VoodooLabs

Continuing to partially document my experiments with polyphasic sleeping.

Day 3 was the hardest day to get through, but every now and then I have another cycle that just isn’t working for me. I’ve ‘crashed’ about twice a week for the last couple of weeks. This is still a lot less sleep than normal: 2 hours x 5 days + 8 hours x 2 days = 26 hours instead of the 8 hours x 7 days = 56 hours. But I’m still dissapointed I haven’t become completely polyphasic.

I do have more time to do things, but I haven’t been sticking strictly to the polyphasic cycle. I think the longest I was on the cycle continuously was 4 days.

The truth is I enjoy sleeping.

Anyway I’ve had some naps in interesting places:

The couch in the meeting room at work.
Propped up against the wall sitting on a chair in the kitchenette at work.
In Alex’s car.
In a Daytona bucket seat in a huge busy Auckland arcade while friends played Daytona around me.
Sitting on a bar stool in a pool hall while friends played pool.
In friend’s houses.
In a moving car travelling from Auckland to Hamilton.
The couch in the flat lounge.
And many many naps in my bed.

I drift off to sleep 6 times everyday. I would like to say I’m now good at it. I am better but falling to sleep isn’t something I can do on command yet. Sometimes it takes a good 30 minutes for me to fall asleep, the problem is I’m continuously adjusting my alarm. I need to sleep for 15 - 20 minutes and this doesn’t count time falling asleep. There is no other way to do it other than perhaps being tuff - if I don’t fall asleep in the allocate time I’m not going to get any until next time. I think this would severly mess me up so I continue to adjust the alarm.

For the last week and a bit I’ve been getting used to a polyphasic sleep cycle. Poly meaning many, this is different from the normal monophasic sleep, one sleep period in 24 hours.

The schedule I’m on is a 20 to 30 minute nap every 4 hours. Adding this up means I get 2 to 3 hours of sleep a day.

There are various discussions and details concerning this sleep pattern. I did some research a couple of years ago and attempted the schedule then. I found that I didn’t have anything to do with my extra time and was bored so I didn’t continue. When I was researching the schedule I looked through several articles. The first was possibly the original article at everything2. The second article available at that time was at kuro5hin.

At 5am Wednesday before last I was staying up late as I often do. Surfing the internet I came across an article on Polyphasic Sleep that I hadn’t read. After reading a bit I decided to try it again. Steve Pavlina’s series of posts are fantastic and go into a lot of detail. I highly recommend reading them if you are interested in polyphasic sleep.

I’ve had several ups and downs including attempting to move the naps drastically, skipping naps, and sleeping too long. However on the whole it’s going great. Each nap feels like I’m sleeping for hours and afterwards I can get straight up and I feel great. I’ve had to start eating more and eating healthy. I now eat fruit and nuts a lot more than I used to.

The common reason for stopping once properly on this schedule is that it’s inconvenient. If or when I get past 2 weeks on the schedule this would be the reason I would stop. That or the fact that I really enjoy sleeping in.

My mother was concerned so I did some more reading recently and found a particularily blamming article at supermemo. Upon reading this article I started getting concerns myself but I couldn’t help notice the writing style. It’s written with a goal in mind with a great amount of emotion. But it did make some decent claims with apparent evidence to back it up. One of the main pieces of evidence was research by Claudio Stampi. He was quoted as noting “performance on polyphasic schedule is still far less than that in free running sleep conditions”.

The supermemo article by Dr Piotr Wozniak is arguing that while it’s possible to sleep polyphasically your creative ability and general performance is reduced.

I was distraught as I value my creative ability highly.

I continued to read from various sites around the web eventually reaching this polyphasic blog. Interesting enough this contained a replicated comment that details a couple of experiments Scampi did. His conclusion: “Adult humans appear to have a natural ability to adapt to polyphasic sleep schedules” and “Polyphasic sleep may be a feasible, and perhaps the only, strategy allowing remarkable levels of sleep reduction during prolonged quasi-continuous work situations, without unduly compromising performance effectiveness”.

Painting quite a different picture.

Anyway, I’m going to continue this for as long as I can. It’s estimated that I will gain an extra 11 years of time if I keep this up for the rest of my life.

11 years.