Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 4

Yesterday I decided to try and make an attempt to wait until later in the day to post about the day, naps and all, in its entirety. This way, I could attempt to recap the entire day instead of posting several times about the same day in short blasts. I just wanted to try it as an alternative but, I went a visited a friend last night and ended up not getting around to posting until right now, so I’m thinking maybe short bursts are indeed the better way to go about it.

On to business, then. Today was certainly an interesting day when it comes to my polyphasic sleeping schedule. Let me start off by saying that recently, I have begun use of a polyphasic mp3 file that is up for download on the internet (I believe I downloaded the base version here: http://www.placebo.serv.co.za/?page_id=7). I ended up downloading the 23 minute version presented here and then I edited it, making the alarm a little quicker and to the point, and adding enough static to allow for 30 minute naps instead of only 23 minutes. I tried this out on one of my early naps (3am, maybe) and it seemed to work pretty good. Incidentally, when I was up at 3AM I still felt very tired, but it was better than yesterday. I think that I might be over the worse of the transition, then. I see the hours of 2-8am or so getting easier and easier each day until I’m just as awake and alert at those times as I am at all the other times. Sleeping with headphones was easier than I had guessed it would be, and they didn’t become that bothersome (weren’t really falling off, allowed me to sleep in pretty much any orientation without being uncomfortable, etc). I set a backup alarm just in case it didn’t work the first time, and didn’t end up needing it, considering it worked pretty good – waking me up just about when I wanted to be waken up, anyways.

Due to this success, I didn’t see any problem with using the mp3 player tactic for my next nap (without setting the backup alarm). If I remember correctly, I took this nap a little early to held fend against the fatigue (maybe around 5am). Little did I know, though, that my mp3 player batteries were running out of power. Then, of course, what do you know, but somewhere in the middle of playing the 30 minute mp3 file, my mp3 player ran out of batteries and simply turned off. I know, awesome, right? This, of course, resulted in me oversleeping….again. I must have slept for at least an hour and a half….maybe even a little bit longer (although I don’t think I got to the two hour mark). I’m pretty disappointed about this. It’s probably going to cause me nothing but trouble…..I think that every time I vary from the schedule grossly, like this, it sets me back and makes it harder to complete the transition in its entirety.

But, this isn’t where the schedule varying stops. I was surprised to find that my next two naps were pretty refreshing – I always feel good when I’m tired before a nap, and refreshed afterwards – because I know that the schedule is working. And that was the case for those next two naps…I think that I skipped the 7am (because oversleeping during the 5am led me to wake up too close to 7am) and napped at 11am and 3pm – and then when it came time to get ready for my 7pm nap, a friend had called and mentioned that he wanted to go to a movie with some other friends. I thought that this would be perfect, I would leave for his house early, take my nap there before I left for the movie, and then met everyone there. However, I wasn’t really that tired for this nap…the ride there I remember thinking several times “I wonder if I should even take this nap” or “I don’t feel like I need a nap right now”. Anyways, turns out that traffic was horrible, so I didn’t even have to worry about making the decision of whether or not to nap – it was made for me. I didn’t get to my friends place until 8:15pm or so to catch an 8:45pm movie at a nearby theater, so we had to leave straight away to catch it. The movie ended up lasting pretty late, later than I thought, and we ended up not getting back until after 11 (skipping my 11pm nap in addition to the 7pm). Now, what really worried me about this was: I wasn’t that tired. This might not sound in particular like a bad thing at first but, it was too me. Not being tired after skipping two scheduled naps in a row means that I haven’t acclimated correctly to the schedule. I was considering that, because of the extra sleep I got during the nap that I overslept on, my body wasn’t in need of the REM sleep from those two other naps….but this seems too farfetched. I don’t know why my body would be optimized to get REM sleep for all 1.5 hours of a 1.5 hour nap – this sounds like something that would take time to develop, if it’s even possible. I don’t know, all I know is that I wasn’t tired at all until around midnight, where I took my first nap in something like 7 hours.

I felt a little groggy waking up from this nap, and had to drive home late at night. I didn’t expect there to be any problems, but I was feeling more sleepy than usual on the drive home, and it kind of worried me. I’ll have to crack down these next few days to see if I can easily repair the damage that’s been done. The naps that I have taken this morning (the 19’th, even though majority of this post is describing events on the 18’th) have gone alright….but I seem to be kind of groggy still waking up. I haven’t gotten any more than 2 hours of consecutive sleep within the last 3-4 days or so, though, so I don’t think that these little mistakes would be enough to revert the schedule completely back to monophasic and make me start over, or anything. The experience has confused me a little, and right now, in all truthfulness, I’m not sure when I should take my next nap according to my current schedule. I’ve decided that it would be best to get ready, and if I’m tired enough, take a nap before my dentist appointment this morning (yes, another one….*sigh*). I have more to post about, but for now I need to leave so that I have time to take a nap if I want to. I’ll stay much more diligent with my naps now that I have full battery power :). Stay tuned, I'll post again later today.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 3, Part 2

I am feeling very good about the experiment, right now. Since the extreme tiredness yesterday, it seems I’ve been improving consistently, and I didn’t get around to writing that until 1AM. I can only assume that the effects of switching to the polyphasic schedule are really starting to take root. My last three naps (one at 3PM, one at 7PM, and one at 11PM) were pretty good. I am still having just a bit of trouble falling asleep quickly, I had particular trouble doing this with today’s 11PM nap, for some reason, but as far as I can tell, that’s not such a horrible thing (not to mention the polar opposite of what I expected with this experiment).

I’m simply not “dead tired” when I lay down for the naps….only slightly tired….and I think that another reason might be that I’m used to rolling around in bed for a while before actually falling asleep when I was on my monophasic schedule. I’m sure that eventually, when I reduce the naps to 20 minutes time and need to be asleep for almost all of that time, that I’ll need to be sure that I’m off in dreamland within the first 5 minutes or so… but, I’ll cross that road when I come to it. But, the way I see it, in my current situation, it can’t be bad. If I take too long for me to get to sleep for one nap, I’ll probably be so tired for the next nap that I’ll drop off as soon as my head hits the pillow. One bad thing about this that I’ve considered is: If I was truly adapted to the schedule, I think that my body would be very excited to get these naps, and that laying down for the first 15-20 minutes of one without sleeping would be unheard of. So, maybe this inability to get to sleep is just proof that my body is not yet fully acclimated to the new schedule, and that I still have a long way to go before I’m a true polyphasic sleeper.

However much that may be true, my naps are definitely getting more refreshing when I wake up. All three today so far were easy to wake up from. Granted, though the upcoming 3am and 7am naps will be the real test. These are the times that my body is used to being asleep during, so it’s a little more difficult to pull off those waking hours without falling asleep. I feel pretty good right now, though. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to skip the extra 5am nap I was planning on adding? Although, I surely wouldn’t count on it :). However, I feel that I should be awake enough to have success with these naps…hell, if I was able to do it yesterday when I felt more tired than this, I should be OK today. I will only find out for sure today if yesterday was the peak of the hill, or if I’m still climbing. For all I know, I could be over the worse of it after yesterdays 3am-7am nightmare (not literally, of course :) )….either that or, this is just the beginning. Either way, I’ll be sure to keep you posted on my progress as I continue the transition. For right now, though, I’m going to go get something to eat.

On this note, before I go, I wanted to mention that it feels kind of odd eating at 1:30 AM and knowing that I’m not going to go to sleep for the night right afterwards. As a matter of fact, speaking of my eating habits, I’m excited to see if there is any weight change due to the new schedule. I’ve definitely been eating more, but I figure this is offset by me using up more energy with more waking hours, so I didn’t think any weight change would come with. I, however, will make absolutely no attempts to diet or stop myself from eating more, so we will see if I naturally gain weight. I’ve also heard of people getting odd cravings after switching to polyphasic sleep. I read one article where the polyphasic sleeper offered the explanation that his body craved certain vitamins or minerals that it was no longer creating by skipping all of the other stages of sleep. This sounds plausible, so I’ll keep my eye out for any significant craving changes that I might experience. That’s all for now, wish me luck for my 3-7am cycle today! 

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment:  Day 3

I wanted to quickly start a post before my 11AM nap. Today (in particular, between my 3AM and 7AM naps) was horribly difficult. This is the kind of sleep deprivation I thought I was going to be experiencing in the first place. I’m not sure why it took almost two full days to kick in but, it’s definitely here now. I was playing a video game, trying to keep my mind off of how tired I was, but I kept closing my eyes and starting to nod off for a bit. I wasn’t actually sleeping – but it was more like when you’re in a boring class and you fall asleep and hang your head and the momentum of your head dropping wakes you up immediately. I found that I would be running around shooting stuff in the game, really barely even concentrating on it due to my fatigue, and then all of a sudden my eyes would close for about 3-4 seconds and I would open them again to see my character running aimlessly into a wall or being killed by enemies. Needless to say, I was really tired.



I have considered from the start the possibility of adding extra naps in to the hard waking hours of this new schedule to make things easier, and that’s what I had to do during my 3am-7am waking hours today. I added an extra nap in at 5am, which was completely necessary as I was worried I would fall asleep in my computer desk chair if I didn’t. The way I see it, as long as I keep the naps at least an hour (preferably two) apart from each other and do not sleep for more than 30 minutes, my body should still adapt to the new schedule, no matter how many naps I take, because it still needs to learn to go right into REM sleep for those 30 minutes. I, however, don’t want to go overboard, because if I get my body used to taking 10 naps a day instead of just 6, then I’m going to have to wean myself off of those extra naps, because they’ll be taking up extra time in the day that I don’t want to waste. So, I’ll try and keep my extra naps at a minimum (one extra nap a day, possibly two if it’s really bad) so that the transition from 7 naps a day to 6 naps a day won’t be too difficult once I get more stable with the new schedule. I see myself taking this extra nap for a while, though, just because it was so hard to stay awake this morning, and I don’t think it’s going to get any easier for at least a couple of days. I’ve just got to stay focused on my goal, though, and not let anything deter me from successfully setting up a polyphasic sleeping schedule.



There was, however, a problem when I took my 7AM nap. I was extremely tired at this time, and pretty much just wishing I could sleep forever. I set the alarm for 7:30 AM, and then, I swear to you, I have no idea what happened. I remember waking up 5 minutes before the alarm went off and thinking “SHIT I OVERSLEPT!” but then realizing I had 5 minutes left and laying back down…and then I truthfully do NOT remember what happened, but somehow my alarm that was set for 7:30 went off, I must have turned it off in a practically drunken sleep deprivation stupor, and then for some reason, instead of staying asleep for the rest of the day and completely destroying my chances at the schedule like I figured would happen if this occurred…I only stayed in bed until about 8:15 or so…I think. Like I said, I don’t remember much of this, I just remember waking up and being very worried about the fact that I overslept with my nap, and hoping I hadn’t ruined anything that would be difficult to repair. I hazard a guess that I probably slept an hour or so, instead of a half an hour (considering the time I was just laying in bed and not sleeping). I still feel tired, so I assume that the extended nap was not enough to damage the schedule noticeably. I am considering finally implementing my headphone/polyphasic mp3 idea so that it’s not something I can so easily shut off…and then maybe have a backup alarm, as well, to make sure I get up on time.



Well, I’m going to go take my 11AM nap, now. I’ll wait to publish this post until after I am done with that nap so I can mention anything interesting that might happen.



The 11AM nap was good – much easier to wake up from than that horrible 7AM nap. I feel very awake right now, but I think it has to do with my mother just getting angry with me, most likely causing me to produce adrenaline. I should mention here that, I am impressed that mood swings have not been occurring during the experiment. I considered that as a possibility when I first started but, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, and I feel like my personality hasn’t changed at all save for me becoming more tired in general, and maybe less outgoing due to that fatigue.



I have been experiencing some more appetite jumps. For instance, before my 11AM nap, my appetite spiked and I was very hungry. However, I chose to go to sleep instead of postponing the nap and eating, and then after the nap I was not that hungry. This would happen sometimes even when I was on a monophasic sleep schedule, but it seems more often or more powerful now that I’m polyphasic.



A post or two ago, I was going to mention that my arms were feeling somewhat sore, but I decided against it since I figured it was due to exercise. The only weird thing is, it took over a day for them to start feeling sore….it just felt weird and out of place. I talked with someone about the stages of sleep that I will be avoiding with this new schedule after this, and she claims that certain stages of sleep, other than REM, are involved in building muscle tissue – and she said that I might start feeling sore in certain muscle areas if I continue. Maybe my arm muscle soreness is a result of this? Again, if I start to experience any health problems or concerns that really bother me, I will certainly terminate the experiment. As of right now though, nothing too bad is happening, and the experiment seems to be going alright save for the mess-up I experienced during my 7AM nap this morning. Will keep you posted. 

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment:  Day 2 Part 2

An interesting story about that dentist appointment – when I was first making the appointment yesterday (yesterday….is there such a thing for me anymore? Time gets so confusing, as I’m not sure whether I’m talking about today or yesterday because I have no block sleep to separate days for me) anyways….when I was making the appointment the assistant told me that I could come any time after 11 AM the following day. At first, I almost reflexively thought “Dammit! That’s freaking early…” seeing how I’m not used to waking up that early on my monophasic schedule. But then, I realized that I was going polyphasic, and I actually ended up asking her if she had anything earlier so I could more easily fit it in between my 7am and 11am naps. She didn’t, but I just thought the experience was interesting. There is no more morning, to me. I will no longer schedule things according to whether they make me wake up early or late or whatever – now all I will do is schedule things around my naps.



Today, I had my 3:30 nap just about on time, and was woken up by my father for a haircut (which I thought was a half an hour later, or else I would have scheduled my nap more efficiently around it) about 25 minutes later. This means that I got approximately 5 minutes less sleep than usual in this nap. I don’t think that this was the reason that I was so tired between my 3:30 and 7:30 naps, but it was a pretty tiring experience. It was hard to keep focused and have a conversation with my father on the drive over, and I found myself just wishing I was sitting at home, out of the sun and relaxing. I remember feeling this way earlier today, too, on my way to CompUSA. I took my motorcycle, and remember wishing that I was just at home, out of the sun. When I got back, nothing could have talked me into going back out until I recuperated a little bit. I’ve really noticed that the more I focus on how little sleep I’ve been getting, the more fatigued I seem. I found that once we got into a political conversation with my barber and his wife, and I was engaged mentally, I started to wake up a little. On my way home, we picked up some food, and I ate a pretty good meal of an Italian beef with hot peppers, followed by some candy which I’ve been munching on until 45 minutes ago or so when I ran out :). It was kind of exciting to get home today, because after the dentist I went to CompUSA to pick up a new graphics card and a game and drove those home.



You see, a long while ago I came pretty securely to the conclusion that computer gaming, although fun occasionally, is not something I should spend a lot of time doing. Save for certain games that I really like and play every once in a long while, I have pretty much stayed away from computer gaming, and even gaming in general as of late. This has been working out just great, but that’s when gaming had no positive benefits for me. In my current situation, I have realized that gaming is the *perfect* way to help me get through the more boring, tiresome spaces in my new Ubermans schedule. Gaming is relatively engaging, enough so to keep my attention and focus off of being tired or my next nap or what not, but at the same time is not so mentally focused as other tasks that I’ve been looking to complete during the transition that revolve around programming or web design. These tasks, I think, would be too difficult for me to focus on, and could just make things worse by getting me frustrated and mentally fatigued. So, I decided to pick up a new video card (like I said, I’ve been out of the gaming industry for a while, so I was a bit behind when it comes to hardware) and a good first person shoot em up game that could hold my interest without being too mentally challenging.



So, I have been playing the game, and it was been working very well so far. I feel engaged, and not tired at all. As a matter of fact, I think I may have had a breakthrough during my last nap. I napped from about 7:15 to 7:45 and when I woke up, I was pretty damn tired. However, I rolled out of bed, drank some water, and all of a sudden felt very energized, as if I had gotten a full nights sleep. I wonder if this was my first real bout of REM sleep during a nap…..but it seems to have come far too early in the experiment. Maybe my body had already adapted somewhat to getting REM sleep during naps from my napping habits before. I never used to nap in small intervals like this, but I often laid in bed for a long time before I got to sleep, and then stayed in bed for a pretty long time after I woke up just to relax. Who knows, maybe I really was only getting somewhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour of actual shut eye. This would explain a lot, as I have been wondering why I am not as fatigued during the experiment as I expected I would be, and why I thought I might have had dreams during a couple of my naps (which, at the time I passed off figuring they were daydreams that just had me confused). If this is true, could it be possible that I am already partially acclimated to the polyphasic sleep schedule? Only time will tell – if by “tomorrow”, this time, I am still feeling generally energetic and not that tired….I will assume that this must have been the case. Three days of REM sleep deprivation with almost no effects just makes no sense, so there must be another answer. Either way, in about 24 hours we’ll see if I was just prepping for a big crash, or if I am somehow already partially acclimated to the schedule.



I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned this before, but due to reports that caffeine can mess with the REM sleep schedule, I have decided to go completely without caffeine or any other substances to try and keep me awake for this experiment. It is only my will power and positive thinking that I will use to keep myself up for as long as I need to be up.



I think I am going to try and take my 11:30 PM nap a little early (around 11), so I can get back onto a more rigid 11, 3, 7, 11, 3, 7 schedule. I will wait to post this blog entry until after this nap, so I can comment on it as well.



I am a little worried about driving, especially my motorcycle, while I am sleep deprived. I thought it would be easy to tell when I was too tired to drive, but I have felt relatively good pretty much through the whole experiment so far. Although I can tell that I am tired (things tend to happen a little slower, I feel a bit hazy, etc.) I do not feel too sleep deprived to drive safely. We’ll see how things turn out “tomorrow”, there are some errands that I might be able to run depending on how I feel. It’s odd, though, I still can’t get over it. I’ve been awake for over 35 hours now, and I do not really feel like taking a long monophasic sleep. I feel a bit tired, but there is nothing in me that actually wants to fall asleep for 7 hours straight. Maybe it’s just a subconscious motivation to get the sleep schedule to work, I don’t know. All I know is that I am perfectly happy getting these small naps, and I have no urge to go back to my monophasic schedule as of yet, even factoring in my increased tiredness.



Well, that was pretty crazy. Believe it or not but, for the first time since the first two naps I ever took on the polyphasic schedule, I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep. I’m not sure exactly what it was, I think that it may have had something to do with me being excited that the polyphasic schedule was working so well due to me waking up from my last nap (the 7:15 one) relatively refreshed and feeling like I had gotten REM sleep. It might have been this, or it might have been a slew of other reasons, but all I know is that I laid there for the first 20 minutes or so, I think, without any real sleep. I felt like the alarm woke me up, so I might have gotten a little bit of nap in near the end….I feel about the same as when I went to sleep, though. A friends phone call coincided almost perfectly with my alarm, as they seemingly went off within seconds of one another, which is just something I found interesting. I wonder if the phone ring alone would have been enough to wake me up. I am interested to know how deeply I sleep during these naps – once the schedule is more secured, I might have to do some tests to determine this secret. So, this last nap went pretty horrible, but at least I don’t feel any worse or more tired after waking up from it than I did when I first laid down for it. I am becoming slightly worried, to tell the truth. It is odd to me that I have only slept approximately 4.3 hours – probably much less due to tossing and turning instead of actual and what not – within the last 35 hours, but that I am awake enough to keep myself up during a nap. This isn’t even factoring in the idea that I am probably getting little to no REM sleep in those previously mentioned 4.3 hours. I think that around Day 3 it is supposed to get real hard, so we’ll see how it pans out. Look out for my next post, I get the feeling it might be an interesting one. 

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.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment:  Day 1 (Intro)

Well, today is the first day of my polyphasic sleeping experiment. This is the main reason that I am beginning this post at 5:15 AM. Throughout the experiment, I will be intermittently posting on this blog about my progress in order to keep both a personal and public record of how the sleep schedule is working for me. If you do not know what polyphasic sleeping is, it’s a method of changing your sleep schedule to accommodate several naps a day , allowing for the human body to get by with less sleep in total.

In more detail: the schedule I will be generally following, and I stress the word generally because it is quite possible it becomes too difficult or I decide there is a certain part of the schedule that I dislike and need to change, is called the Uberman schedule. It consists of 6 20 minute naps throughout the day; that’s one nap every 4 hours. The theory of the schedule is this: the human body normally only gets a small amount of REM sleep per night, approximately 2-3 hours worth. This is the stage of sleep that really revitalizes and reenergizes the body, while the other stages are seemingly unnecessary. Realizing this, a polyphasic sleeping schedule aims to trick the body into going straight into REM sleep immediately when it goes to sleep. Unfortunately, the only real way to do this (according to the research I’ve performed) is by depriving the body of sleep. By sleeping only in 20 minute intervals, the body becomes deprived of REM sleep because it simply is not asleep long enough to enter REM. But, the human body can adapt to just about anything, and adapt it does. Apparently, after the fourth day or so, my body will realize it needs to start getting some REM, and therefore should begin to shoot me directly into REM sleep for the duration of my 20-30 minute naps. After two weeks or so, my body should have it down pat. Eyes closed, REM sleep for 20 minutes, eyes pop open and body awakens as energized as if I had just had a full night’s sleep.

Now, this schedule is very exciting for me in general. Lots of people, when on breaks from work or school, need to develop some kind of large project to take up there time, or simply sit around complaining about being “bored” all day and exclaim that they need to get a job or they’re going to go crazy. I, on the other hand, have had many vacations in the duration of my life, and not one of them can I remember being bored at. Placed in an isolated room without books, sound, or even light, I still think I could remain at least relatively “unbored” for a good period of time. This is a bit of an extreme case, and I know it’s a bold statement, but my general point is that I can always find stuff to do with extra time, be it something as trivial as play video games or as exceedingly important as contemplating crucial personal growth. That being said, I have several tasks already put before me to finish up while I’m polyphasic, as I have read that without a list of tasks to perform one may become so bored and frustrated with their free time that they will be unable to stay awake.

I have been mulling over starting this experiment for a while, now, and I’ve finally “gotten my shit together”, as you might say. I took the next two weeks off of work, and my classes at school don’t start until Thursday of next week (leaving me with about 9 days from start of the experiment (yesterday) to the day school starts to adapt to the new schedule). I’ve set a goal to try the schedule at least for 10 days, and I will complete that goal unless the idea of polyphasic sleeping itself fails horribly, which I highly doubt due to the positive feedback I’ve read on the internet at several trusted sources. The only reason I will stop the experiment is if I am so tired that I accidentally oversleep (which could destroy the entire schedule – this is something that I will take great care not to do), or if I think it is dangerous to my health or to others around me somehow. In general, I am confident the experiment will end in at least some kind of success, and at the very least I will learn that this is not the way to reduce the amount of time that I sleep, and that it doesn’t work at all.

So, now that that’s all been said, on to the recap of my first polyphasic day, EVER.
I had some things going on with my friends that I was considering doing today, and therefore putting off my polyphasic sleep experiment (I.E. visiting a friend in a different state) but since those plans fell through, I kind of spur of the moment decided to make this my first polyphasic day. Another big motivator in this decision was realizing that I am probably going to be moving this coming weekend, and I want to be at least somewhat adapted by then, to the point where physical work (I.E. lifting boxes back and forth) won’t make me throw up and then pass out from exhaustion :).

I would like to mention here that even though I decided to start the experiment today, I had a final workout with my sister. During the experiment, I will be trying to avoid extreme physical labor or exercise due to the amount of energy things of that nature consume, but I figured since I wasn’t yet very tired I could pull off one final workout today (I took it generally easy during this workout) before the experiment started and I wouldn’t be able to do things like that.

Anyways, I decided around noon or so that today was going to be the day, so my first actual nap was at 3 pm. It took some deliberation to decide whether I would wait until I was tired enough to actually get to sleep during a nap, or just take naps according to the schedule even if I wasn’t tired. I decided on the latter, for a few reasons. One reason is, I figure that even if I’m just tossing and turning in bed, it’s expending less energy than being up and around and completely conscious, and since especially in these first few days, I’m going to want to expend as little energy as possible in order to not become too tired, it seemed a decent idea. Also, I was feeling oddly tired around 3pm, and thought that I could pull off a decent nap attempt at that time. In addition to both of those, I figure that any amount of extra naps I get will just act as extra steps towards getting my body to realize it needs to go straight into REM sleep during these naps.

My first nap went surprisingly well. I am not sure if I slept very much, but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as “tossing and turning”. I shut the lights off, set my alarm for a half an hour later, and kind of half slept for that amount of time. My eyes were closed the whole time, and I never felt the urge to open them or get up and do anything. Part of this may be due simply to extreme motivation. I am very excited to try out this schedule and work it into my life so that I have more free time, and at first I thought that might make it more difficult for me to actually get to sleep during the early naps because I would be too excited, but it seems to have caused the opposite effect. Maybe I am simply so motivated to succeed in this project that I am mentally forcing myself into a partial sleep stage during these naps. I’m not sure, but one thing I do know is, the more tired I get, the more easy these naps will be to fall asleep during.

The second nap I took was an interesting one. I ended up driving somewhere with my sister and not getting around to this nap until 7:30. I took this nap in the car on the drive home. It was interesting because, again, I wasn’t really tired at all, but not so energetic it was impossible for me to get to sleep. So, I laid down and closed my eyes and I’d say about 15 minutes or more into the nap, I started to have these odd dream sequences. It was as if I were dreaming, but then my sister would make a noise or blow some smoke toward me that would make it hard to breath or something to pull me back into reality and it would go away quickly. This happened several times according to my memory. It didn’t feel entirely like a dream, and I don’t think that they were dreams. It takes anywhere from 4-7 days to start getting real REM sleep with this schedule, so I don’t see how I possibly could have been dreaming (something that only happens during REM sleep) during only my second nap of my first day. I think that maybe these were some kind of odd daydreams, and I’m not sure why I was having them. Maybe, again, it was simply my intense motivation to fall asleep and successfully complete the experiment.

My third nap was the best one up to that point. I was actually over at a friend’s house during that nap, and it was interesting to see how easy it was to fit the nap in. He had to leave to go to jewel and pick up some garbage bags, and while he was gone I just set my watch on a 30 minute timer and took a quick nap. I felt oddly like I was asleep, but still awake, during this nap. I think that I might have gotten some real sleep during this nap, but only minimal amounts. As soon as my watch went off (a relatively quiet beeping noise) I immediately got up and turned it off. I didn’t feel very tired. This leads me to believe I wasn’t actually asleep at the time, and that maybe I didn’t sleep at all during this nap. I, however, am not positive. It was very odd, but I found this nap to be much longer than it actually was. When I woke up, I remember thinking “was that really only a half an hour? I feel like I’ve been napping for over an hour”. Interesting, considering I thought I would find these naps so short they were almost nonexistent at first. However, after double and triple checking my watch, it was certainly only 30 minutes that I was asleep. Interesting.

My fourth nap was almost a big mistake. I ended up staying at my friends house longer than expected, and had to take my 3:30 AM nap there, too. I laid down to get some sleep as he did some meditation and lit some incense. I usually like the smell of incense, but for some reason while I was laying there trying to get my nap in, it was slightly annoying to me. I was still able to get some sleep, though (remember, it was almost 4 AM at the time). I was pretty surprised at myself for not being very tired when I first laid down for this nap. Maybe it was the excitement of my first polyphasic day, or the very interesting conversation I was previously having with my friend, but I simply wasn’t any more tired than I was for the 11pm nap, which wasn’t that tired at all. However, this one was easier to get to sleep, it seemed. I told my friend that, since this was one of the key naps because it’s so late at night during times I’m used to being asleep at, he should keep an eye on the clock and wake me up if I slept 40 minutes or more. I set my watch, and closed my eyes, and woke up what seemed like 15 minutes later to my friends voice. I checked my watch and saw that my countdown timer was stopped somewhere around 9 minutes, interesting since I did not remember stopping it at all. My theories are 1. I accidentally pressed the button while rolling around on the couch, or 2. Less plausibly, maybe in a sleep induced stupor I pressed the button consciously to stop the timer from going off. Is it possible that my body wanted to stay asleep longer, so it took advantage of my sleepy state and told me to shut my watch off so it wouldn’t have to wake up in 30 minutes? I’m not sure, but either way, I ended up oversleeping by 10 minutes or so (slept for 40 minutes, about) – which probably doesn’t make that much of a difference this early in the game (I’m sure I got no REM sleep even though I slept 10 minutes longer than I was supposed to, so I’ll still be REM deprived enough for the experiment to work). I did learn an important lesson, though. Something like my watch is simply not a reliable enough alarm to use to wake me up. I need to start bringing either a portable alarm that is loud/infallible enough to work right, or I need to copy an mp3 file I downloaded a long while ago, when I first go into polyphasic sleeping, that apparently has been used by multiple polyphasic sleepers as an alarm method. They copy this mp3 file to a portable mp3 player, and then put headphones on and start playing the file to initiate their nap. The file first off plays soothing noises and sleep inducing music, and then when it reaches around the 25 minute mark it starts to slowly escalate into more and more annoying/loud noises until the user finally wakes up. This sounds like a good alternative, seeing as how I could take headphones & mp3 player anywhere, and it would be relatively easy to set up and wouldn’t look all that weird. It would just look like I was listening to music and fell asleep to any observers. Anyways, I need to run and take my 7:30 AM nap, now – I will be back in a half an hour or so to tell you how it went :).

This was certainly the hardest nap to wake up from so far. It seemed very short when I woke up, no more than 5 or 10 minutes in my mind. I have almost been up for 24 hours at this point, save for the short naps that have done essentially nothing for making me any less tired so far, so when the alarm went off I was still pretty tired. I’ve found previously that, in order to wake up, it’s best to get up out of bed immediately without thinking about it. The more time I take to think about it, the more time I allow myself to fall back asleep accidentally. I’ll be using this tactic during the polyphasic experiment to make sure I don’t fall back down into bed and oversleep. I also woke up from this nap very cold, as I often do in mornings. I’m not sure if this is a time thing (maybe around 8 AM my house starts to get very cold by nature) or if it’s a just waking up think, but this is the first nap I have woken up from and felt especially cold.

I would like to mention that I am not overly tired, and now, about a half an hour after my 7:30 AM nap ended, I do not feel very tired. I suspect that the real exhaustion will come tomorrow, during the second full day of essentially no sleep. We will see how much help these naps are in fending off sleep deprivation on the second day…but as of now I should mention that I have barely been tired at all since the beginning of the experiment, save immediately after naps, and that tiredness has gone away quickly enough. So far, I’m happy/impressed at how untired I am. I do not feel like I have been up for almost a day straight. I assume that this isn’t due to the naps, but instead (again) to my excitement to successfully perform this experiment. There are a lot of other things that I want to talk about pertaining to the experiment, but this post is getting long and I would like to look up some other things in the meantime, not to mention run some errands today. So, I’m going to leave it at this for now.

As of right now, just rest assured that I still feel confident I can successfully perform this experiment for an extended period of time. I’ll keep up my nap schedule as strictly as I can, and before giving up the whole project I will try things like adding more naps, or maybe even adding core sleep to the schedule. As of right now though, I’m barely even tired, so we’ll see what happens next. Thanks for reading….keep your eye out for my next post!

How Risk Taking and Thinking Outside the Box are Such Effective and Useful Tactics.

(Told via the story of the little bald frog)

Well well well - I just signed up for this blog as a way to express the things about the world and life (from my and only my perspective) that I percieve. When signing up for this blog, I filled out my user description, and within it there was a question saying something along the lines of: "The children are all waiting, tell us the story about the bald frog and the wig". Although there ended up being a ridiculously small (150 characters) maximum limit to this story...I was indeed impressed with blogger.com for doing something interesting and out of the ordinary that majority of the time confuses people.....those kinds of things are good...for everyone. The very small limit of characters leads me to believe that I misinterpreted the way in which they expected people to answer that question but.....I really don't care. I like my way better. So, I'm going to pretend they were presenting a random story topic which users are to write a story about to help describe themselves to others. Along those lines...

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There once was a little frog. Soon after its birth, this frog realized that, like all of his friends, parents, and siblings, he was also born with no hair. There was, however, something that this little frog was born with that NONE of his other frog pals had....and that was....the desire for and motivation to get that hair. The little bald frog hopped everywhere, trying on leaf after leaf, brush after brush, but NOTHING would stay on top of his head in a way that would look nice....a task that was made especially difficult when he went under-water :).

The little frog went to his parents and told them about his problem. With a little chuckle at his predicament, they said to him in a wise and overbearing tone: "Little frog, don't you worry about not having any hair. No one else has any hair, so you're not being isolated from any group by being bald, and truth be told, you're beautiful no matter what kind of hair you do or do not have, and we love you very much either way!" So, after that, the little frog hopped away, happy as can be that it had such loving parents.

However, soon the desire again presented itself, and it did not go away. So, the little frog, going against the advice of his loving parents, continued to search for a wig. Eventually, after months of work, he was able to fashion a fitting wig out of very rare waterproof leaves topped with brush to make it look like a nice head of hair. When he came into his group of friends again with this new wig, ALL of the lady frogs were immediately in love with him, practically worshiping him, and all of the male frogs were jealous of him, wishing they had been the first to make such a wig. He was a smart and moral frog, so he didn't take advantage of any of these people....instead simply following his own mind and doing what HE wanted to do for the rest of his life, obtaining similar results from every aspect of the way he lived.

The little frog lived happily ever after because of this very reason. It doesn't matter that his parents would love him whether he had a wig or not, he wanted a wig and knew that it would be a positive change to his appearance, so he didn't let the little demeaning speech from his parents or even the advice from his friends deter him. All of these other frogs were thinking squarely inside the box, too afraid to try anything different. Because, in lieu of these obstacles, the little bald frog was strong, intelligent, and free minded enough to complete his goals, he reaped the benefits from taking a risk and trying something new.
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Now, I liked this little story time break because, it gave me a great idea for explaining a perception I've had about life for my first post. You see, it has always been not only an interest, but a personal goal of mine to do things that are a little risky, a little crazy, and a little weird or unnecessary in others eyes. This is not for the sole reason of looking weird or unique to other people, but instead for a multitude of "real" reasons. Since I don’t want to make this post all that long, I’ll just touch on two big ones, and maybe add more in comments:

First off,
I have yet to find someone in my life that has a life that I completely idolize. Certain people (I can think of one or two off the top of my head) I do idolize many features in, but the fact of the matter remains that not only do I not idolize anyone’s life completely, but the overwhelming majority of the time I simply feel bad for people due to the way they live their lives, or find their lives simply pathetic from my point of view (not to say it isn’t a perfectly happy life to them, though...). Due to this, I see no reason whatsoever why I should worry about looking weird to the majority of people.

To help clarify this, let's take a quick look at the idea (not the definition) of the word 'weird'. Words can be defined, but then somehow end up meaning something completely different to most people who hear it, so let's focus on the general idea of the word to avoid confusion or misconception. In general, I think that the word weird means someone who differs from the majority of other people in such a way that causes them to be outcasted by a large group. This “weirdness” can be physically or mentally, I.E. Physical: A severely mangled cripple on the “negative” side, a supermodel on the “positive” side, or Mental: A raving lunatic schizophrenic on the “negative” side, and Einstein or Newton on the positive side. Another for instance would be the bald frog. Hi might have been (probably was) considered weird, not for being bald, of course, but instead for working on his wig and being obsessed with getting hair all of the time. The other frogs might have thought he was dumb for spending all of his time trying to make a wig....I mean...frogs don't have hair...how the hell did he even get that idea, much less why is he working so hard on something that seems like it will be useless....what an idiot frog, right?

Well, the answer is no. If you answered yes, then you, in actuality, are more likely the idiot. The frog is only considered weird for working on that wig because it is not commonplace....he might be the first frog to do it. But that, by absolutely no means, makes it wrong or dumb. As you can see in the conclusion of the frog's story, it turned out for the best at the end because the wig actually helped him in his social circle and made him feel better about himself simultaneously, meaning it was the “correct” choice (I use quotes and parenthesis a lot….please bear with me).

So, weird is really just like saying "You don't comply with what I'm used to perceiving from observing people". If, however, you (like me) are not looking to become "like" any other people, then you are doing exactly the right thing. Follow your own mind, and find out what is best for you. Those things that you choose are best for you seeming like weird decisions to other people is actually a good identifier that you're doing stuff right, in our case. If majority of people didn't think it was weird, it would mean that they all did things like that also, and if almost all of the time you do not like what the majority of other people do, then you are on the right path by seeming weird to them.

Secondly,
Risk is a key factor in success. Think about it, if there is a goal that you unfailingly want to achieve, in this example the frog getting hair of some kind, you never have to worry about screwing up risks. If that frog took the risk of spending months trying to find the right kind of wig only to find out that there is no existent leaf in the world that was waterproof, leaving his idea in shambles, he could gather up his things and rebuild his idea in another way to succeed. All he lost was time, and that time can’t really be considered lost since without the learning experience of failing with that first attempt, he never would have know that he needed to go on to another completely different attempt.

So, he needs to either find a new way to make hair (hair growth formulas….different types of paint or powders) that he thinks will work, or he needs to make his own waterproof wig, or he needs to find a way to do something else to himself that will get him to the same place that he wanted to achieve via the wig (better physical appearance, more friends, more sexual activity, whatever).

In other words, he fell off of his horse, gathered his things, and then promptly saddled back up and started off on a less bumpy path (alternative hair products)…..or maybe a way to make grind away at his current path thereby making it less bumpy (make his own waterproof wig) or maybe giving new shoes or shock absorbers to his horse to make it able to take the bumps better (finding an idea that would make him feel the same as if he got the wig). There are a multitude of solutions for any one problem, and any of them can work, you just need to focus on one.

This is the idea of risks being so important, and why it’s almost idiotic not to take them. If you truly want something, risk away, because the more you fail the more you will learn about that thing, and or what you want from it/out of it. Eventually, you will either loose motivation (meaning you didn’t want it badly enough…oh well….at least you tried!) or, you will succeed (yyyaaayyy).

Maybe on the next post I will talk more about what motivated the bald frog to complete his goals. Motivation is so important. Let me rephrase: Motivation is sooooooooooooooooooososoooooooooooooo (X 10000) important. Anyways, I'm sure I'll touch on what I think about that, soon.

I would like to mention that, if you are reading this blog, and find it interesting, and want to comment or better yet ask a question or get me to clarify something, please don't hesitate. Human interaction is one of the best ways to solve problems, as long as people interact the right way. Hmm, one day I'll have to make a post about that, too ;). Well then....have a nice day, everyone!