Katie's Polyphasic Sleep Log

Yes, I failed.

Because it's part of a class project, I'm still making a really half-assed attempt at this, but the really strict attendance policy at my school (which says I'll fail if I miss ANY of my classes for the rest of the semester, several of which I missed due to oversleeping my alarm while trying to become polyphasic) and the fact that I live by myself right now and have no one to depend on to wake me up if I oversleep, I'm pretty much giving up for now. But, I do plan to try again once I get a break from school - hopefully I can learn to do it over the winter, when being awake at x time isn't as big of a concern. Life is feasible right now for HAVING a polyphasic schedule... just not for the week of adopting it. I'll start posting here again when attempt number 2 gets underway.

You know, when a person hears about someone else's mistakes, there are some times when we pay attention and learn from them, and there are other times that we don't. And then there are the times when we become so stupidly arrogant as to say "Well, that didn't work for them, but it will for me, because I'm better/stronger/more willful/etc!" And when we make our OWN mistakes, there are times when we learn from them and stop making them, and there are times when we don't. And then there are times when we get so stupidly blind or stubborn (or perhaps, arrogant) as to say, "It didn't work last time. And it didn't work the time before that. And it didn't work 50 times ago. And it didn't work 500 times ago. But this time, it will work!"

Unfortunately, this morning, I fell into the third category on both accounts at the same time. Wonderful me, right? In one single day, I've likely undone a good deal of the progress I've made since day 1. Five steps forward and four steps back, so to speak. So, here are the things I will NOT do from this point forward:

Number 1: Sleep on a bed or couch. Puredoxyk (www.puredoxyk.com) warned me already in her blog about this. Beds and couches are too cozy. It's too hard to wake up, too easy to fall back asleep. Bad situation. This was mistake number 1 this morning.

Number 2: Stay in the same place after I wake up. Especially when getting used to Uberman for the first time, it just doesn't work very well! I was so horribly out of it this morning, when I woke up from the 8 AM nap, that I just sat there and stared at the ceiling. I thought, "As long as I keep my eyes open, I'll stay awake." Yeah. Right. It's worked SO many times in the past, hasn't it, Katie? *slaps self*

Then there's the "Good but bad" side of things. I set my alarm properly last night (good) but it didn't go off at all! (bad!) I don't know WHY it didn't go off, but it was on my cell phone, so if it had gone off, I would have awoken to a message saying I missed it. So I overslept. (Bad.) Again. (Very bad.) But, I only slept 3 hours before I woke up naturally (good) just in time for another nap. Which I opted to go ahead and take just so I would get back on the schedule. And that's where bad thing number 2 from above happened... from that point on, I drifted in and out of doze until 1:30 PM. (VERY very bad.)

So. From now on: Sleep in a chair or on the floor, wake up by STANDING up and moving around.

I'll try to take a jog every morning. I never have a problem STAYING awake, once I GET awake, even when extremely deprived of sleep. I've gone 48 hours without sleep before, and, despite feeling like Ubershit, I still was wide awake at the end of it, and would have been able to stay awake even longer quite easily if people hadn't practically forced me into bed.

I like to say that my sleep has a strong inertia. A Katie awake tends to stay awake until acted upon by an external force; similarly, a Katie asleep tends to stay asleep until acted on by an external force. That makes things easier for me, I suppose, in that I'm fairly used to sleep deprivation, seeing as my lack of ability to sleep at night in the past has caused me to deal with it more often than I'd like to have. In that respect, Uberman is a bit easier on me than it is on most, I suppose. But I also have trouble getting to sleep in 20 minutes, which I suppose makes it harder on me than most. But from what I understand, that's normal. I just need to get my nights sorted out properly, and learn how to stop oversleeping or sleeping at bad times, and then I'll hopefully be ok.

I will say this, though: as hard as this is, there is one bottom line condition that will definitely come to pass, no matter what I have to do. I *WILL* SUCCEED IN ADOPTING AN UBERMAN SLEEP SCHEDULE. That's all there is to it. It may take 100 tries, but I won't give up. I'll keep doing this until it's done, and then, depending on my experiences afterward... forever.

Somehow, I think I'm not going about this properly. Day five, and while I'll admit there were a few times in the first two days that I overslept, and then I dozed off a couple of times the next couple of days (but never for longer than a minute or two before I snapped back awake, and usually only immediately after the core nap), I really should be more tired than I am, I think. I feel pretty good still. But my sleep schedule is nowhere near stable. The worst part is, today, I didn't fall asleep in two out of three naps.

On a side note, ignore the post I made this morning. I'm sticking to my plan of the modified Uberman schedule. My goal is to sleep during the day as if I was on Everyman, and sleep twice as often at night, sleeping at 11 AM, 5 PM, 11 PM, 2 AM, 5 AM, and 8 AM. Don't ask me why. I just feel like Uberman is more appealing to me, and since the 20 minute naps are giving me better results consistently than the core nap, I'm going to give it a chance. If it turns out that it's absolutely too rigid for me and I need more flexibility, then I can always switch back to Everyman later, but so far, I've had no trouble at all sticking to my naps in the day time, and night time won't be a problem either.

And on another, completely unrelated side note, I'd like to report that my deathbox 360 has officially been revived. It took me several hours and a lot of "innovative" thinking, but using only tools and loose screws my mom's boyfriend had laying around the house, I managed to successfully replace Microsoft's flawed "x-clamps" with a nice, stable system to hold the heat sinks in place. I know no one reading this cares, but I'm proud of myself! Getting it repaired by microsoft would have cost me at least 2 weeks wait, and likely $140, since I ordered it used from eBay, and I repaired it myself for free in only a few hours. Go me!

This is really hard. Trying not to doze back off is killer... for the most part, I'm being successful with it, but there are moments, particularly between the core nap and the first nap of the day, where I unfortunately doze off. But, on the note of the core naps, I do have an interesting success to report.

After noticing how much easier it's been for me to wake up from the 20 minute naps than from the 3 hour core, last night, I was planning to switch to a modified Uberman schedule. Unfortunately, I set my alarm to PM instead of AM, so after 20 minutes nothing was there to wake me up, and I overslept. Why is this a success? Because I woke up on time for the core nap. I had gone to bed an hour earlier than the core naps were scheduled, at 2 instead of 3, because that fit best with the uberman schedule, but I still woke up at 6, 4 hours later. That's a success that tells me everyman may be a feasible result after all! In that case, I'm gonna stick to everyman a bit longer, instead of taking the route I was planning last night. Why? Simply because of flexibility. In Uberman, if something happens and I have to put off a nap for an hour, or, heaven forbid, SKIP a nap entirely... I'm going to feel it something horrible! In Everyman, the same feat can be done with only minimal effect on me. Thus, now that it looks like I can wake up from the core naps after all (XD), I'm going to stick to Everyman a bit longer.

Better. I managed to get up today after only a 4 hour core nap. It's been about 40 minutes since then, and I feel pretty awake now, so I don't think there's any risk that I'll go back to bed. But just to be safe, I'm going to go take a "wake-up shower" right after this post.

Yesterday's naps were a little off - the 11:00 AM nap, of course, was done away with by the fact that I slept till 1:30 PM. 5:00 PM nap ended up being 30 minutes instead of an hour because I forgot to turn my alarm off after I set it (silly Katie), and I never fell asleep during the 11:00 PM nap, though I still laid there with my eyes closed the whole time just to help my body get used to doing nothing during that time. The core nap... I woke up on time, but then I let myself convince me that one more hour would be fine, and would help me get used to the schedule a little more fluidly, so I went back to bed for an hour. Bah! I need to learn that I'm an idiot, and stop paying attention to my so-called logic. It gets me in trouble too much. This is especially true when I'm sleepy!

At any rate, I'm up, but still tired, so I'm running off to the shower. More later!

Ja ne!

Wow... Right after my last post, I fell asleep. And I didn't wake up again till 1:30 PM, which means I slept through my first nap, and then some. That is NOT good! Picking this up is going to be a real challenge, it seems. I'll let it slide this one time, on account of the 24 hours without sleep the day before. I figure this is going to leave me close enough to sleep deprivation... considering that, it may be best for my health that I made entirely sure I was awake as I could be before I really tried to get into this. Hopefully tonight goes a little better.

As expected, core sleep did NOT go so well. After three hours of sleep, I woke up to complete exhaustion, and the snooze button was not my friend. I managed to get up after six hours instead, and that was something of a stroke of luck there. I'm still exhausted! I'm planning now to simply reduce the time of the core nap by at least an hour each day, until it reaches the desired three hours.

Well, today thusfar has been interesting. Having missed sleep entirely last night, I think the 20 minute naps aren't doing as much good today as they will tomorrow, but despite that, I'm still amazed at how refreshed I feel after waking up than I felt before my nap. Unfortunately, it took me two tries to experience that - the first nap seemed only to taunt me with how ridiculously short a 20 minute nap is when you're incredibly sleepy. An hour after that nap, I had to go to class, too - that didn't go as well as I'd hoped. I dozed off WAY too much, and it generally was just not very good. I don't like sleeping in class, but despite my most valiant efforts to stay awake... even the best speakers will put you to sleep when you're that tired, and all you're doing is sitting in a chair listening to them. There was no physical or mental engagement, and at my current level of advancement in the polyphasic schedule, I didn't manage it. But, tomorrow is a day all to myself, so I'll be able to come up with plenty of mentally and physically engaging tasks to get me through the day. It's Thursday that I'm dreading... *shudder*

The second nap today, as I said, went pretty well. I awoke at exactly 5:20 PM feeling remarkably refreshed, considering that I've had a total of 40 minutes of sleep over the past 32 hours. I'm feeling about equally as awake as I usually feel at this time of day... perhaps a bit sleepier. I can definitely feel that I'm missing some sleep, by the lull in my mental processes right now, and a slight pressure in my head that seems to say "Closing your eyes and nodding off would feel good right now." But it's not an overwhelming NEED to sleep. What I feel right now is analogous to when a muscle is sore, and seems to say "A massage would feel really good right now." In terms of ability to stay awake, at this point, I don't think making it to my next nap at 11:00 PM will be any problem at all.

The real test is going to be the three-hour core sleep period tonight. If I wake up successfully from that without hitting snooze and going back to bed, then I'll consider the first day of this experiment to be a success. More on that tomorrow!

In the meantime... I'm hungry. I'm going to go get some food.

Ok. I'm tired of staying up too late, and sleeping all day. But I can't seem to find any way to be ok with going to bed. I have too much to do, dammit! I've tried and tried to get a "normal" sleep schedule, and all my efforts have failed. So. I'm trying something different this time.

For the next 6 weeks minimum (the amount of time required for the EKU Wellness Project, which this is doubling as), I will be engaging in a polyphasic sleep schedule. But what is polyphasic sleep, you ask? I'm so glad you asked!

As you may be able to surmise from the word, polyphasic sleep is sleep that occurs in multiple phases. Most people have a monophasic sleep schedule - their sleep is concentrated in one phase. Go to sleep. Then wake up. Repeat daily.

With polyphasic sleep, it works a bit differently. There are numerous possible schedules, but the basis is in replacing one long sleep period with several shorter ones throughout the day. The two most common of these are known as the "Uberman" and "Everyman" sleep schedules.

Uberman is an equiphasic sleep schedule - all of the phases are the same length, and occur at equal intervals of time. Typically, this is equihexiphasic - 20 minutes of sleep, done 6 times a day, for a total of 2 hours of sleep.

The other common (actually, far more common) polyphasic schedule, Everyman, incorporates a "core sleep" period. This period is usually 3 hours long, and is supplemented by 3 20 minute naps at 5-6 hour intervals throughout the day, for a total of 4 hours of sleep.

Now. I know what you're thinking. "How in all HELL can anyone survive with just 2 hours of sleep a day?!" Well, the answer is fairly simple. It seems the body takes its sleep not based on raw time, but based on the number of sleep cycles you go through in one night. When you take a polyphasic sleep schedule, you force your body to adapt to shorter sleep periods, and research has found that all stages of the cycle STILL OCCUR, but are vastly compressed.

"But won't that affect your ability to function?" Well, yes. But not in the way you're thinking. Studies have shown that this sleep schedule actually improves cognitive ability, alertness, awareness, and many other factors SIGNIFICANTLY compared to monophasic sleep. Uberman received its name because of that, as well as the constant feeling that the practitioner was moving at speeds far faster than everyone else, claiming that the world seemed to be moving in slow motion, and they had more time, even for simple things like catching a ball. Everyman isn't quite as effective in that regard as Uberman, but it's significantly more flexible, and the naps are further apart, meaning it adapts better to an everyday work environment.

"That sounds awesome! Why doesn't EVERYONE do that?!" Well, that's pretty simple, as well. In order to get into a polyphasic sleep schedule, one has to adapt. The adaptation phase takes up to a week with the Uberman schedule, and can take even as much as a month with Everyman. And with Uberman in particular, this adaptation period is essentially the same as spending an entire week without sleep. It's very, very difficult to maintain. Everyman is easier than Uberman, but still difficult.

The other problem lies in strictness of schedule. With Uberman, you have to take naps every four hours, almost exactly on the dot, or your body will more or less completely crash. This means that work and social events are difficult to plan. Everyman is easier in this regard, as well. The 3-hour core nap seems to give enough sleep that the other three naps can have a flexibility of up to two hours in either direction. Needless to say, especially as a student, I'm going with Everyman, at least for the time being. If Everyman works well for me, I'm going to possibly see about using it as a "stepping stone" toward Uberman, but if Uberman isn't going to work out, I think Everyman will still provide the benefits of extra time to me during the day. And to think... when it's time to sleep, now I'll *need* the sleep... very much. And I won't go to sleep thinking that I could be doing something more productive anymore!

There's also a suggestion of taking a full monophasic sleep once every week or two, to fully round out this plan. I plan to go a full month on pure Everyman without that weekly super-sleep, so that I can be sure I'm 100% "in the groove." After that month, I will add either a weekly or biweekly long sleep, depending on what I feel I need.

I've stayed up all night tonight. Starting at 11:00 AM today, I'll begin my polyphasic sleeping. So, here begins what I hope will be a fun and productive experiment. Wish me luck!

-Katie