Polyphasic Sleep Experiment:  Day 2

I thought I'd throw another post out there, because I kind of have a lot to say about the experiment.

So far, so good...although lately I've been worrying that I am not being precise enough with my nap times, seeing as how I already have varied within 30 minutes each way (both late and early) of certain naps, and how I overslept once for 10 minutes already. I need to start being more diligent in my napping schedule. This is a revelation I came to when re-reading some research on polyphasic sleeping that describes many people who have failed by not keeping a very strict napping schedule.

A friend of mine had decided to try out polyphasic sleeping with me, but he didn’t really go into it 100%. He decided spur of the moment to try it out with me after I explained to him why I thought it was such a beneficial sleeping schedule. However, when I called him that very night in between my 3AM and 7AM naps, he picked up the phone groggily and exclaimed that he didn’t get any sleep for the first two naps except for the last 10 seconds of the second nap, and then just decided to continue to sleep through the night since he had work tomorrow.

Don't get me wrong, this makes sense, as I don’t think I would have had the guts to try out the schedule if I had work, either, but the odd part is: He was very tired. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s almost been 24 hours and I don’t feel tired at all. I’m sure I’m heading for a crash….seeing how past experiences tell me that I am not especially good at handling lack of sleep in any substantial way, but as of right now, I feel fine. Maybe things will change after my 11:30 AM nap (it’s 11:11 AM right now)….but it’s odd that sometime late last night he was too tired to go on, but for some reason it’s 11 AM the next morning for me and I feel no severe urge to sleep. Must be the excitement of getting the schedule to work, I guess…although I don’t really feel that “excited”, either. Just motivated, really. Hmm, well, I’m sure the answers will come in time.

I am trying to figure out if my lack of sleep deprivation right now is beneficial or not. I find myself wishing I didn’t have to take naps, because I am not that tired and know that taking the nap will make me more tired when I wake up. I think that I am trying to remain awake and not sleep deprived right now by subconsciously conditioning myself to believe that I am not tired. Problem is, maybe I need to stop my body from doing this. According to the ideas associated with switching over to this sleep schedule, sleep deprivation is a key part of getting it to work successfully. Is it possible that maybe the more sleep deprived my body becomes, the more quickly the transition to polyphasic sleeping will take place? I mean, if my body is not tired or in pain, it has no reason to adapt, right? Oh well, I am confident that tomorrow I will crash…hell, maybe twice as hard since I’ve remained so energetic through my first 24 hours of polyphasic sleeping. That’s fine with me. Means I will adapt to the schedule twice as fast then, I guess.

Also, I’d like to mention something else odd that happened earlier today. I think it was somewhere around 5 or 6 AM that I started to feel just a little hungry, so I threw in a small personal pizza. By the time this pizza came out, I realized that I was oddly not that hungry…but was still able to eat some pizza. I had three of the four pieces, eating slowly until 7:30. After that, I had my 7:30-8:00AM nap, and then I went to the dentist around 10. As I was sitting in the office waiting for the dentist to arrive, I all of a sudden felt very hungry, as if my stomach was completely empty. It came about very quickly, and seemed unusual to me. The assistant there told me that the dentist was going to be a half an hour late, and I told her I would just come back because I was so hungry. I went back home and immediately ate the extra piece of pizza, and then proceeded to microwave some more pizza and throw some vegetables in for good measure. It is very odd how my hungry seems to be fluctuating violently for little to no reason…it must be the fact that my body is simply not used to being awake for 24 hours straight. It might take some time to learn a new eating schedule and new ways for my body to tell me I’m hungry. This will be an interesting extension of the new sleeping schedule; a new eating schedule, as well. I will try and keep track of what meals I eat and when so that I can detail the specifics on this log.

In general, I admit that I do not exactly have the best memory around. As a matter of fact, I often might even be known for being rather forgetful to most people who know me. I bring this up because I had a rather forgetful experience this morning…and I realize that this could simply be my usual forgetfulness and have nothing to do with the polyphasic sleeping, but it just seemed a little too odd at first glance. Things like when I gathered all of my things for the dentist appointment today, thought I was completely ready, and walked over to the back door to wave goodbye to my mother and leave only for her to tell me, completely to my surprise, that maybe I should consider putting on shoes before getting onto my motorcycle. I’ll keep an eye out just in case things like this continue to happen. As promised, if I think that anything really dangerous is happening to my body, I will terminate the experiment, but as of now that’s hardly enough problems to even get me worried. Well, I’m off to catch that dentist again and run some errands. I’ll probably post again sometime today. See you then!

Quick addition:  It's 12:30 now, I've been up from my 11:30 - 12:00 PM nap for a half hour or so now and, I continue to feel just fine, not extremely tired or fatigued.