Polyphasic Sleep

Step 9 2007-08-31 - A Change Of Plan

Well I fell off the wagon in a big way today. I was so tired that I'd decided to have a nap at 3AM as well, and Matt also was planning to do this. Last time we slept together we overslept badly so we decided to sleep in different locations... but we still overslept badly. I woke up at 7 and was so pissed off and tired and shaky that I simply went back to sleep again, determined not to wake up until I wasn't shaky any more. And so I slept all day until almost 5. I'm still a little shaky, unfortunately, and I'm not sure how to move forward from here.

Has anyone else of all the people who've done similar sleep schedules and commented here, felt this kind of internal shakiness? Like you haven't eaten in over a day?

More when I figure it out.

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Friends, I am not giving up yet. However I'm going to scale back the attempt a bit, as the 'cold turkey' approach clearly isn't working for me. I'm going to aim for an Everyman schedule, which allows for 'core sleep' plus naps, and I'll work up to it.

Goal
Core Sleep: 3AM - 6AM
Naps: 4 of 20-30 min each
Nap 1: 10AM
Nap 2: 2PM
Nap 3: 6PM
Nap 4: 10PM

I'll start tonight with a longer core sleep of 2AM - 6AM and make sure I get 30 minutes each nap. This works out to a total of 6 hours per 24, which should not kill me. If I can handle that, then I will drop the core sleep by half an hour for a while, and then by another half hour until I'm down to starting at 3AM. I expect 'a while' to be in the neighborhood of 3 or 4 days, but I'll let how I feel determine the actual times. I'll scale back the naps as I go, or not, again depending on how I feel. For tonight I'll skip the 10PM nap because I slept so much earlier today.

Comments

[AnitraF]

There are, indeed, three stages of sleep. When in college I found out through my own experience that I wake better during REM Sleep. If I wake during Light Sleep I am still tired, as if I haven't slept, and when I wake during Deep Sleep I find it extremely hard to get going, etc., just as described here. With the help of a friend, I determined what my 'Node Point' is. That is the point at which I have completed a full cycle from REM to REM. You do this by having the friend observe you while sleeping. Your eyes will twitch during REM Sleep. I found that my personal Node Point is 2 hours. I have since verified this in many ways - if I sleep for eight hours, I wake refreshed, if I sleep for nine I do not, despite getting more sleep. If I know I cannot sleep a full eight hours I will deliberately set my alarm for a multiple of two hours - two, four, six - and will usually awaken refreshed. Even a two-hour nap will do better for me than a three hour one. You said at one point you were doing well on 20 minutes, but not on 30 minutes. I suspect this has something to do with your personal Node Point. Perhaps you should consider investigating this further. I look forward to reading more of this Instructable.

[Grey_Wolfe]

Ivan's got a pretty good point there. Back when I was in 8th grade, I accidently fell into a nap cycle that ended up giving me more rest with less sleep. I had not been sleeping well for days, so I crashed out when I came home from school one day and ended up sleeping til 1:30am. The next day I was tired again when I got home and did the same but woke up in about three hours at 6:30pm, went back to sleep at 10 and slept till 1:30. After that I would take an hour nap at about 3:30 and then sleep from 10 to about 1:30. I never had any deprivation issues during this sleep pattern, and it held true for about a month. Then we had family come in for a couple weeks and it threw off the schedule. Sadly, I've never gotten it back. Anyway, point is, I weaned back the time spent sleeping (however accidently), and had no real side effects. Woke up without alarms, and felt more rested then I had in years. Good luck with your experiments on this though. I hope you gain some positive results and would love to read them when you do.

[x_joinmeindeath]

i used to do the same in eight grade. but then during the summer, since i didn't force my sleep i would sleep at three in the morning and wake up at nine or ten during ninth grade and now tenth grade i can't get back into that routine

[IvanJM]

I haven't read anything but this instructable. That said, the problem is probably not that you need a "core sleep" but that your naps need to start out longer. Perhaps 5 one hourish naps. This would be a lot closer to the amount your used to getting. After a week or so (earlier if you find you have too much trouble falling asleep) start cutting down your naps by five or ten minutes. By keeping the core you allow your body to keep using it's old pattern. It may keep trying to fit what it used to do into your core time. Choose the number of naps you want and perhaps try to be more flexible about duration. At times of high stress we tend to need more sleep. You might find that even if you get yourself comfortably down to 20 minutes, if you pick up a few stresses every now and then and it doesn't quite seem like enough. Just add a bit more for a few days till you feel right again. A lot of things cause stress, good and bad. Worrying that your sleep experiment might not be working causes stress. Your mind may start panicking, or it may spend hours trying to think up a different way to fix it (when you haven't really given it the chance to prove it can't work. In the past, when I read about meditation, there are those who claim they no longer need more than a couple hours of sleep. These people are experts at avoiding and releasing stress. When you add meditation time to sleeping hours, it's probably on par with how long most of us just sleep or close to it.

[Subvert]

I'm in no way trying to claim to be any authority on meditation, but I'm convinced you're right. I've sorta stumbled upon training myself to meditate, and just sitting around resting without actively meditating feels a lot more restful for me now. When I go to sleep, I pretty much just meditate myself to sleep. Training the brain not to waste energy on what is out of your control at the moment is a big help. Having confidence in yourself, having plans and goals, all good things. Oh, and you don't have to be all sensory deprived to meditate either. You get to where you can supress your reactions to sensations if necessary. It's not really like just going numb (emotionally nor physically), it's controlling your reactions. People experience emotions or physical pain, but how you react to these things is largely under your control (especially if you work on it). I haven't messed with it a lot (or researched it at all), but there's also moving meditation (like tai chi). I'm also convinced that this is effective, and I've talked with a buddhist friend of mine about this, and we both feel that you can do this safely while driving. I think of it as a kind of relaxed alertness/awareness. Mmm neurology, yay. Maybe I'll get motivated to try to write up an Instructible on how to learn to meditate.