finally....

It's about time I got around to this. It doesn't feel like it's been that long since my last post, but it's been quite busy. In short, holidays, a funeral, an extremely busy period at work, house and mortgage hunting have played havoc with my schedule. Missing a few naps here and there is very destructive to polyphasic sleep.

As a result, I've been a strange mix of mono- and polyphasic for the past week or two, which has been interesting - at first you feel pretty cruddy (physically) after getting extra sleep, but that smoothes out after a while. If I'm completely honest, it's gone on a little longer than necessary, primarily due to laziness on my part. But I did have some lovely sleeps.

So I'm back on the PS drug again, with tonight being the first full night in several days, and so far there's no issues (yes, it's early days yet!). I've been vaguely concerned that I might have to go through the transition phase again, but this is highly unlikely as

1. I never went completely back to monophasic sleep and
2. My body has learned to get quality sleep from naps

Speaking of naps, I did keep them up even when I had had extra sleep the night before, and I did notice a slightly different quality to them - they were lighter for a start, I was more likely to remember dreams, and also more likely to wake up before the alarm.

Anyway, if you take anything away from this, it should be that busy schedules and polyphasic sleep are difficult combinations to make work - miss one nap and you'll find it difficult, miss the second and you'll crash hard.

haven't

No, I haven't forgotten. I'll post soon. I promise.

Health Concerns

Continuing with the monophasic sleep patterns throughout the day (this being day two) have highlighted some issues.

First off, I'm generally feeling quite bad. Grogginess and inability to think very clearly are the main symptoms, meaning that I have to push hard to maintain any levels of productivity.

I'm also experiencing a very uncomfortable tightness around my head (not quite a headache), adding to the general difficulty in progressing with this.

In short, this monophasic sleep does not seem to be very good for me mentally or physically, and I'm starting to become concerned about the long-term health consequences of continuing with it.

I'm going to terminate this trial immediately, and switch back to polyphasic sleep - monophasic sleep is obviously a fad, as well as being clearly unnatural. One big chunk of sleep per day? How did that get sold to anybody?

In retrospect, it seems like such a stupid idea - it's also throwing away 40 hours of consciousness every week, for no real benefit.

Looking forward to my next nap!

Slow

You might have noticed that I've been posting less entries over the past few days - things have been very busy at work and at home, and I've also relaxed somewhat with my sleep; I've had two large chunks of sleep over the past two nights. The is for a variety of reasons, including ..... I don't remember ;o)

Anyway, yesterday after my first chunk of sleep was just the same as previous times - I was able to continue through the day without being tired or requiring any naps. This again shows that the schedule can be relatively flexible if you need to take a day off from it.

Today however, after another chunk of sleep (4-5 hours) I'm much more groggy. Definitely not at my best. The extra sleep was somehow un-wholesome - like eating cardboard.

So it's back to full polyphasic for me, with a renewed focus on getting through my list of things to do. I can't stress how important it is to be motivated to do the tasks that you set yourself, otherwise the temptation to read, watch junk on tv, websurf randomly or generally just waste time is too strong - any or all of these then lead to drowsiness and inevitably, sleep.

Week 6 Stats

If you remember, last week was fraught with oversleep issues, which I'm glad to say, I have successfully overcome. A lot of it was due to my getting a bit too relaxed with the whole thing. The main points that I addressed were

• getting up off my ass the second an alarm goes off, and
• keeping physically active any time that I'm drowsy

Thus the stats for this week are:

1207 minutes slept
2.87 average hours sleep per day

...which makes it the best week since I started, 6 weeks ago.

Here's the previous weeks' averages:
Week 1: 4.38
Week 2: 3.75
Week 3: 4.02
Week 4: 3.88
Week 5: 5.41
Week 6: 2.87

Coffee

Over the past few days, I've started to re-introduce coffee into my system. This had to happen, because I like coffee a lot. A very big lot. So much so that my wife despairs at the vast amount of coffee related apparatus that I've acquired over the years.

For the moment I've settled on a relatively good espresso machine, a very good burr grinder (the experts often say that the grinder is more important than the espresso machine) and an air popcorn popper.

You might we wondering what the popcorn popper is doing in that list - it's for roasting coffee, and it does a great job! Batches are small, but the whole process is fascinating and fun - I recommend that anybody give it a go if you really want to know what 'freshly-roasted' means. Google it.

Back to the point - I started by taking a coffee just after my 1pm nap at work, and had no issues getting to sleep for the next nap of the day. So far so good.

Next, I decided to have a coffee after my 1am nap, which also had no ill-effects, in fact it probably helped through that difficult part of the night - and let's face it, nothing's going to prevent me from getting to sleep for my 5am nap.

Other coffees after various naps have also shown no problems, but I have been careful to avoid them coming up to a given nap, especially during the day.

I hope this gives some encouragement to those of you out there who may be considering PS but don't want to give up coffee long term. Depending on your constitution, you may even get away with drinking coffee during the initial few weeks of the transition, providing you limit it to just after your naps.

Good luck!

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Various

Still going well, with only a small hiccup on Thursday - I made the mistake of skipping my additional 11pm nap in favour of fixing a wireless network problem - I just couldn't leave it alone. By the time it got to 2am I was un-recoverably tired, despite going for a brisk walk. I don't remember approaching the couch, but obviously we worked out some arrangement that allowed me to 'just relax for a minute' for about 3 hours.

So, Chris, while this still doesn't help much with our parallel experimentation into the benefits of core sleep versus additional napping, at least it doesn't prove me incorrect.

Fabs (an avid reader) has sent in a picture of something he invented. It's called the fabs-keep-o-wake and it looks very promising. Especially if you need a suntan. This is in relation to comments he posted here.


Thanks Fabs!

Another reader has sent in the following article:

A small study of 16 volunteers found that exposure to short-wavelength light, or blue light, perked them up immediately.

I'm going to make a full-screen image consisting of a solid blue colour, and see if it has any affect.
I'll let you know!

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going good...

That's two perfect nights under my belt now, and tonight is shaping up to be a third, with relative ease.

I do say 'relative' for a reason, more on that shortly.

Today was a busy and stressful day at work - careful readers might note that the last two times I mentioned that were immediately followed by hard crashes. But not today - I was more aware of my tiredness, which probably helped, as it let me plan for additional naps.

The first of these was an accidental 5 or 10 minute snooze in front of the tv just after my 9pm nap (Reminder to self: no couch, no tv when tired!!!). I awoke from this feeling surprisingly refreshed and 'satisfied'. So no issues there.

Regardless of this impromptu 'napette', I still felt it wise to take an 'official' additional nap at 11pm, which I did. It was uneventful, but I do now feel as if I've pulled myself further away from the edge of sleep deprivation.

I promised that I would elaborate on my earlier choice of the word 'relative' which I used to describe how easy the nights are. It's become apparent to me that surviving this week with some good sleep stats to show for it is now merely a matter of applying the 'keep active' formula. And that's fine, even heartening.

What I have to struggle with every night (at least when I'm tired - when I'm not tired Wil should be love sen.

......

It's now a few hours later, and I've left the above as an interesting example of what happens if you try too hard to continue blogging while you're nodding off. I've only just noticed it now while finishing this entry. I don't have a clue how the thought that I was trying to communicate got mashed into what you see above, but it is interesting how I somehow managed to include the word 'love'. Anyway, I noticed myself nodding off, at which point I got up and did some cleaning to keep myself busy.

The point I was trying to make is that, at night, when you're tired, you really miss sleeping, and beds, and the freedom to lie down and relax. It's actually quite difficult. But this only happens when you're tired - you don't miss those things at all when you're alert, active, and awake as you would be during any normal day. I have to remind myself at the time that one of the main goals of this transition is to eliminate these 'tired' periods.

Time for my 5am nap...

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Update

Ok, last night went very well, as you would expect given that there should be plenty in my sleep bank. Tonight has also started out well, I don't have the tiredness that plagued me the previous nights - my naps over the past 24 hours have been quite satisfactory.

I've been thinking about the additional nap theory to get around the crash-cycle, and have decided to make them short naps, or 'power naps', of approximately 10 minutes in duration. I do find these quite refreshing, and they have the added benefit of having close to zero sleep inertia attached, which I consider very important given my issues of the past week. Coincidentally, it's time for my first one now.....


.... and I'm back (that's right folks, you're getting live-action poly-napping, right here on wideawakeliving!!). I awoke with only minimal disorientation, but I wouldn't actually describe myself as 'refreshed'. Pity, I was hoping for more from the power naps. Perhaps I'll try 15 minute power naps, to accomodate the few minutes it takes to drift off....

In relation to last week, it's become quite clear to me that the root cause of the issue was the fact that I let my guard down - I got 'cocky' about the whole thing - after all I had just achieved four weeks of very successful polyphasic sleep, and it was only going to get easier, right? So I relaxed, took the pressure off, and things started to fall apart.

It's absolutely critical that you keep yourself moving and busy if you get tired or drowsy, even after four weeks - always have a list of things to do. My mistake was to keep reading or using the computer until I got so drowsy and mentally fatigued that sleep was too easy an option. In fact, I'm feeling a bit that way now, so I'm gonna get off my ass and start into the washing-up.

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Week Five Stats

Ok, due to popular demand (1 vote counts for a lot around here) here they are, and despite all the spreadsheet cells filled with 60's, it's not as bad as I expected:

2272 minutes slept
168 hours in week
37.87 hours slept
4.44 ratio
5.41 hours average per day

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Week Five - No Stats

I won't be posting stats this week - needless to say they're crap. I even stopped recording them at one point.

Looking back at the week, the issue seems to revolve around an initial oversleep, usually my 1am nap which extends for an hour in total. Upon waking from this, my mental state (due to sleep inertia?) is apparently quite susceptible to suggestion - the night seems spoiled and un-redeemable - so at some stage within the next hour I succumb to a quick nap from which I wake at 5:30 or 6am.

On the nights after an oversleep, it's very easy to stick to schedule - they're very productive nights with no tiredness. Then the next night, the naptime double-up happens again - last night it was my 9pm nap (that's never happened before!), and then my 1am as well.

Needless to say this is very frustrating.

So some resolutions:

• Get the hell up as soon as the alarm goes off - it's possible that I may have woken at the correct time during the doubled-up naps, turned off the alarm while still lying down, and relaxed for just a moment........ It seems I wouldn't remember waking either - this memory-gap seems to be a recurring item in people's reports.
• Be very strict about keeping active during 'tired' periods - don't let my mind linger on how comfortable the couch looks
  
• Oversleeping during a nap is not an excuse to give up on the rest of the night
  

I've also changed my alarm to be quite a bit louder, and have started setting multiple alarms - one at my wake-up time, and two more at 5-minute intervals after that. This is in addition to the countdown alarm which is set to go off a minute or two after the very first alarm.

Also, Chris, in relation to my earlier post about testing the difference between core sleeps and additional naps, I've messed up a bit, and will have to postpone ;o)

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