Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Days 27-35 (Week 5)
I realized the other day that it's been a bit since the last update on my personal experiences...
Again, there's not much to report. I have continued with 90 minutes of core sleep during my dredge hours (4 am to about 8 am). My wife usually wakes me up from this, or helps me when I don't immediately respond to the alarm clock. Usually, just saying my name is enough to kick my brain into gear. (Or at least... I think it's enough... obviously I wouldn't actually know, now would I?)
The parallels I talked about yesterday have mostly started manifesting in the last week or so, but instead of repeating them, you can go read the entry. :)
I guess the biggest point of interest (one I promised I'd discuss in the previous post's comments), is that I've slept significant amounts on the weekends (in particular, two four hour naps this past weekend, and the previous weekend's six-hour sleeps), but still continue to increment my day counter. Why haven't I started over?
I don't think I've failed and that I should list myself as attempt two, or that I've slipped into mono- or bi-phasic sleeping, for a few reasons... (this calls for a bold-prefixed list!)
My body still remembers my polynapping, despite the gains in overall sleep. I don't feel like the horrible, sleep deprived state as the first few days.
It's a known variation on the Uberman sleep cycle to do "normal" sleep periodically. Usually, the implication is to intenionally crash periodically, but still, it means it doesn't define "failure".
I haven't given up. Many other polynapper testers at this point would have declared failure and either given up or started over. However, it seems that most polynappers don't have any given metric for when failure occurs (one exception). My best approximation is, as Placebo has so eloquently put it, "Failure IMO is when you give up." I agree. I haven't given up on the attempt.
I think the trigger that would indicate to me when my stint is over would be if my body sleeps mono-/biphasically enough that I start to "forget" how to polynap. In other words, when napping becomes tricky, or I feel like a zombie again. Then it's time for a solid reset (a month maybe?) so I can take some slightly more objective measurements for another trial (or some derivative, like minimal bi- or even tri-phasic.)
The other point I promised to discuss (sickness, the immune system response, and crashing) I'll handle in another post.
-sean
Again, there's not much to report. I have continued with 90 minutes of core sleep during my dredge hours (4 am to about 8 am). My wife usually wakes me up from this, or helps me when I don't immediately respond to the alarm clock. Usually, just saying my name is enough to kick my brain into gear. (Or at least... I think it's enough... obviously I wouldn't actually know, now would I?)
The parallels I talked about yesterday have mostly started manifesting in the last week or so, but instead of repeating them, you can go read the entry. :)
I guess the biggest point of interest (one I promised I'd discuss in the previous post's comments), is that I've slept significant amounts on the weekends (in particular, two four hour naps this past weekend, and the previous weekend's six-hour sleeps), but still continue to increment my day counter. Why haven't I started over?
I don't think I've failed and that I should list myself as attempt two, or that I've slipped into mono- or bi-phasic sleeping, for a few reasons... (this calls for a bold-prefixed list!)
My body still remembers my polynapping, despite the gains in overall sleep. I don't feel like the horrible, sleep deprived state as the first few days.
It's a known variation on the Uberman sleep cycle to do "normal" sleep periodically. Usually, the implication is to intenionally crash periodically, but still, it means it doesn't define "failure".
I haven't given up. Many other polynapper testers at this point would have declared failure and either given up or started over. However, it seems that most polynappers don't have any given metric for when failure occurs (one exception). My best approximation is, as Placebo has so eloquently put it, "Failure IMO is when you give up." I agree. I haven't given up on the attempt.
I think the trigger that would indicate to me when my stint is over would be if my body sleeps mono-/biphasically enough that I start to "forget" how to polynap. In other words, when napping becomes tricky, or I feel like a zombie again. Then it's time for a solid reset (a month maybe?) so I can take some slightly more objective measurements for another trial (or some derivative, like minimal bi- or even tri-phasic.)
The other point I promised to discuss (sickness, the immune system response, and crashing) I'll handle in another post.
-sean
posted by Sean @ 12/21/2005 03:15:00 AM
2 Comments:
I am very unconvinced with your arguments indicating that you are still polynapping.
You say your body still remembers "polynapping", while your weekends indicate your are heaving towards being biphasic.
You say you "do not feel horrible", which should be expected considering your bouts of "core sleep".
You say that a "variant of Uberman allows of normal sleep from time to time", which dilutes the problem you are investigating: Can you be polyphasic or not? It is as if we investigated if humans can run without breathing, except we let them take a large breath every 50 meters or so.
You chose "forgetting to polynap" as the failure trigger, while the quoted blogger put it more honestly "Failure: Sleep more than four hours". He put a number on it!
I believe failure criterion should be formulated as "sleep above X hours" OR "being totally zombified" for "Y days running". With X=3 and Y=2 being the criteria I would chose had I have courage to plunge into p.s.
Keep on!
mc
You say your body still remembers "polynapping", while your weekends indicate your are heaving towards being biphasic.
I say that my body "remembers" polynapping to mean that I (think I ) still have compressed sleep cycles. If this were not true, then I would have experienced the original symptoms of sleep deprivation that occurs before people adopt a polynapping schedule.
You say you "do not feel horrible", which should be expected considering your bouts of "core sleep".
Careful. You're putting words in my... um... keyboard. ;) I said that I don't feel like I'm in the "the horrible, sleep deprived state" I was in during the first few days.
The fact that I don't feel so sleep deprived indicates to me that I am probably still compressing my sleep cycles. If it were just my core sleep providing benefit, I would guess that I would feel as bad (or worse) than I did during college (where I slept about 3 hours a night during the week and 12-14 hours on weekends). At that time, I felt really chewed up, despite getting a lot more sleep in general... Right now, though, I feel much, much more rested than that.
You say that a "variant of Uberman allows of normal sleep from time to time", which dilutes the problem you are investigating: Can you be polyphasic or not? It is as if we investigated if humans can run without breathing, except we let them take a large breath every 50 meters or so.
Seems to me that this is also an interesting questsion worth investigating, really. :) I already looked into pure Uberman - it wasn't working for me. So I tried the core sleep approach.
Yes, I am investigating personal polyphasic sleeping, but I am not necessarily investigating specifically Uberman sleeping (anymore, anyway).
Also, one must recall that I'm not really investigating it in any sort of scientific sense (see here).
It was never really one of my goals, either. So dilution of the problem isn't much of a concern to me. I would like to increase scientific understanding of the phenomenon, but I have decided that it is a lower priority to me.
This also applies to my creation of personal failure critera. I'm not looking for a hard and fast rule by which to be held, because this is not a hard and fast experiment. Ultimately, I'm just a guy mucking around with this weird and potentially dangerous life hack.
Thanks for the comments and encouragement, though. :)
-sean
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