Intro to Polyphasic Sleep | First attempt (lasted 30 days) | Second Attempt (lasted 7 days) | Third Attempt (ongoing)
Today was probably the hardest day I’ve had.
Not because I was sleep deprived – I’ve put up with that for almost 2 weeks now. Not because I could barely keep my eyes open between 2am and 6am – I’m used to that. Not even because I overslept by 2 hours this morning (more on that in a minute).
Nope, none of that. It was because today was the first day I’ve had doubts about this whole thing.
I’ve struggled with the early morning hours the last few days. The hours between about midnight and 6am are despised by polyphasic sleepers who are still in the adaptation phase, as your body tries very hard to shut itself down during this time. Sleep deprivation can only be described as a rather horrible form of self-torture, and the wee hours of the mornings are the time when you most consider either sleeping for far longer than 20 minutes, or giving up entirely.
But I struggled my way through this morning just like any other day I guess. It was complete hell but I made it. I’d even wager I’m getting better at pushing through the sleep deprivation. I made it all the way through to 9am, when I could finally stop working and take a well-deserved (and needed!) nap. I set my alarm and expected to wake up at about 9.30.
And I didn’t wake up until 11.15.
It’s hard to describe in words what it’s like to put yourself through 2 weeks of sleep deprivation hell, to struggle through hours and hours and hours of early-morning torture, all to screw your progress up like that. Maybe I’m taking it to heart too much (I probably am), but polyphasic sleep is taking a huge amount of my time, effort, concentration, planning and willpower and it’s frustrating when I stuff it up like this morning. It also makes me feel like hell – somehow, if I oversleep I feel HORRIBLE compared to just sleeping the 20 minute nap. I’m groggy for hours, I have a severe headache, I can’t think and I can’t wake myself up no matter what I do.
But, in the name of being optimistic, I will say it’s only happened 3 times so far, and all of them have been 2 hours or less. And this morning my body woke itself up before the backup alarm went off, so obviously my body is somewhat on the same page as me in terms of what it wants to do.
So what happened? For most of the day I assumed I’d somehow woken up (without really waking up), walked across the room and turned off my alarm, then gone back to bed. All without remembering. Of course being betrayed by your body like that is a huge cause for frustration, and it had me a little depressed. I spent the day not doing much at all, wondering if polyphasic sleep was something I wanted to continue doing. I’ve made progress in terms of how quickly I can fall asleep and I absolutely LOVE being able to nap on the floor, but I’m still not feeling refreshed after every nap (maybe 1/3rd of them leave me feeling good) and the early morning hours SUCK hard.
Even a pep-talk from my very supportive girlfriend didn’t give me a whole heap of motivation. But then, as I lay down for an afternoon nap, I had a strange thought. Instead of my body stuffing up, maybe it was my alarm that didn’t do what it was supposed to. I wasn’t totally convinced that I could really sleepwalk across the room, turn off a very complex alarm system (it requires me to answer maths questions in order to turn it off) and then go back to bed and not remember any of that.
I fiddled for quite a while and then thought of something. I’d been turning off my alarm app using the task manager on my phone because I’d been having problems with battery-drainage. Maybe the alarm didn’t work if the app wasn’t running in the background? I tried it and, lo and behold, the alarm failed to turn on!
Woooo! So it wasn’t my body’s fault I slept in! In fact, my body could be commended for waking up after 2 hours without needing the backup alarm – most other polyphasic sleepers seem to sleep for HOURS, as in 8 hours or more, if they oversleep. My mood somewhat improved by this revelation, I decided I’d recommit myself to polyphasic sleep, so I set about figuring out how to fix another thing that’s been bothering me with the polyphasic sleep; I only wake up refreshed about a third of the time. The rest of the time I’m groggy and consider going back to sleep. It always passes within 5 minutes (which is way, way less time than when I slept 8 hours a night) but it’s still incredibly demotivating to have to face this 8+ times a day.
So I thought about how I could tackle the problem and here’s what I’ve come up with. Instead of setting my alarm to go off after 20 minutes, I set it to go off after 30. I spend that first 10 minutes lying on my back, breathing very deeply and slowly. On each in breath I say to myself, “I am napping for 20 minutes.” On the out breaths, “I will wake up refreshed and full of energy.” Needless to say, this worked flawlessly the first time I used it. In fact, I didn’t actually fall asleep – I spent the entire 30 minute meditating like that, and “woke” feeling pretty damn zen. I tried it again a few hours later and fell asleep after about 5 minutes, again feeling like a king. I finally have a solution to grogginess! I guess if you’re not getting the positive health effects, you can tell your body to generate them itself :)
So all that put me in quite a good mood. I thought I should tackle the final frontier – those awful graveyard hours in the early morning. Spoiler alert: it’s 2am (the next day) right now and my eyes aren’t closing, my energy is fine, I’m getting work (and this blog) done and I’m actually happy. Awwwwwwwww yeah.
First thing I did was research why my eyes are in agony and why I can’t keep them open during the night. I discovered it’s got a fair bit to do with the colour of light at night compared to day. As any photographer (and any non-photographers who pay attention) will tell you, during midday the light from the sun is blue and during the morning/evening it’s yellow/orange. This is referred to as the colour temperature. Our eyes react to blue light by being alert and wide-open, while the yellow/orange light relaxes our eyes, ready for sleep. Makes sense.
At night, your eyes are getting used to orange light, and after the sun has gone down, this is what they expect. But computer monitors emit very blue light, and while it seems intuitive to suggest blue light should wake you up, it seems to have a negative effect – it irritates the eyes as it’s much too harsh. The solution? Changing the colour temperature using a program like f.lux. It’s a pretty cool little program that changes the colour temperature of your monitor based on what time it is. Obviously I’ll have to disable it if I work on any photos at night, as it makes the monitor REALLY orange. But I’ve definitely noticed my eyes relaxing more.
The next thing I did was fix the lighting around my desk. I turned off all the extremely bright overhead lights (bad for your eyes) and turned the brightness of the monitor right down. I’ve only got some ambient lights in here now, and my eyes are so grateful they could kiss me.
Tomorrow I’ll post the full report of how these next few hours went. But if how I’m feeling now is anything to go off, I should absolutely kick some ass. I’m seriously, seriously happy right now and I can’t believe how much I’ve turned the day around from this morning.
F–k sleep deprivation, I’m doing this polyphasic thing.
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