I sit here at 1 am in a completely different (and more complicated) situation than I would have imagined. However, other than the fact that I'm mad at myself for not posting the past 2 nights (I consider a few hours ago to be a night also), I'm doing quite alright.
In my last post I told you guys to stay tuned for a post about my New Year's Resolution of switching to a polyphasic sleep schedule. For those of you wondering what the heck this is, polyphasic (poly = many, phasic = phases) breaking up and condensing the normal 8 hour sleep. A few different methods have been made over the years, the Everyman's sleep cycle, consisting of a 3 hour "core nap" and three 20-30 minute naps throughout the day for a total of about 4 hours, the Uberman's sleep cycle, which consists of 6 20-30 naps throughout the day, spaced 4 hours, for a total of 2-3 hours of sleep, and the intense Dymaxion sleep cycle, which consists of four 30-45 minute naps every 6 hours for a total of 2-3 hours also.
Many have tried these polyphasic sleep schedules over the years, many to fail miserable. The most famous of those that have succeeded and inventor of the Dymaxion sleep schedule, Buckminster Fuller, stayed on schedule for 2 years, stopping only because of social inhibitions, and who can blame him. After just one day, I found myself having to schedule my day around naps. I guess that's not too unordinary though. Who among us plans our day and just chooses a random time during the day to get our 8 hours? Okay maybe that didn't make as strong of a point to college students as to those in high school or out of college, but you get what I'm saying.
There are multiple well known cases of bloggers undertaking this change, and with great success. Steve Pavlina undertook the Uberman sleep cycle for 5 and a half months, stopping for social reasons as well as it simply being too unreasonable for him to carry on in a world of monophasic sleepers. It is also said that Leonardo da Vinci experimented with polyphasic sleeping. There definitely hasn't been a lack of attempt in the area.
I can't remember where I first saw the subject brought up. I'm pretty sure it was from Tynan's blog just a few weeks ago, as it was something he tried out last year, but I could be mistaken. I always seem to be drawn quite quickly to strange and sometimes daunting tasks such as this so it's not much of a surprise to me that I have chosen to try.
I would have started during this winter break, but I didn't know anything about the subject until I read it just a couple weeks ago, a bad time to start as I was leaving for vacation to Colorado in a few days. I made the plan to start as soon as I got back to school, this past Friday. Caught up in stuff going on though, I didnt start until this past Saturday.
I made the decision to attempt the Everyman's sleep schedule as it wasn't to far off from how I've grown to sleep at college over the past 6 months. I would still be sleeping a good chunk at night, but just a smaller chunk accompanied by naps during the day. I figured it would give me a taste of the polyphasic life without sacrificing my oh so pleasant nights or daytime flexibility of schedule. So without further ado, here is how the past 2 days have gone.
Saturday night I stayed up until 4:20 am for no good reason and proceeded to take my first shortened "core nap" of 3 hours. Setting my alarm for 7 am, I fully expected to have world's of trouble waking up as I often do. To my surprise, though, it was quite the contrary. My first alarm (my phone) went off, I got out of bed, and walked to turn off my other 2 alarms that went off seconds later. Nap number one was complete, and shorter than it was supposed to be.
The rest of my day was rather normal, aside from the fact that I scheduled my naps first and then my day. I've never been that great at falling asleep quickly, so I downloaded a sleep track I had read about for use with "polynapping" from this website. It has a nice white noise for the beginning of the track and was actually quite useful for my naps. My first nap, taken at 12:30, lasted about 23 minutes, the second, taken at 6:40, lasted 25 minutes, and the third, taken only 4 hours later at 10:50, lasted 24 minutes. Falling asleep, which I included in these times, took a bout 5-10 minutes each. This was rather interesting as how easy it was falling asleep was quite different each time. I would have thought it would be easier to fall asleep on each subsequent nap, but it wasn't. The first was the easiest, while the last one had me feeling that I'd never fall asleep. However, to my surprise I fell asleep each time.
I'm not quite sure how to describe the naps, as I've never really forced myself to take a short nap. I really focused on clearing my mind and I can't stress enough how much this helped. I tried creating a sort of dream in my head to coax myself into drifting off into dreamland and it worked quite nicely. I can't say I fell asleep fully, but I didn't expect to. REM doesn't happen til about 90 minutes after you fall asleep, so the naps right now are more of just short rests than actual sleeping.
After the 3rd nap, I went out to hang out with friend and at 3:30 made my way back to my dorm for my 4 am bedtime. This is where things have changed drastically.
I set my 3 alarms like usual, but my body just did not want to cooperate with them as they had the night before. I am quite pathetic at waking up and this was certainly example. I turned off to alarms and reset the alarm on my phone all without quite fully waking up. Sure I was awake, but my mind was not functioning yet. I think this habit may be a side effect of my sleep troubles as a child (I may post about this another time, but it's rather unimportant right now) but whatever the case, it happened. I ended up waking at 10:30, getting 6.5 hours of sleep rather than the desired 3. Saying that I felt like a failure is an understatement.
Through today I argued back and forth with myself on whether to get back on schedule or to wait til another holiday weekend or at least until the upcoming weekend. Throughout the day, I read the whole log of Steve Pavlina's successful undertaking of the Uberman's schedule. It was after reading those logs that my goals changed. No longer did I just want to dip my toes in the waters of polyphasic sleep by trying Everyman's, but I wanted to take the full on plunge. I wanted to experience all the unique effects of a full on polyphasic sleep schedule that Steve had reported. Everyman's would probably not show all of these and I am not one to stop short. After finishing every log, I made the decision to take on the Uberman schedule, not sometime in the future, but right now. I know, I'm insane. Classes start tomorrow (today?) and as far as I can tell, I'm supposed to be a zombie for the next week. Yet I still feel I will succeed. My curiousity and motivation has been increasing exponentially each minute and I can't see myself giving up. The only obstacle in my path is that my class schedule is up in the air right now. I have to go through add/drop the next couple of days to get the classes I need and if there's no time for a nap every 4 hours, I'm going to have to rethink my plans. At this point in time, though, I have every intention of carrying it out.
I took my first 30 minute nap today at 5:30, this time without the sleep track. I felt I could focus enough to get myself to fall asleep and I didn't want to depend on the the track in the future. If I wasn't going to continue using it, why would I use it now? It worked just fine. I fell asleep after about 7 minutes and woke up from my short rest when my roommate knocked on my door after 27 minutes, just short of the 30 minute alarm. I changed and went to the gym, longer than usual, and got back to my room at 10:30. Later than I probably should have.
I expected to fall asleep within minutes, but that didn't happen. I'm still not quite sure if I completely fell asleep during that time, but I'm guessing I did, as I don't remember the complete passing of time from after about 10 minutes. It's 1:56 right now and I plan to take my next nap as soon as I finish this post.
While its probably not smart of me to start this now, I can't help it. As they say, curiosity killed the cat, and right now, its nipping at my tail. I just couldn't delay trying this, so I'm going to suffer through a few days of classes and then I have the weekend to hopefully get over the inital hump. Next week I may actually be getting some real sleep. Whether that be on a polyphasic or monophasic schedule is unknown until I solve my class problem. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment