Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Days 15-21

It's getting harder and harder to write anything interesting about my sleeping experiment itself. As expected, things are becoming easier. And it's just not near as interesting to write a full post saying "I slept well through all my naps. No problems or changes to report".

I guess I did change somewhat by adopting core sleep when I'm very tired. I had been considering core sleep for a while now to deal with my drag spot of 4-7 am for a few reasons:

• I have previously noted that when I oversleep (usually for just around 90 minutes, or one full sleep cycle) I feel just really good.
  
• We don't know for sure that REM sleep is the only sleep we need. During NREM, a variety of maintenance tasks occur (source, though source is targeting children) which may or may not happen sufficiently during times of wakefulness or REM.
  
• I started really dragging my feet at work around day 16, and I needed to get productive work done.

Given those, I picked up core sleeping for 90 minutes around night 16. It's helped a lot, and I feel a little less nervous about long-term effects (not saying there aren't any, just that they're probably lessened and will have later onset). I did say that I wanted to do this safely, so now that I'm mostly adapted, I can throw a little more buffer into my safety zone. I'm not losing much either, because those hours were usually not real useful to me (far too tired) and it was detrimentally affecting my day job.

Also, I feel now that I'm significantly adapted to the schedule that I don't think that I will oversleep accidentally from it. So if I'm dragging my feet, I'll go ahead and grab an extra nap or turn a nap into 90 minutes of core sleep. It's like if I were still monophasic, and napped or slept in when tired. Makes sense to me.


And I guess I did have a few stumbles along the way (minor extended sleeping, etc). But it's nothing big that I haven't mentioned in previous posts. It's almost like I'm actually waiting for some problem or catastrophe to occur so that I can tell you all about it. "Unfortunately" for me, though, still no catastrophes to report. ;)

But then, I don't consider sleeping outside of the schedule to be a catastrophe. Even if I sleep 4 hours, more or less straight. That happened just this morning. I had my usual 1:00 am-ish nap just fine. I awoke, felt a little tired, but continued working. I took an extra nap around 3 am to deal with the drowsiness that didn't go away. Awoke, felt unmotivated, and grabbed an immediate second nap*. After that, though, I decided to take a 90 minute core sleep. Which I did beautifully. Then I decided just to sleep off the rest before getting ready for work at 7am.

* I've done this double nap a few times before when very tired. I find it very refreshing and a good revitalizer when I feel like I need more sleep. Usually, the second nap is not taken until I've been up a minute or two, so that I don't just continue where I left off. I'm hoping that my body is treating it as just another polynap, but I'm guessing that it's not.


Don't get me wrong. These weren't sleep-deprived-whack-the-alarm decisions. I was alert and conscious. I just decided that I should probably grab more sleep to alleviate the sleepiness. Yes, my tiredness weighed in pretty strongly, but it was something I had been considering for 3 or 4 days.

This sort of crash may have some precedence, too. According to some, Thomas Jefferson crashed out for a full day after a month of polyphasically sleeping, in order to reset himself. Take that with a grain of salt, though, for now. I'm not even sure that he did polyphasically sleep. I'll examine it more closely when I investigate his sleep cycles. For now, I'm satisfied in knowing that I could listen to and appease my body appropriately.

By the way, after the block of sleep last night, work today was awesome.
-sean