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Polyphasic sleep: Day 24

So I didn’t feel well, and as a result I slept in. Not totally comatose or anything till 6am… but more like intermittent napping throughout the morning.

I need to come up with a new plan. If I’m really going to do everyman2, I need to be exact. I think the fact that I haven’t REALLY been exact in about a week is what’s causing this adaptation dissonance.

A note on napping I wanted to include… so the first week or so, I didn’t sleep at all. If you’re going to do this, you really just need to close your eyes for 20 minutes in a place where you theoretically COULD sleep. Eventually, I started noticing some of the signs of earlier sleep phases (uncontrolled twitching, especially) and despite being conscious, I think my body was resting. Now, of course, I can literally lay down for a nap and it’ll happen every time.

I’m at the crossroads… not sure where to go from here. Going to do some serious prayer about where I go from here, and get some confidence in the decision.

Polyphasic sleep: Day 23

So I got 8 hours of sleep today… went to bed at 9, woke up at 5. I feel thousands of times more rested than I usually did before I started polyphasic sleeping, and over yesterday too.

Today seems like a critical juncture. Do I stick with it? Do I return to my normal habits? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Polyphasic sleep: Day 22 part deux

Today sucks. I’m tired this afternoon like no other. Boo. Sometimes polyphasic sleeping is crappy.

Polyphasic sleep: Day 22

Today’s wakeup was really good. Did the 4.5 hours exactly… woke up at 2 promptly, and been working solidly for a few hours.

Today is the first day I eliminate my morning nap, which makes me a tad worried I’ll be more tired in the mornings… but I can live with that (for now.) I’d take some marginal fatigue from 2am – 6am if it means I’m fully awake from 6am to 9:30pm… something I couldn’t necessarily say was true with my previous sleeping habits. I used to be consistently tired throughout the day, and that was a big reason why I wanted to try polyphasic sleep out.

I was talking with my friend Kyle yesterday… he mentioned he gets about 5.5 hours of sleep on a daily basis anyway, and he’s tired all the time. I get about 5 hours in total (5 hours, 10 minutes) and have little comparable fatigue. My wife disputes this fact, since I can fall asleep at any time, but I think that’s actually just my body being nicer to me.

If I were Kyle, or people like Kyle, who already have demanding sleep schedules, adding two naps to the day doesn’t seem like it’d be that difficult. I’d even try it out to see if my body could handle it without adjusting my night time sleep needs. I’d just add a nap around 11-2 and 4-7 as evenly spaced as possible (11 & 4, 12 & 5, 1 & 6, 2 & 7). The other factor would be wake up time. I like working on an east coast schedule, despite being in CA, so I like doing 9:30-2, but that could also shift forward. I’m going to move my naps to 11 & 5 likely, but that’s for schedule convenience, since I typically do a show at 3pm EST / Noon PST.

The other thing I’ve noticed about today is a propensity for distraction. I’ve had some really great business ideas this morning, and to be sure, I’m an ADD personality type, but this morning I’ve caught myself staring at the wall and thinking of cool ideas more than normal. In 1st grade, my teacher would describe this as ‘daydreaming.’ It’s happening a lot this morning, probably because I’m tired.

Also, I’ve noticed my apetite is larger than usual. Especially a breakfast apetite. I typically never had a breakfast apetite till I started polyphasing, but I actually lost a lot of weight when I started to eat breakfast this year… so I don’t mind. I think it sped my metabolism up somewhat.

UPDATE: I’m still tired… so I’m going to sleep right now. I actually needed a fair amount of sleep when I was sleeping full days, so the fact that I need more when I’m doing polyphasic doesn’t shock me.

Polyphasic sleep: Day 21

So I’ve decided to move to Everyman2, which means instead of 3 hours + 3 naps, I’m going to do 4.5 hours + 2 naps. I’m practically doing this schedule anyway… since I end up losing some time here and there from stupid over sleeping. I think that’s my new goal though, to create a workable, stable, everyman2 schedule.

Polyphasic sleep day 20

So woke up this morning fairly rapidly with few problems. Its seriously a battle of wills. When I wake up, I’m not tired like “I need to sleep!” tired, but its this different kind of tired I can’t describe. I know its physically possible for me to fall asleep at any moment of any day, and in the mornings I feel sort of like I should sleep more. But, if I stay awake for 10 – 15 minutes or so… my brain clicks over from “let me sleep” mode, to something that’s more awake.

I’m not really having any sort of issues with the schedule at this point, but I’m just considering switching back over because I don’t really NEED polyphasic sleep. I might instead just go biphasic, sleeping 5-6 hours at night and grabbing a quick afternoon nap. That’s essentially what I’m doing now sometimes anyway… sleeping from 9-2 or 9-4 instead of the 11-2 target.

Not sure which I’ll end up doing, but regardless, playing with my sleep habits is fun. It’s made me more awake, which is weird, since I’m sleeping much less than before. I think oversleeping, or more to the point, sleeping and waking up during the middle of a sleep cycle, was a big problem for me, and when I’d sort of drag ass out of bed, it was difficult to get a full day’s work in.

Polyphasic Sleep: Day 19

Wow… 19 days already? Crazy. So yesterday, I decided to sleep in, because usually saturday mornings are really boring for me and so rather than be by myself for 6 hours, I just sleep in with the wife. I decided to not set an alarm to see how long I’d sleep… and I slept for about 12 hours total. I still took my other regularly scheduled naps, and everything worked out fine.

This morning, a Sunday morning, I decided to do the regular sleep thing. (Regular meaning my regular schedule, not yours.) Went to bed at 10-ish, and I actually woke up at about 12:30… which means I was in full “freak out” mode about not sleeping enough. I need to at least get to the first hour in the next day to not have “freak out” mode.

I slept in, and woke up at my first alarm really easily. Got up, got on the computer, started watching BBC World News (which is my new habit of choice, I’ve decided) and played some Scribblenauts.

Last Thursday, or so, I decided to move my regularly scheduled morning show from 6am EST to 9am EST. Best. Decision. Ever. It’s definitely difficult to do a 6am EST morning show because if I oversleep, it’s basically the end of the world. (I only get a one hour grace period, which doesn’t seem like enough.) On the other hand, doing 9am EST gives me about four full hours to sort of plan my day, get up, get ready, etc., and even write and pre produce the show.

One thing I’m going to need to do is figure out how to utilize that time the most effectively. I think that’s going to mean creating a more regimented schedule that I live by, ie 5am – 6am is freeform, but 6-7 is story writing, 7-8 is show production, 8-9 is a runthrough / CGs, etc. If I create that regimented schedule, since I’m an ADD-type, I’ll be able to be more creative within those boundaries.

the story so far

So I’ve got a few minutes to pause for reflection about the polyphasic experiment so far… and all-in-all it’s been largely positive.

Starting out, my adjustment phase wasn’t as whacky as some, simply because I already had a wacky sleep schedule due to jetlag from the east coast and  the move to the west.

I’ve gained so much time before 9am (both eastern and pacific) that it’s sort of made me think of my work day in terms of 4am PST – 1pm PST. It’s much more difficult for me to work longer hours truly, but that doesn’t exactly stop me from doing it.

My appetite is larger… but so is my waistline. Though, to be fair, its a combo of moving from a place where I walked everywhere to a place where the food is plentiful (and cheaper than NYC.) I’ve gained about 10 pounds or so. Also, no more nutrisystem meals of any sort, so that’s also working against me. We’ll see if I can’t lose some weight once we move into our own place.

All-in-all, I’m extremely satisfied with the polyphasic sleep experiment. Not sure if I’ll stick to it forever, but I’ll definitely stick to it for now.

Polyphasic sleep: Day 17

After a nuts night yesterday, I skipped the journal, but here’s the breakdown: Essentially, I just slept in till about 7 PST after taking care of the wifey the night before.

Today… went to sleep at around 10:15, but had a harder time than normal to get to sleep. Luckily, I still got to sleep on time and the sort.

Woke up at around midnight or so… Traci couldn’t stand my allergy induced snoring so she gave me a breathe right. I was semi awake for that lovely incident.

All-in-all… if I make it through the first 10 minutes of being awake, I’m pretty golden. Today I was really tired for about the first five minutes, but now I’m doing pretty well.

Polyphasic sleep: Day 15

After yesterday’s nightmarish disaster of a sleep day, today was relatively great. I didn’t have a good final nap yesterday since I decided to go to the beach to sort of “sort myself out,” so I ended up going to bed at like 9:15 or something ridiculous like that. As a result, I woke up around 12:30 fully rested, but felt like I shouldn’t do that. There’s something inherently freaky in waking up before my Wife, her brother and most of her family has gone to bed that makes me feel psychologically icky. As a result, I went to sleep for another hour and a half (a full sleep cycle) to sort of make up for the icky feeling.

Post 1.5 hour sleep, it was about 2:30 PST, and I woke up fairly groggy, which I should probably expect whenever I sleep more than I should. However, it was no where near as bad as the day before, so I felt very lucky.

One thing I’ve decided to do, on a more professional note, is stop running myself so damned ragged. So a big problem with yesterday was this unbelievable sense of failure, since I had missed a show. It’s a big deal to me when I make a commitment to something, and it doesn’t work out. That’s essentially what ruined my day. As a result, I decided that doing the morning show is important, but I’m going to create the best morning show that I can do consistently without issue, and then keep expanding that show till I find my logical limit. That means instead of doing the show at 6am EST, I’ve decided to do the show at 6AM PST. 6AM PST is still 9AM EST, which doesn’t quite fulfill the requirement of being the “background noise” to someone getting ready in the morning, on the east coast anyway, but it will fulfill the requirement of me actually being awake for the show on a consistent basis, which somehow trumps a pretend sense of implied importance.

I think my advice to anyone trying polyphasic sleeping for themselves would be to utilize the extra morning time gained as a buffer, not as a regular scheduled event thing. I find the mornings to be super useful, but there might be occasions where I’d want to *gasp* sleep in till 5:30 or something. And there might be other occasions where I’d actually NEED to sleep in till 5:30.

I was thinking that if I could, I would do polyphasic sleeping if I was still doing the morning shift at KUTV in Salt Lake City, but I’ve come to realize that it really might not have been the best call. There are too many times when I’ve felt completely dead and/or needed to sleep in extra time thus far that would make it less than ideal. That’s not to say, though, that it’s impossible… but I’d definitely feel more confident if I had a few months behind me on this schedule.

When comparing my 8pm -> 3am sleep to my 10pm -> 1:30am sleep, I’m definitely feeling better with the latter, though again, I’m only 2 weeks in instead of 6 months, or whatever.