Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

So I skipped a few days writing during the regrouping phase. We made it through day 8 and then lost it, the first night for only a few hours of oversleeping and the next night more.

Last night I practically had a normal night 2am to 8am. 6 hours…Ugh. I definitely lost all the hard work I put into the first week, and we were so so close.   And I also feel like I let go of the whole thing in kind of a haphazzard way.  We wanted to suggest a tip to people, if you decide to quit, make yourself last one more day before quiting because making a decision at 4am when you are in a lot of pain is not always the best idea.

The first few days back living among the humans has been great. I am altert and sharp enough to finally get down to business and do a bunch of the things I had wanted to do.  That is one thing you certainly miss in the first week of adaptation, you don’t feel like doing much and that can get very boring.  Lucas keeps laughing as he remembers me wandering aimlessly around the apartment.

I have decided to go onto a very light schedule because I so disappointed in the tails I hear about everyman…in that people sleep 3 hour core and then naps and feel tired for 1-2 months, and never really have that energy thing that Ubermen talk about.  I figure rather than be tired, go ahead and sleep 4 hour cores and use my other hours in a better way etc. I figure I will still have a lot of time, but will also feel more rested.

It would be nice to find a groove, because it would be cool to have so much extra time.  I am currently thinking about 2pm, 8pm, 2am (all for 30 min) and then a core between 4 and 8am or 8:30.  We figured this schedule would also help us, help each other get up, though I do think it might eventualy be better to put the core at 3am to 7am… but I guess it is not that different.

Lets see how she goes this time.

We are still trying to find someone on the internet who actually was able to do Dymaxion sleep…amazing that we have come up empty handed so far.  Also read about a guy that is doing triphasic.  This sounds cool…I like the idea of having three equal sleep times. I want to learn more about the sleep cycles, and how the body goes through the cycles etc.

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.

We moved to the new schedule against Lucas’ wishes. He thought it would be a mistake to switch from one system to another, and he was right. We slept a 3 hour core from 2 to 5am and when we woke up feeling like a train wreck. I guess we kind of figured this would happen, but it was bad. We took a walk around the city trying to stay up and tried to last until our 8am nap which was only 3 hours away. We took a nap at 8am for 30 minutes and when we woke up felt really terrible again. You can’t even stay awake on the edge of the bed waiting to take a shower. You can’t stay awake in a chair. Very very uncomfortable. Lucas has decided to let his body reset and then adjust again. They say that the adjustment to this rythum only takes two days. But this is probably going to be much longer when we are starting in a major state of sleep deprevation. Never the less, I will try to hold on for fear of even greater pain getting started again. But not sure I will last.

Well, we ran into a few hitches. The 5 days with only 2 hours of sleep per day finally took its toll. We invited friends over to help us stay up during the dreaded and at this point very difficult night shift.

Unfortuately I have not had much of an appetite since I started the project and Thursday and I didn’t eat all of my lunch. I snacked on popcorn and mellon but by the time we ate around 1am, I was green in the face. I felt feverish and like I was going to throw up. I think my blood sugar level was extremely low. I had a cramp in my side that lasted 2 plus hours and the sum of all of it mixed with sheer exhaustion, shut me down. We tried to regroup. We decided to take our 2am nap early, but by the time our shocked friends left, it was 1:50. We slept until 2:35…this was 15 extra minutes and we woke up a bit nausiated.

We found it almost impossible to stay up. I tried to sit down and organize some papers but we were nodding off. By 5am we decided that we needed to add an extra interval nap time to get us through the 2am 8am shift. We had heard that some people do this during the period of adjustment. We kept the nap to 30 min. This seemed like it worked fairly well. We made it to our regular nap at 8am, but we woke at 8:30 and then layed in bed half awake half alseep until 9:30.

This mistake, along with my low blood sugar meltdown hurt our esteem. We felt so sad that our system had been derailed and once again considered abandoning the project. Lucas was still feeling pretty good. We began to consider our options for the 99th time around.

We looked on the internet and to my surprise we couldnt’ find anyone who had really successfully been able to do the Dymaxion and wrote about it. I got the feeling that what we were attempting was very extreme and I began to think that we needed to down shift in the short term as we acclamate our bodies.

We still go back and forth but the plan is to stay as is, but add a core to our 2am nap and reduce our naps by 10 min. to 20 min. We stay on the same 8am, 2pm, 8pm, 2am schedule, but we give our bodies a 3 hour core in the short term to help us with the night times. We are going to pay for it after the first core, because I am sure our bodies will be very confused, over sleeping is what really makes you feel badly.

It is now Friday at 6pm. We have been awake now for 5 days, or around 105 hours and only slept 9.5 hours…

I felt fine all day today. I really look forward to the transition being over so we can enjoy our hard work…

Llegamos al cuarto día, y no sin haber considerado varias veces dormir una larga y placentera siesta de 12 horitas. Es una idea cada vez más tentadora, pero conseguimos mantenerla a raya.
La sensasión general de el día 3 es un deseo de dormir horas y horas de un tirón, acompañado de oleadas de cuestionamientos, y replanteo de por que estamos haciendo lo que hacemos.

02:30 - Nos levantamos un tanto cansados. Tomé coca cola antes de dormir (y comimos pizza y creo que fue demasiado), conclusión: dormí mal y casi paso de largo (por primera vez). Vamos a salir a pasear por la ciudad, pero estoy hecho un escracho. Hasta ahora este suele ser el período más doloroso de adaptación, entre las 2 y la salida del sol.

05:00 - Volvemos de nuestro paseo, funcionó, no nos dormimos, pero seguimos cansados.

05:40 - Despues de intentar ver un episodio de una serie y casi dormirnos en las sillas, decidimos jugar a uno de los juegos que el fora dejó en casa. Y yo agrego unos mates a la ecuación.

07:55 - Lo del juego de mesa funcionó de maravilla, el tiempo pasó volando. Hora de la siesta. Hacer alguna actividad es muy buena idea para pasar las noches.

09:09 - El mate tan cerca de la siesta no fue muy buena idea. Hoy me levanté con las ultimas dos siestas mal dormidas. La de las 8 fue particularmente alarmante, me costó dormir(unos 5 minutos desperdiciados) y me costó levantarme. Pero estoy (relativamente) bien.

Mucha gente a esta altura ya abandonó el experimento. Los entiendo, yo casi lo hago más de una vez, pero realmente quiero tener esta experiencia, y ya estamos a mas de mitad de camino, asi que si llegamos hasta acá, vamos a seguir un par de días más. Pero confirmo que el “horrible período de adaptación” es, sobre todo, horrible.

14:00 - El cacho de la mañana estuvo durisimo. Fuimos al centro a hacer
trámites y pagar impuestos y casi nos dormimos en la cola del banco. Llegamos justo para la siesta de las 14, de más está decir que directamente a dormir.

15:20 - Nos levantamos de la siesta de las 14 un tanto aturdidos y cansados. Se esta poniendo pesado esto de estar todo el tiempo con sueño, cansado, e intentando no dormirnos en la silla. Intentar evitar la cafeína es el problema más grande.

15:25 - Pongo el agua para unos mates.

18:35  - El mate realmente ayudó, un poco mas de medio termo sin recargar la yerba. Dejé de tomar a las 18 como para que no me afecte el sueño de las 20. Espero que funcione. Jenny no está tomando mate ni café asi que si ella se adapta antes que yo al horario, ya se a que hecharle la culpa…

20:45 - Tarde en dormirme un poco más de lo normal, tuve un sueño un poco más liviano, pero me levanté de maravilla, sin sueño ni fatiga. 15 minutos después  está apareciendo una sensación de cansancio (no sueño).

5:32 am

Tonight has been really difficult but we were saved by a friend of ours, Fora, who came over and played a board game with us. This was the engaging physical activity we needed to get us through the first part of the evening. We took our 30 min nap at 2am on schedule while Fora was here but we both woke up feeling tired and even a little disoriented at first. We walked downtown and had a sprite at an outdoor cafe (at 3:30 am we could barely get a set in one of the 8 or so cafes) and then we walked home. We got home at 5am and tried to watch an episode, but we are having a lot of trouble staying awake while seated. We played the game again and it lasted luckly until our 8am goal.

It is hard because when you have no idea how you are going to pass the time awake, you don’t have anything to look forward to. The reward of a 30 minute nap is not really a reward, because your mind is craving sleep without abandon. We know that we are getting closer now to adoption, but this is so hard. I hope tomorrow night is better.

At times I had the sensation that the world was getting more cloudy…the wakeful dream state that some people have mentioned.

Lucas did have caffeine both before our 2am nap and a little bit after. I think it is ok because it is night time and we don’t have much choice…but there is always the wonder if that is holding back our REM sleep, which to my understanding is the key. We did eat very close to our 2am nap…pizza around 1am. We don’t remember having dreams, and we don’t feel so rested.

I really hope we make progress tomorrow. I do know it is easier to get through the day portions, there is more to do and the body responds.

6:32pm

We passed the day fairly well, but I felt very listless and had low energy throughout. We left the house at 9am to walk into town and ran errands. We barely got home in time to do our 2pm nap. That is what makes this type of sleep pattern tricky…you can’t be too flexible when it comes to the sleep schedule.

This afternoon we ate and I have been tired and somewhat uncomfortable. We watched a movie and I nodded off a bunch of times. I MISS SLEEPING! And today was really rainy so it was such a shame not to even be able to sit on my bed and read… It is hard to keep going when you don’t see that the results are getting closer, you just feel uncomfortable.

But with that said, we are definitely close to adapting, and it is really hard to believe that we are doing as well as we are considering we have only had 2 hours of sleep per day total. Looking forward to not dreading night time. We invited Marco and Alejo over…this will certainly be what saves us tonight.

Well we almost gave in and slept last night. Thank goodness, when one of us wants to quit it all together, the other one holds the line and is supportive. We were really feeling the need to sleep especially in our 2am to 8am shift. It is really strange when the whole world outside the window is completely silent and still. Another problem is that when you are adjusting you don’t feel like doing much. For example reading a book would have put me to sleep. We definitely didn’t have enough physical activities to do, and as I said that is really important for that late night portion during adjustment. We ended up sorting through old CD’s and organizing our book shelf.

We had a long talk this morning about switching to the Everyman system, which can consist of for an exmple a 3 hour “core sleep” and three 20 minute naps throughout the day. This schedule is variable, some people do the core 2 or even 4 hours and the naps can be 2 to 4 etc. From what we have read about this variation on the Uberman is that you can ajust the time of your naps 1 hour in each direction. So for example if we set our core from 2am to 5am and kept our naps at 8am, 2pm and 8pm, we could ajust our nap to 8:30am or 9am some days if needed. The problem with Uberman and maybe even the one we are doing, Dymaxion, you don’t have much flexiblity. Your body has a hard time flexing the schedule without feeling it.

The other information we read about Uberman vs. Everyman is that Uberman is easier to initially adjust to, with total mental clarity in 2 weeks or less, where as with Everyman the total mental clarity can talk up to 4 weeks.

We have heard that it is very difficult to switch from one schedule to another once you have set your body to that scheulde. For example, Steve Pavlina claimed that he had problems trying to switch from Uberman to Dymaxion.

So we are still wondering if we should make the switch now to Everyman tonight before our body become totally set up for Dymaxion. The Everyman sounds more reasonable in the long term, however we would miss experiencing the Dymaxion, which would be a shame. It seems that the fact that your sleep expands to include more than REM in Everyman must be significant in terms of biological matters. Also, we have read that people like to experience the cosy feeling of sleeping those three hours. We also think that during the night we might want less time as well. We will be adding almost 40 hours more to our week which is a lot of time to do various things, but may be too much.

I think we will try to stick it out with Dymaxion, but hope that if we switch to Everyman mid stream that our keeping the other 3 naps at the exact time will help with the trauma the shift will cause.

Today I woke up after our 8am nap, feeling very tired and a little dizzy. I got a second wind after 30 plus minutes of feeling really drowsy. The good news is that we both entered REM sleep! We are getting closer to adapting. The shower didn’t help wake me up. I didn’t drink a coffee today. We are really going to have to plan for tonight, sitting in front of a computer or watching a movie is not going to work. We need to be doing something more active, such as cleaning or playing cards.

~5:00pm
After the initital drowseyness we made it through the day feeling really good. We worked all morning and in the afternoon went grocery shopping. We were tired after our 8pm nap, so we decided to start that stint off with a walk to the plaza, were we sat for 2 horus talking. This outside stimulous and being away form the computer was a great idea.

 Anoche fue horrible. Mucho sueño, ganas de dejar todo y volver a la normalidad. A eso de las 4am Sentia que cada celula de mi cuerpo quería ir a dormir. Y casi lo hago. Estuvimos cerca. Pero decidimos darle un par más de días. Me tomé una taza grande de café extra negro y pude llegar despierto a las 8.

Hablamos de cambiar a un cronograma Everyman, con una siesta de 3 horas a la noche y 3 siestas de 20 minutos durante el día. Supuestamente es mucho menos drástico. Y Dormimos 4 horas en vez de 2. Pero por ahora seguimos con Dymaxion. Por lo menos hasta esta noche.

En la siesta de esta mañana (8am del miércoles 6) los dos soñamos! Parece que llegamos al MOR en menos de media hora. Además, al despertarnos nos me pareció que hubiese mos dormido toda la noche, y me desperté fresco como una lechuga.
 Definitivamente el café no fue tan noscivo.

9:10 - Ya siento la falta de sueño de nuevo. El período de recien levantado me-siento-re-bien se está agrandando de a poco (de a muy poco). He decidido tomar mate sin miramientos para mantenerme despuierto. Por lo menos hasta que no me haga más falta.

13:45 - Llegamos a la siesta de las 2 bastante cansados, pero el estado va mejorando. Los altibajos energéticos se van suavizando, pude trabajar y de vez en cuando sentí que me dormía en frente de la computadora, y tuve que pararme y caminar por unos segundos para que se vaya la sensación. Estamos planeando invitar gente esta noche para que nos ayuden a mantenernos despiertos a base de juegos de mesa. Mis capacidades motrices están al 85~90% y mi capacidad de raciocinio se ve bastante reducida. Supongo que este es el período zombie del que todos hablan. Me cuesta enfocarme y concentrarme, y a veces me siento muy cansado, pero ya casi es hora de la siesta. Espero que sigamos con M.O.R. y soñemos algo divertido.

20:50 - Despues de dormir la siesta de las 8 sigo casi tan cansado como antes de acostarme. Y un tanto ido también. Se viene mate/café para pasar la noche.

23:50 - Sin café. Llegamos muy cansados al final del día. Invitamos a un amigo a que nos divierta para poder mantenernos despiertos.

So I only have about 15 minutes to write this post before we get to take our 2pm nap. I have been feeling really good today except for the first 30 or so minutes after our morning 8am nap. The sun certainly helps pick your energy up. Also I find that if I don’t have something to do I get to feeling a bit strange, light headed, slight naseau etc. But when I am doing something that seems to fade away and I feel almost normal.

Again, I think most of the strangeness of last night was our built in apprehension about the way we would feel. We have stayed up until dawn occasionally during a Friday night and didn’t feel half as strange. When I reminded myself of that it was as if my mind cleared and I felt fine.

09:00

I made my regular cup of java this morning but only drank about 1/3 of it. We are planning to follow the advice of the others and not eat before nap. This afternoon we will walk into the center. I think the hardest part will certainly be tonight when the sun goes down.

We are rapping up the last major items of work we needed to complete. We actually postponed starting the project until after a major job was finished. So we should be able to coast without major deadlines into the first week.

The most exciting thing about last night was that I got to read a bit more about the process and to my surprise we are doing the Buckminster Fuller version! He is one of my heros in life. He was an philosopher and invetor who had one of the most original and refreshing minds of the 20th century.

So there is some presedence behind the 4/30 system…which I was wondering as we had considered the Uberman 6/20. Fuller called his version “Dymaxion Sleep” and apparently practiced it for 2 years. He claimed he stopped because the other businessmen around him would not tolerate the schedule.

“Dymaxion is an abbreviation of “dynamic maximum tension” , however it has also been reported that the name is a combination of the words dynamic, maximum, and ion. Fuller was very excited about the word and used it for many of his inventions in the decades to follow, including the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion World Map. He also renamed his elaborate journal, in which he sought to document his life as an experiment with the greatest possible detail, as the Dymaxion Chronofile.”

1:25 am

So this is technically Day 3…but to recap the latter part of Day 2, I will write here. I still felt fine most of the day with my mind’s point of view having a powerful effect on my physical state of being. For example,  if I get to thinking I should be tired, I feel tired. If I think, wait a minute I feel fine, I do feel fine, physically. I suspect this will decrease in the days to come as my mind will take a back seat to my body rather than the other way around. I haven’t noticed loss of cognative functions yet - I can read, do work etc. though I am a slight (9 on a scale of 10) bit physically clumsy and I assume that will increase in Day 3 through Day 5.

We have been following the advice of the others and today ate lunch right after we woke up from our 2pm. I felt drowsy for about 15 minutes after we awoke and wasn’t terribly hungry. In both the 2pm and 8pm naps I did “fall asleep” unlike day 1, where I was just tossing and turning without loosing conciousness. I don’t think I have experienced REM yet, but I am not sure as we have awoken twice with a start in the middle of our 30 min. Once with me waking up 10 minutes early and the last one with Lucas walking up 15 minutes in.

Some of the other people trying Polyphasic sleep have been recommending people to sleep on couches and floors…nothing too comfortable. For now (the first two days) , I have been trying to make myself VERY comfortable as I would when I normally go to bed (change clothes and brush teeth etc) , hoping to get to a relaxed and deep REM sooner than later. I also have thought at least in the first two days it helped to cover my eyes as well during the day and be in a darker room. Though this said, the recommendatiosn for not getting too comfortable were based on the risk over oversleeping which can delay the adaptation period. We are less concerned about tthe danger of oversleeping because we have the advantage of three alarm clock system plus eachother. (Yes, from all vantage points, it is great to be doing this with my boyfriend together).

In terms of the general ambiance…I feel like I am being dragged into some kind of …dimension. A sort of personal unchartered territory that I seem to be wading into gradually step by step. It is a strange feeling, and there are definietly times, like now, mintues before my 2am nap, where you want to turn back and just sleep.

I hope we can find enough things to do durring the 2nd wake cyle of the night. I think I need to do something semi active, to keep my blood flowing. Once again, I atticipate nighttime to be much harder than daytime. Tomorrow is supposed to be “zombie day”.

We went to bed at 2am, hoping to wake up at 8:30am to start our schedule. We woke to Pooma ringing the doorbell… it was 9:25 am. The famed alarm clock failed us. Or as we were later to discover, like most equipment failures — it was categorized: “operator error”.

We tried to sleep for our 2pm to 2:30pm nap, but weren’t very tired…and the same happened at our 8pm pass in which we were awoken by the 70’s Polaris, Lucas’ cell phone and a voice in his computer saying “wake up twice” in machine tone.

Things don’t feel strange…yet. But somehow the whole thing gets under your skin and for moments at a time you feel tired…a psychosomatic reaction to the experiment. I suppose my mind telling my body that I am tired is not the best way to get things off on the right foot.

1:37 AM
Absolutely incredible how strong the mind is. Lucas and I were both having periods of feeling strangely tired, and we still haven’t deviated from our normal sleep schedule. I even went so far as to feel almost light headed. It as if my brain is practicing/panicking. So funny. We are about to take our 2AM nap.

I have been reading a little bit more about this first week of adjustment. Steve Pavlina says he felt ok after 4 days, Wired Magazine says a week and Wikipedia says 2 weeks. Most people can’t make it through the first period of adjustment. We have to stick to it carefully, or we will prolong that adjustment.

I am so glad we chose to modify our original plan. We have decided to do 6 hour/30 minutes routine rather than a 4 hour/20 minute routine. Lucas mentioned that on the 4 hour it would be hard to streech past 5 hours when needed. He also mentioned, based on Steve Pavlina’s blog, it would be hard to change the cycle once our bodies got used to it. I think that the 4 hour version would be so impossible to manage with leaving the house to do things, so hard, that we would end up unable to sustain it. I do however wonder where the 4 hour/20 minute schedule originated and if our version has a presedence. From a social standpoint (which I understand is why people stop doing it) it is to an advantage, from a biological standpoint who knows.

There is still so much I don’t know about this…but I will have plenty of time to find out. The computer just barked at us…”time to sleep, time to sleep”. Man, that voice is creepy.