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Week 3

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Day 15 (Monday)

I felt a cold coming on last night, and elected to maintain a monophasic sleep pattern to ensure that my body got as much rest as possible.  Nothing else to report today, though I am returning to biphasic tonight.

Day 16 (Tuesday)

Back on the wagon.  It was again, fairly easy to get up at 4:00AM this morning, and I’m 100% convinced now that if you need to get up early for something, the way to do it is to ensure that you sleep for some multiple of 90 minutes: 90 minutes, 1.5 hours, 3 hours, etc.  Whatever it is, if you stick to this rule, getting up is a snap.  It’s now the morning and I have not been particularly sleepy or yawny.  However, the first day is usually easier, as there appears to be less sleep debt overall that I have accumulated, versus later on in the week.

Day 17 (Wednesday)

The pattern continues – easy to get up, though never a pleasure having the alarm ring at 4:00 in the morning.  On especially busy days, I also find making time for the nap a bit of an inconvenience.  The best way to work this is to schedule it in your calendar and honour that appointment.  This way I am inclined to treat it as just another thing that I have to get done during my day, and like any other meeting.  The only trouble is that napping feels like wasted time, rather than something that is actually productive.  I sure wish I could find a way to make the ubersleep pattern actually work.  However, this is far too much for any normal human to accomplish, and I am skeptical of the physical costs that sleeping a total of only 2 hours a day would have on your body, regardless of whether or not you were able to function fine mentally.

-Nap-

As is now the usually case, I feel groggy for about 30 minutes after waking up from my nap.  This is very frustrating.  Even if it’s only a temporary thing, it’s just annoying feeling this way a second time during the day.  I can still function fine during this period, it’s just like being uncomfortable for a scheduled 30 minutes every day.  Is it worth suffering through this to gain an extra two hours every day?  Yes, absolutely.  But, I don’t have to like it.

Day 18 (Thursday)

I’ve made another realization today: sleeping biphasically is not that difficult physically (aside from the annoyances I’ve mentioned previously), but it is definitely a little bit taxing psychologically.  Even if my body is getting enough rest, it is very difficult to accept the fact that when I go to bed, exhausted, at 11:00 in the evening after a hard day of exercise and work, I will be getting up in 4.5 hours.  I am used to looking forward to waking up feeling refreshed and shedding that exhaustion over the course of 8 hours of shut-eye.  Even if this is purely a mental thing, it is difficult to adjust to.  Just the fact that I wake up at 4:00 thinking, “Man, only 4.5 hours of sleep”, takes a small toll on me.

I assume that as time wears on, this feeling will disappear, as sleeping biphasically will be the norm, rather than the exception, and so the concept of sleeping 8 hours will be the thing that feels weird.  I have heard people that operate on a polyphasic sleeping pattern feel this way about everyone else sleeping a single, contiguous block of 8 hours, but I have never heard anyone write about what it’s like when they’ve returned to monophasic sleep (which has happened plenty of times).  I would be interested to know if it took a while for the psychology to right itself and accept once again that they were sleeping for 8 hours each night.

I’ve reached the conclusion that once the experimentation period is over, I will continue on with biphasic sleeping, though revert to monophasic on Saturday and Sunday.  The aim here is to try and eliminate some of the debt that I felt I was accumulating during the second week of this experiment.  Getting a full 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday may help in this capacity, or it may throw off my schedule completely.  In truth, I don’t know exactly what will happen, but that’s okay.  I suppose the experiment will continue, even after the official end-date has passed.

Day 19 (Friday)

This will mark the last day of my biphasic sleeping experiment, as I intend to revert to monophasic blocks of sleep on Friday and Saturday nights from here on in.  I finished all of my working out for the week yesterday, and did not feel like practicing any dance.  As a result, I didn’t have any physical activity to stimulate me in the morning, and I’ve felt quite tired for the last four hours (it’s now 8:45AM).  Again, I’m drawn to wonder whether or not this approach to sleeping actually gives the body enough sleep, or if I’m just gradually building more sleep debt or getting used to the feeling of perpetually being a little more tired throughout the day.  Part of my reasoning for getting two unbroken blocks of 8 hours on the weekends is so that I can see if that leads to feeling more refreshed during the rest of the week.  Time will tell.

A funny thing happened last night: I went to bed at 11:00, as I normally do.  At some point in the night, I woke up.  It felt like I’d been asleep for quite some time, so I assumed that my alarm had gone off and I had “rested my eyes” for a few seconds.  This is a dangerous trap to fall into, as you turn off your alarm, “rest your eyes” and then wake up four hours later.  Anyhow, I’ve gotten myself into the habit of jumping out of bed as soon as I catch myself doing that, and so I did the same this time.  I got up, put on my clothes, grabbed my iPhone and waterbottle, brushed my teeth, and then started checking my e-mail.  It was at this point that I noticed that the time was 2:00AM.  I must have finished a sleep cycle, had a brief moment of wakefulness, and then gone from there.  I went back to sleep until my alarm actually DID go off, got up, and started the day.  If this is indicative of anything, it’s probably just that I’ve now trained myself to get up fairly easily whenever I like, provided I’ve finished the most recent sleep cycle.  Getting up at 2:00AM didn’t feel any different from 4:30AM.