Google
Web seanonpolynapping.blogspot.com

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Finally moving!

So, I stopped being lazy and moved the blog over to a Wordpress blog instead of Blogger. I was starting to get frustrated with the poor support of Blogger, and the slightly more limited functionality. Wordpress has sooooo much more that I can tweak and play with.

Anyway, I won't be updating here at the ol' Blogger / Blot*Spot location anymore. You can find new posts on over at http://www.polynappers.com.

Word.
-sean

"Chirp Chirp" Said the Crickets

Been real quiet lately.

I've not been posting much recently here, as I'm sure you've noticed. Mainly it's because the "sleep thing" has become old-hat. I don't even track days anymore. I nap when I need to do so, at roughly the same times each day. Sometimes I sleep more for core sleep.

Last week, I was pretty heavily sedated with a nasty case of the sniffles. My core sleep jumped up to 4 and 6 hours then. It's been continuing this week as well, as I'm still slogging through the tail end of it. My core sleep has stuck around 4 or 6 hours as well. I don't like the lost time, but it's what my body is telling me it needs. I've only been taking two or three 20 minute naps in addition to the core sleep.


I'm going to try transitioning back to a pure, or near-pure (1.5 hour core) Uberman cycle, since I've been just shy of monophasic sleep recently. I'm not going cold turkey, though, like when I started. I'll probably cut out one or two hours of core sleep every two or three days until I'm back to a 6x20 (potentially with core).

-sean

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

When Does Adaptation End?

I've returned from the various amounts of galavanting I've done over the holidays. I hope everyone's holidays treated them well. For me, it was a lot of very engaging social activity (from which I could not pull myself away), rich food, a little alcohol, etc. All in all, not encouraging to a polyphasic lifestyle.

I slept a lot more over the holidays than I expected. I found myself many times without a desire to work on projects. It was vacation, after all, which has personally always meant "catch up on sleep time". Thus, without drive to keep going and stay awake, I allowed more sleep. I'm still gaining time, though, as these long sleeps would normally all have been 10-14 hours straight through.

Now, I've adopted core sleep in my schedule, as I've mentioned before. Recently, though, I've been throwing it in early in my evening schedule, instead of right around 4 am. This is usually somewhere between 9 pm and 12 am. For that nap, I don't set an alarm at all. Every time, I've woken up after 1.5 - 3 hours. I've never gone longer, even when I gave in and hit the snooze. It's weird... I would have expected to crash for long stretches from this, but I didn't. Perhaps it's my "siesta" time in my subjective day, so a short, semi-normal nap works best?

Anyway, I slept a lot the past few days (by my standards, anway). Friday and Saturday (NYE) nights, I slept 6 hours. The day after NYE I slept an amazing 10 hours (though, intentionally - I decided to let myself sleep as long as my body wanted). For those keeping score, that's the most I have slept in a single sitting since I started. So, this was three days of large blocks of sleep. I was worried that it would have interrupted my polynapping, that I would need to start all over again, and today would be a problem.

It wasn't.

I breezed through my naps as though nearly nothing had happened. With the exception of my 7 am, pre-work nap (which took place with a bit too much noise), every nap has been fruitful. I've slept quickly, well, and with dreams.

So, this set me "a-ponderin'"... is it possible that the trial becomes just the practice of a learned "skill"? We all must realize that, at some point, one is no longer experimenting or testing, but they are simply a polynapper (unless of course it stays a struggle indefinitely, which I do not believe to be true).

I've been in contact with Andrew "Xeeban" Nishigaya, one of the more cited polynappers because of his earlier success with it. He said in private emails that he switches back and forth from mono to polyphasic sleeping (repeating what he says in a follow-up post circa April, 2004). Other veteran polynappers on the uberman mailing list have said similar things - that they switch between them as their needs change. I'm guessing here, but their casual mention of just transitioning when needed indicates to me that later transitions are much easier than the initial "training". I wonder how much time was between each of the polyphasic sections.

Is it possible to "forget" polynapping (ie, reach a point where re-transitioning would be as nearly as hard or harder than the initial attempt)? I really don't know. I've considered testing how long it would take for me to revert to monosleeping only, purely out of curiousity... however, I really don't want to give up the hours, and I hate the idea of having to re-transition. :)

-sean