Intro to Polyphasic Sleep | First attempt (lasted 30 days) | Second Attempt (lasted 7 days) | Third Attempt (ongoing)
Well I’m still very sick from yesterday. I’ve got an annoying cold which is putting a drain on my energy and making polyphasic sleep a nightmare.
But I’m glad I’m sick. One of my biggest curiosities was how polyphasic sleep would fit in with a cold or fever. I can report it’s basically the same as normal (meaning I don’t feel any worse or better than when I was sick and getting 8hrs of sleep).
However, the huge downside is that normally when you’re sick you can just sleep the day away. It’s a bitch being awake for most of the day when you’re sick (and I imagine it would be the same if you were injured). Every time I wake from a 20-min nap my body screams, “Go back to sleep!” Lethargy is insane at the moment and I’m really struggling to get out of bed. Once I’m up it’s OK but that initial drowsiness/grogginess is horrible, depressingly so.
It’s caused me to have a LOT more naps than I normally would (though I haven’t overslept on any because I’ve been extremely vigilant with my alarms yesterday & today.) During the early morning I slept for about 4 hours straight with only 5 or 10 minute breaks between naps (I’d previously set myself an arbitrary minimum 2hr gap between naps but bah, I’m sick!) All that sleep didn’t make me feel any better though.
The past week or two my diet has been terrible; I wasn’t eating raw and was eating too many carbs and junk food. Yesterday and today I’ve been back on the raw food plan, eating lots of fruit and vegies and meat. I feel so much better; the difference is night and day. Waking up after naps was agony when I was eating badly and I never felt fully-awake. Despite the initial grogginess and lethargy this cold is making me feel, I actually have more energy now than I had in the previous week. When I get up the first thing I’m doing now is eating an apple, having some home-made juice or eating a few handfuls of nuts and within 5 minutes of doing that I’m awake and alert.
My opinion (based only on my personal experience) is that on polyphasic sleep you can skip a meal or two, you could have a cup of coffee here and there and even eat junk food every now and then, but if you do it continuously then polyphasic sleep will be very difficult for you. So there’s some flexibility but like many things in life it needs to be in moderation. I’d also conclude diet is (in my experience) the most important factor in getting polyphasic sleep to work for you, maybe even more so than taking the naps themselves.
I’m interested to know if anyone else has gone on a junk-food binge and how it’s affected you. Or maybe you’ve converted to a raw food diet, or an organic diet, or even just a low-carb diet; has it affected your energy levels and mood?
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