Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day One

by Drew on November 17, 2009

It’s been a full 24 hours since I started my polyphasic sleep experiment (sleeping for 20 minutes every 4 hours around the clock) and I’m feeling great!  It’s hard to believe that its only been 24 hours… it seems more like 72 hours.  I think I’ve invented time travel.

The Chart

As promised, I’ve been recording my mental clarity, optimism towards the experiment, and how badly I want to sleep on an ordinal 0-10 scale.  I recorded these values 12 times during the past 24 hours and the resulting chart is below.  Pretty cool, huh?

polyphasic-sleep-adaption

The Facts

During the first two rest periods of the experiment, last night at 10pm and 2am, I couldn’t get to sleep at all. I was too excited thinking about the experiment – and like I mentioned in the last post, it normally takes me about 30 minutes to fall asleep anyways. That’s something that will have to change if I’m to successfully adapt to the polyphasic sleep schedule.

During the third rest period (this morning at 6am), I cheated and gave myself 45 minutes. Sleep at last! Something that helped me fall asleep was getting away from my computer, diming the lights in the room, and reading for 15 minutes beforehand. I would guess I got about 25 minutes of sleep. When the alarm went off I was momentarily disoriented but quickly jumped out of bed, turned on the lights, and got a glass of water.  I’m determined to not oversleep.

I spent most of the night working on website projects, listening to music, and roaming my apartment. The night seemed to last forever. I finished a couple small projects, read, walked outside, took some photos, order a new laptop, and talked to the night owls on twitter.

When the sun came up it provided a huge boost to mental clarify, optimism, and reduced how badly I wanted to sleep. I wonder if the night/day cycle will continue to have this influence on me or if it will fade over the next week or so.   Hmm…

During the day today I felt very good overall, but I found my energy level fluctuated quite a bit.  I expected this, and it honestly wasn’t as bad as I anticipated.  Maybe tonight/tomorrow will be worse.  So far the biggest way to improve my mental clarity and energy level seems to be:

  • Going for a walk outside
  • Eating
  • Talking on the phone (funny sidenote: I made an important call to a prospective client this afternoon and although it went very well, there were two times where I just stopped mid thought and was completely lost with what I was saying and I had to gracefully recover and switch directions – oops!)
  • Drinking lots of water

Diary of the Day

  • 4:11 am – I just bought a new Toshiba laptop on eBay. (I need it for my visit to Hawaii after Christmas woop woop!) I’m worried that I may have actually bought a toaster oven or something due to my sketchy state of mind.
  • 6:37 am – I’m definitely feeling tired. It makes me miss sleep. I can’t focus on that though. It’s cold and rainy outside… perfect sleeping weather. I find that I type letters out of ourder and wow I just misspelled “order”. Feeling tired and having to wake up early reminds me of final exams at Purude.
  • 7:26 am – My eyes are dry and I find myself not doing much of anything except staring off into space. My computer screensaver coming on pulls me back to reality.
  • 7:39 am – What a relief – the sun is coming up! I’m having trouble doing basic tasks like preparing a check and envelope to pay my utilities.
  • 8:10 am – Waves of positivity! I’m following up with prospective clients, the sun is coming up, and I just got a nice email from Mom. Ps – I find myself really thirsty?
  • 9:30 am – Looking forward to the 10 o’clock nap. I hope I can sleep again. I may opt for another 45 minute session to make sure I can fall asleep. Yawn, stare. (I wonder if yawnstare.com is available…)
  • 12:04 pm – Feeling really good right now after a brisk walk to the post office. Feeling almost normal I’d say.
  • 3:10 pm – Despite not feeling tired before my 2pm rest I fell asleep pretty quickly (this is encouraging!). I’d guess I slept for maybe 30 minutes – bringing my grand total for the last 24 hours to just under 1:30. Once again I was in a deep sleep when my alarm went off – it took me a few seconds to realize where I was and what was going on, but then I popped right out of bed. Time feels weird right now. I’m used to sleep representing the break between two days… so in my mind it’s almost as if 4 or 5 short days have passed. Very strange.
  • 5:00 pm – I feel really great considering the lack of sleep. I can already sense the huge benefit of these frequent micro-naps. They really are quite restorative it seems. The next 24 hours will be interesting and tell a lot. I’m excited.

Reflection

I feel liberated. Liberated from wasting a huge chunk of my time in unconscious sleep. It sounds strange but it’s amazing how peaceful I feel knowing how much time I have available.

Let me explain how a normal day goes (that is, a normal sleep schedule).  For the first couple hours after I wake up I tend to procrastinate because I feel as if I have plenty of time ahead of me to be productive. Then, when it’s getting towards the end of the night, I tend to get a lot accomplished because I feel as if I’ve been procrastinating all day and I need to accomplish something before I surrender the day and go sleep for 8 hours (and repeat the cycle). I hustle at the end of the day to make up for my earlier procrastination and I procrastinate because I know I can hustle later. Ack!

Now my whole world’s been turned upside down – and I love it.

I no longer procrastinate because I know I only have about three hours until my next rest. As a result, I never hustle because I’m not trying to make up for any procrastination AND I know that whatever I don’t get finished I can pick up on after my next rest – 30 minutes later.

Under monophasic sleep there is more pressure to complete a project before resting – because the rest period is so long and makes such a dramatic division between work days. I don’t feel this dramatic division. If a project isn’t completed in one session, I can just pause, rest, and pick up where I left off 45 minutes later. It’s a very efficient way to produce steady, relaxed results – without my usual fluctuations of procrastination/hustle.

Oops, it’s 6:04 – time for a rest!

EXPERIMENT INDEX:

blog comments powered by Disqus
Olark Livehelp