Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Day 7

5:30am

So it is day 7 and I am feeling pretty good. We changed the schedule one last time to make it something we can live with. I think it is going to work really well.

1. We started with Dymaxion: 4 , 30 minute naps at 8am, 2pm, 8pm and 2am for a total of 2 hours

2. On day 6, we added an Everyman core nap of three hours for the 2am block to get us through the night, total of 4 hours

3. Day 7 we have decided to create a new variant schedule: 6, 30 minute naps with the late night weighted. Times are 8am, 2pm, 8pm, 2am, 4am, 6am, total of 3 hours. Plus we are thinking about adding a free fall sleep night on Friday nights due to research we read.

The shift of schedule is due to the following. First of all it was very painful to get through the 2am to 8am shift awake. We needed to break that up better. But adding a core sleep seemed dangerous because it seemed to be mixing types of sleep (this might be a good thing for your body?). However, we have read that a core sleep of only 3 hours plus 3 naps can leave people basically constantly sleep deprived and feeling sluggish for a month or more. Some report only feeling good on the second month. We also had heard that on the Uberman, people generally felt good, it was just that the hours, nap 20 every four hours was to difficult to maintain in society. Weighting our naps to the night time, makes the time between our naps unequal but also leaves us with a nice 6 hour spread during the day which makes all the difference when you have to leave the house etc.

The last variation, a free fall sleep once a week or month we heard was heathly. I am nervous to do it right away because I want to acclimate my body first to the routine, but we will consider it, and hope that it proves to be a nice addition. Besides reading that letting the body sleep for 5 or so hours every so often was good, we actually felt the effects of it after doing a 3 hour core trial. Even though we aren’t going to stick with a core nap, doing a three hour chunk on Day 6 helped my body feel better, and as Lucas points out it was a physcological necessity. Napping for 30 minutes is not very satisfying, you don’t feel like you are getting sleep, and that is hard to adjust to mentally.

So I am feeling fairly good right now and as each day passes I feel in the mood to do regular work and mental activities etc. Before it was hard to focus your mind for more than an hour or so at a time, without exhaustion knocking at the door. I woke up very sleepy from my 2am nap, but the 4am nap was good. Again, it seems like doing a 30 minute nap schedule is dangerous because if you get into bed 5 minutes early, you might risk jumping into that extra sleep schedule and waking up dizzy and drowsey.

I continue to feel 100% more tired at night than durring the day. At night I have to do physical things often just to stay awake, and even that sometimes is challenging. The other thing that is important in general when doing this is to have lots of things to work on and do. Boredom on top of a stressful mental and physical adjustment leaves you feeling kind of helpless.

So all in all, things seem to be good. We are sticking with it, after lots and lots of doubt in the last two days. We just felt that we would never want to go through the first week again, so if we are going to try it it might as well be now. And every day that we stick with it we feel luckier that we are getting the opportunity to try it out. I think the modifications are perfect for us and I think it is a managable system all around. Lets see how it goes.