February – Polyphasic Sleep
Posted on February 15, 2008, under February: Polyphasic Sleep.
It’s been a long time since I updated this site, as you can see there was no entry made in December (which was going to be random acts of kindness) or January. This is because I had exams in January, and revision took up 98% of my waking time.
In the month of February, I have been doing Polyphasic sleep. This is a somewhat insane process whereby one reduces their hours of sleep considerably, and spreads the remaining amount across the day in short naps. The program I have been following is called the ‘everyman schedule’, and looks as follows for me:
5:00am-8:00am – Core sleep period
12:30pm – 20 minute nap
6:00pm – 20 minute nap
11:30pm – 20 minute nap
So, a total of 4 hours sleep each day. When starting a polyphasic sleep schedule, it is reported that an ‘adaptation period’ occurs before you experience life without sleep deprivation again, and that you must stick strictly to this schedule during the adaptation period, or else it will last longer. During adaptation, you are slightly more tired than usual while your body adjust to the new routine.In my experience, I only experience this kind of tiredness after the core sleep and sometimes late at night (duh).
I am not doing this in a hardcore way, nor in a particularly strict way. I have missed naps often, and occasionally overslept (usually when alcohol is involved). It’s not that I’m doing this to see if it works, or because I’m emotionally attached to wanting polyphasic sleep to be a real and valid thing, I just want some extra time for a while, and the detriments of sleep deprivation are not really that bad, especially short term. This is well known to my fellow students; one of whom told me she would cut sleep down to four hours at night during revision periods. She even said there’s a period of a week or so where it’s pretty bad, then she adapts to it. Myself, when I used to work a lot of hours, I would often be left with less sleep. You just get used to it, and as long as it isn’t long term, it’s not so bad.
So as I say, I do oversleep sometimes. Only in the first week was this because I was literally too sleepy to get up. In the first week, I was strict with this, as I did not really go out that week. Since then my life has interrupted my sleep schedules. I work around this as much as possible, but sometimes you’re round at a friends house and you’re all staying up talking and you forget about naps. Other times you’re just too drunk to get up after 3 hours sleep, polyphasic or not! I expected this, and it’s OK.
There was one occasion, this morning, that I was genuinely gutted about. Went for my last nap a little later than usual, and it was set to finish at 00:17. Accidentally, I set my alarm to 12:17 – twelve hours after I wanted to wake! I woke up at around 8:00am, a nice round 8 hours’ sleep. Although I was annoyed at this (the bottle of wine may have played a part), I realised that I had gone to bed at midnight, and got up at 8am, which for a student is still pretty damn good going!
Experientally, it’s pretty cool following this sleep schedule. I do not experience anything like an ‘adaptation period’, ostensibly because I oversleep occasionally. This cuts my waking hours down, but still puts me above normal, and it doesn’t matter because as soon as I get a few days straight without any commitments or plans, I can get straight back into the 4 hours a day routine with no problems. Except immediately after the core sleep period as I have mentioned, during which I sit up in bed, put lights on, and (slowly) make my way through The Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text written around 500BC. It is weird because one of the characters is Krishna, so in effect I have this Hindu God ranting at me while I’m half asleep for 45 minutes or so every morning. Seriously, these Hindu Gods can rant. Reminds me of Galt’s massive rant in Atlas Shrugged, though the topic is almost exactly the opposite.
Another benefit of this, is that it is slowly fixing a problem I’ve always had. I’ve never been able to get to sleep quickly when I lie down on the bed. Usually takes me quite a while actually. With polyphasic sleep, I’ve been forced to learn to get to sleep immediately. Early in this experiment I thought that the 20 minute time period was the important part of the nap. It isn’t. It’s the timing. I used to put my alarm 5 minutes back if I hadn’t fallen asleep yet, and again and again until I fell asleep. This made things much worse because now the nap is out of schedule, not to mention the time wasted lying there. Just made me more tired. So I decided to set my alarm (I set it for 25 minutes now), and lie down for that period and try not to be awake. If I don’t sleep, I get up straight away. This worked much better even if I didn’t manage to sleep, but it also forced the development of a new skill – getting to sleep.
I tried all kinds of things, but what I have found works best so far is relaxing all the muscles, and repeating something in my head at the same rate as breathing. Then eventually I get the urge to shift into the position I usually sleep in, I do that, then I wake up sometime later. Often (but not always) with these naps, I feel like I’ve been sleeping for ages. Sometimes I wake up a few minutes before the alarm, and think I’ve overslept considerably. So I’ve found it unnecessary to be as strict with the schedule as is often suggested, though to be fair I’m doing the tamer of the polyphasic routines; the most hardcore involves a 20 minute nap every 4 hours, and no core sleep. I couldn’t do that one as my life is not flexible enough (ie., I don’t have a successful online business which is the sole source of my income).
They also say that missing a nap is like missing a night’s sleep, I’d say missing 2 is like that, and missing 1 just makes me pretty tired. I really hope I get a chance to do a good week’s stretch where I stick fully to the schedule. As for the extra hours… Did they translate into productive behaviour? Well in two weeks I’m completely up to date with uni work, have completely gone through and organised everything I own here in London (my room is actually tidy!), have made a lot of progress on my dissertation, got stuff on ebay which I’d been planning to do for ages, and still had time to go out a few times. So yes it does seem to work!