Archive for the ‘Sleep’ Category
Polyphasic Sleep 2 Week Summary
The past two weeks have been very interesting and educational to say the least. I now know more about sleep than ever before. This article is me sharing that knowledge with you in hopes that it can help you improve your sleep as well.
For me, slowly adjusting to polyphasic sleep just made more sense. Your body doesn’t like rapid change. Slow adjustment can make adaptation much easier and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past 2 weeks. It has made adjustment take much longer (and I’m still not 100% there), however I believe that it has made it much easier.
Polyphasic Sleep Week 2
I know it hasn’t been a week yet but I feel that now is a good time to update how my sleep has progressed. As planned Monday was full of family obligations. I took a 6h sleep period Sunday night and no naps on Monday. Monday night I again slept 6 hours in prep for Tuesday’s 5.5 hour drive back to Rochester. I took one nap on Tuesday prior to leaving. By the time I got to Rochester I was tired but not more than normal. Tuesday night I resumed 4h/25min sleep … sort of. When I woke up from the 1AM nap I realized I was quite tired from driving and needed some extra sleep. I ended up taking two longer naps that night.
End of Polyphasic Sleep Week 1
It’s the end of my first polyphasic week. I have to say that it went extremely well. I started with 3 days of 6h core and one day nap. Then I moved to 5h core and 2 30 min naps. In both cases I woke up from all of my cores without an alarm. I was pleasantly surprised how well my body did that. For the past two days I followed the 4h awake/30 min asleep pattern (on the 1, 5, and 9 hours) – sort of. Thursday went perfectly, all 6 naps without a hitch. Last night and today were a bit different. I was doing fine and wasn’t very tired. At 3AM I was bored and decided to take an extra nap. I was tired but that wasn’t my motivation. I figured I could use the extra sleep in case I skipped a nap today due to family obligations.
Let The Napping Begin!
I decided that I need to ease myself into polyphasic sleep. Not counting some short car eye resting, I haven’t taken a single nap since I was in Kindergarden. I had no idea how my body would react to napping. I decided on Saturday that I would start with a few days of 6h sleep at night and 1 30min day nap, then move to 4.5h of sleep with 3 naps. After that move to a full blown 4h/30min schedule. Due to family obligations I will be forced to take a few days of monophasic sleep over Christmas weekend. I think this can help me get a feel for how my body handles napping while still providing a cushion of normal sleep during the adjustment.
Polyphasic sleep links and scientific research
Through all of my polyphasic sleep research I’ve had trouble finding real resources about the subject. There are tons of blogs with failed attempts plus a few successful, but not many scientific resources. Since Dr Claudio Stampi seems to be the leading researcher into polyphasic sleep I decided to search for his name on Google and see what came up. I discovered a number of news articles, interviews, and even a video of his research. Here are the links to what I found with information from Dr Stampi’s research and other sources. Please keep in mind that anything coming from blogs, news articles, and forum posts are to be taken with a grain of salt when the do not include a source for their information.
Polyphasic Sleep
Goal #3: Attempt polyphasic sleep for a minimum of one month.
One of the main factors that got me interested in self-improvement was polyphasic sleep. The basic defination of “polyphasic sleep” is simply sleeping more than once a day (hense polyphasic). The theory being that sleeping in more frequent, shorter periods is better for you than a single, “monophasic sleep” pattern in that your sleep requirements will be decreased. Think of it as similar to how eating more smaller meals per day increases your metabolisim.(1) I’ve always hated sleeping and when I found this concept promoting less sleep I became very interested.
In: Goals, Health & Fitness, Philosophy, Sleep