stage 2 Sleep (Light sleep)
1 = Deep sleep

There was virtually no deep sleep in here, although it seemed to be interspered in small 5 to 10 minute increments, which is too fine to graph here. In fact overall I barely had any deep sleep, I don't know why that is. Note though how similar it is to yesterdays core sleep chart, bearing in mind that today I slept half an hour longer:



I am starting to see a pattern here. Based on this information, I'm going to put my alarm on for 3.5 hours tonight, giving me a period of 15 minutes to fall asleep and my smart alarm a period of 15 minutes to wake me up. I seem to be having about half an hour of deep sleep and an hour of REM, but I'm slightly concerned about all that stage 2 sleep in the middle. It makes up for nearly an hour. I suppose it is important though. It'll be interesting to see what my graphs will look like after a week.

Back to Biphasic - Day 1

Last night was the first night of my new biphasic schedule. I went to bed at 10:00pm and was woken up by my smart alarm at 11:40pm. I had a little sleep inertia, and I had a few micronaps before deciding to get up and doing a little exercise to shake it off. It wasn't bad, unlike being awoken after two hours, I think I must have been in stage 3 sleep heading back down for stage 4 when I was woken. Instead of posting my usual graph, I've decided to take the information and make a more easily readable chart, as it can be very difficult to distinguish between deep sleep and stage 2 sleep on my Sleep as Android app. I have learned to distinguish the two however, so here's a line graph of my first nap:

The key for the y-axis is:
4 = Awake
3 = REM sleep (Dreaming)
2 = Stage 2 sleep
1 = Deep sleep

It wasn't that great in terms of quality, but I still got a good amount of deep sleep. I found myself awake and alert though all the way through to my core sleep, par a tired period a around 2:30am. I didn't know whether I'd manage to fall asleep for my core seeing as it had only been about 5hrs since my last nap and I was still feeling pretty much awake. I surprised myself though by falling asleep almost instantly. Here's the graph:

A lot of my morning sleeps so far have been pretty erratic as my sleep is still rearranging itself. Here I fell asleep at about 4:40am and my smart alarm woke me at 8:20am, giving me about 3hrs and 40mins of sleep. It is a little more than I meant it to be, as initially I wanted to start off at 3hrs and 30mins and reduce down to 3hrs, but I only slept 3.5 hours the day before and I was pretty tired. My morning sleeps themselves actually feel really restful, but the cycles are more than a little messed up.

I've decided that over the weekend, starting tomorrow, I'm going to sleep-in with my core and let my cycles sort themselves out enough for me to know when I should cut it off, because at the moment, after looking over all the data from my morning sleeps over the last few days, there seems to be no easily distiguishable pattern.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm dreaming a lot more, but I can never rememeber full dreams, just bits and pieces. I'm hoping that after about a week my REM will start to re-adjust itself, and hopefully my deep sleep by the second week, if not by the end of the next week. One thing I'm concerned about is how about half of my core sleep at the moment seems to be stage 2 sleep, but again, I'm hoping that'll be replaced soon enough with either more REM or deep sleep.

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Triphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 4

With regret I have to say that I've changed to a different sleep pattern as I missed my nap, and on a schedule such as rigid as this, missing a nap is not an option. The problem is if I miss a nap, it takes me a few days to fall asleep at that time again. At this point in my life it's much too rigid. However it's one of the best sleep schedules I've tried as of yet, and as long as I woke up at the right time, I experienced no sleep deprivation. It's a shame really, but I may go back to this at some later point. It was really awesome, like having three days in one. I cannot stress enough how good this made me feel, and in fact this schedule came as natural as breathing to me. When I go to university though this is the schedule I'll definitely be trying first, providing I have the same times in each day to get in my afternoon nap.

Today though, I've decided to go back to a biphasic schedule. However, I'm not going to go back to the 5.5hrs+ 30mins again like I said I would. The problem is here that I can't always get my afternoon nap, and I'd rather not be reliant on that. Also, napping solely in 1.5hr increments has changed me, I agree that they're definitely much more restful than both a 20-30 nap and a 5 hour core when placed correctly. How anyone could call a 20 minute nap a compressed cycle beats me. I guess I shouldn't judge till I've tried a more extreme equidistant one such as Uberman. However, although I would try Uberman out of curiosity, I doubt I'd ever actually find time to do it. I also doubt I'd do it long term. For one I would find it a nuisance to have to sleep six times per day.

So the schedule I'm on at the moment is biphasic with a 3.5 hour core and a 1.5 hour nap. I've made the core quite short because I noticed that despite only having 2.15 hours of sleep this morning it didn't actually leave me feeling that tired throughout the day even though I missed my nap. I think my sister, who slept ten hours last night, was yawning more than me. In fact I wasn't even yawning at all. I think the important thing is that the right amount of sleep is gotten at about the right time, like a way of tricking the body into thinking it's had a cycle longer than it actually has had . So with no further adieu, here are the new plans I've drudged up so far:

10:00pm-11:30pm
4:30am-8:00am

That still gives me about five hours between each sleep, and I have the added advantage of falling asleep for my core when it's still dark. The way it would work is that my first nap would consist entirely of deep sleep, which would be ever the more efficient by being put an hour back. Then the first half of my 3hr core would be mostly stage two sleep, whilst the second half would be mostly REM sleep. Proportionally speaking, no more sleep than this is actually needed to be fit and healthy. And in actual fact if I couldn't take my night nap till later then I could always go triphasic again for a day or two, providing of course that there'll be chance for me to nap throughout the next day, but we can't always know that, we'll just see what happens. Otherwise, for real disasters such as partying late into the night, I'll probably just have to go monophasic, maybe with a nap squeezed in the next afternoon.

I guess really, all in all, I'm just sleeping a plethora of different schedules in the week. I don't mind though as they seem to compliment each other. Biphasic is probably the best though for everyday living. Either way, I think that after 6 weeks I've finally managed to trim off as much as 5 hours off my sleep and be as twice as functional on it.

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Triphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 3

I wasn't able to post this morning as I had a Doctor's appointment and, well, decided to leave it until after my afternoon nap. So yesterday's afternoon was pretty disappointing, I probably slept more than the day before but it was still pretty poor in terms of sleep quality. I was left feeling exhausted by the night and almost fell asleep early again. I managed to wait though.

I fell asleep at about 11:05pm and once again my alarm didn't wake me till 1am, consequently giving me 2 hours of sleep. I woke up with the most awful sleep inertia. I was fighting against the most primal urge to sleep for at least two hours. I was incapable of doing anything, I couldn't even find the willpower to exercise it off, I just ended up staring at the wall standing up for about 15 minutes before giving up. I can't actually remember what I did during those two hours, but I remember beginning to wake up at about 3:00am. I was ok from there on and watched Supernatural all morning and talked to a few Mexican friends for a while before my morning nap. That is one of the most awesome benefits so far, being able to talk to friends and family on the other side of the world who I haven't properly talked to in months due to the timing differences.

From now on for my night nap I'm going to try and sleep 1.5 hours instead of 2 to see if that prevents the sleep inertia. Otherwise, come morning I decided to go to sleep at 5:45am, but it was pretty restless, and although I was in bed for 2.5 hours I probably only slept about 1.5 hours of that. I was okay upon waking though. Again, I remember plenty of dreams and am really appreciating my morning nap the most. After having my deep sleep in the night it feels extremely complementing and restful.

Now, today I had my best afternoon nap of all time. I went to bed at 3:15pm and fell asleep within 10 minutes, waking up naturally about 40 minutes later wondering where on earth I was, completely devoid of any notion of perception. Once I completely came to and realized where I was I felt like I'd been asleep for hours.From the get go I had been completely unconscious. Here's the graph:

As can be seen it was extremely restful. I have yet to figure out the sleep stages ratio, but if I had to guess I would say that I cycled through about 15 minutes of stage 2 sleep either side with about 10 minutes of deep sleep somewhere in the middle there. I don't remember dreaming. I woke up about half an hour before my alarm feeling completely awake. No sleep inertia whatsoever. I feel absolutely amazing. My sister says she came in whilst I was sleeping and she said I was breathing so heavy it sounded like I was dying. My guess is that I had mostly four hours worth of stage 2 sleep compressed into those 40 minutes.

I have noticed somewhat of a pattern here though. I've noticed that my naps are ten times better if I involve myself in any type of exercise about half way through my wake cycle. So from now on I think that's what I'll do.

So far I absolutely love this. Best schedule ever. I feel completely rested, and it's true what they say about there being virtually no adaption time.

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