Polyphasic Sleep, Day 10 | The Probabilist . com

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 10 January 10, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [News], Sleep , trackback

I tried some experimenting during the past two days. When I went for a nap, I decided to restart the polynap sleep track from its beginning whenever I was consciously awake to notice that several minutes had past without falling asleep. This way I would always get at least 20 minutes of sleep, but on the downside, the time it took stretched up to 30 minutes past the allocated schedule during the very alert periods when I faced trouble with napping. Consequently, the whole experiment left me more groggy and tired after naps than during my previous schedule of fixed nap times that didn’t question whether I fell asleep or not.

I’d say the final verdict was a 2, because I was faced with much more resistance to getting up for my exercises. On a positive side, I again overslept once - during the noon nap today at the end of the 48-hour cycle, but it was only for an hour and I recalled having some form of a dream at least on this nap. Something was appearing on the other naps occasionally, but they just didn’t project into distinguishable events that I could remember of afterwards.

I’ve always stuck to the sleep - exercise - eat pattern on the polyschedule. It’s just the other 2.5 hours in between that I’ve been tweaking and at times, kept pretty flexible. Now I’m turning back to my original, strict schedule where I won’t accept doing anything else than exactly what is planned.

The weather has been really weird, but to my favour. Yesterday in the middle of the night, we had +9 degrees although last year we were at a 2-week -20 degree stretch at this exact time frame. There hasn’t been any snow since November either. So I’ve been able to enjoy my walks and runs on a more favourable terrain. Even though I’m already far away on adjusting to polyphasic sleeping, I haven’t seen any radically positive changes in a week now. I’m not finished tweaking and optimizing my schedule until I’ve reached a definitely sustainable, no more than 2-hours-per-day working system where I always fall asleep on my naps, and preferably, don’t need any forms of alarms to wake me up.