bobo23.net

problems! My cold symptoms got worse – or: I definately got a cold. I had to do an unscheduled nap at 4:00am when I was really fucked up and overslept the first time since starting this experiment (from 4:00am to 8:30am). Now I am not sure what to do. I want to recover as soon as possible but I do not think continuing this experiment would be very beneficial to it. I wonder what other polyphasic-sleeper do when they are ill. When I am ill I usually stay in bed and get a lot of sleep – but this not really compatible with polyphasic sleeping – is it?

Last night was surprisingly good – it was actually the first night in which I could engage in real productive work (I was hacking my first Ruby on Rails app ). After my 6:00am morning-nap I got some cold-like symtoms which are worrying me a bit. It got worse during the day. I have no idea if it is related to my sleep experiment (maybe my immune system is not as good a normally now!?) or just bad luck. Let’s see…

uptime: 88 hours (not sleeping more than 30minutes straight)

Last night was better than before. I was not overly tired at night but got a bit tired after my 6:00am morning nap. My alertness is still not normal during the day but I am able to work and do not feel sleepy most of the time. It feels all a bit weired to see people getting up in the morning, going to sleep in the evening and getting up again – but for me it is still the same “day”. In fact there are no “days” anymore…

Last night the time between 2 and 5am was hard again, but I made a list with a lot of non-thinking work before and had enought to do to keep me awake. In the morning I felt a bit groggy but it was not that bad. Until now I did all my naps in time and did not oversleep even once. Actually I feel better than I have expected after reading all the polyphasic-sleeper bloggers writing about the hard adaption phase. I am not sure if it will get worse though…

I did the following preparation before starting this experiment:

• not drinking caffeine (coffee, coke, soda, tea, …) for 30 days
• get up at 6:00am every day
• get a good reason to do this experiment

As caffeine interferes a lot with polyphasic sleeping (or sleeping in general) I stopped consuming it for 30 days to get off this habit (I drank a lot of coffee before). I decided to get up at 6:00am each day to train the self discipline of getting up even if I do not want to. Finally I decided starting this experiment from pure curiosity as there are very different opinions about it.

My first night was ok, the toughest time was as expected between 2:30 and 6:00. Today I feel a bit drowsy but quite good. It is still possible to do some brain work

Recently I was reading a lot about learning methods and how sleep effects the learning process. Many people claim that free sleep is the best way of sleeping for optimal learning progress and memory retention. I am a big fan of the learning software Supermemo whoes author did quite a lot of research on sleep and also suggests this method. I have tried free sleep for about a month and must say that I felt indeed very alert during that time. The problem was that I was sleeping really long and that did not change after weeks. My wakeup-time varied +-2 hours each day, which made it very difficult to stick to my morning-routine. After reading How to Become an Early Riser on Steve Pavlina’s Blog I tried his suggestion to get up at a fixed time and go to bed when sleepy. That worked quite well for me. He later blogged about his polyphasic sleep experiment to which he adapted very successfull. I was curious about it and did some research on the net. There are very different opinions available. Some people say they adapted to it and feel alert and energetic. Others say it is not even possible to stay on this schedule for more than a short time. So I just decided to give it a try by myself

I will use the Uberman schedule which consists of six 20-30minutes naps in 24h. My nap schedule:

2:00 – 2:30
6:00 – 6:30
10:00 – 10:30
14:00 – 14:30
18:00 – 18:30
22:00 – 22:30