Intro to Polyphasic Sleep | First attempt (lasted 30 days) | Second Attempt (lasted 7 days) | Third Attempt (ongoing)
As you may have guessed from the lack of updates, my second attempt at Polyphasic sleep was a failure. I was plagued by oversleeping, which kept ruining any progress I made. No matter how much I told myself I wasn’t going to oversleep, I kept doing it on an almost-daily basis.
There’s several reasons why, but it can mostly be summed up by saying I didn’t follow the same strict regiment that brought me some success the first time around. My diet sucked. I had coffee every couple of days, which is notorious for ruining REM sleep. I kept the phone too close to my bed, so it was easy to turn the alarm off while still asleep. I didn’t eat enough between naps (polyphasic sleep requires more food intake than normal). I pushed the time between naps to way over-the-top amounts, often going 16+ hours without a nap. I didn’t work on my todo list, so I had no real motivation to push myself to get up after a nap (sleeping for another few hours kept proving too tempting). I didn’t train myself to jump out of bed as soon as the alarm went off; I often stayed in bed for a while, sometimes falling back to sleep.
So all in all I did a pretty crap job. I wanted to be a polyphasic sleeper again, but I wasn’t prepared to put in the hard work polyphasic sleep’s adaption period requires. It was incredibly frustrating and I constantly remembered all the wonderful benefits of polyphasic I’d felt before, and was haunted by my inability to get there again.
But I should also give myself a little credit; whilst I haven’t been able to stick to only 20 minute naps, I’ve been getting pretty close. Most of my oversleeps have only been an hour or two, and in those instances I’ve usually skipped a nap or two to compensate, meaning I’ve been sleeping on average 4 hours a day. That doesn’t count for nothing; I’m sure most people would kill to gain an extra 4 hours a day. It’s an amazing feeling to have the entire day and almost the entire night. It’s an amazing feeling to sit outside and watch the sun rise in the morning and then see it set that night, knowing my day doesn’t end just because it’s dark.
But I want more. I miss the awesomeness of never oversleeping. I miss feeling AMAZING after each nap, instead of having to spend 5-10 minutes waking myself up, fighting the “zombie” feeling. God, I used to feel like I’d had 50 Redbulls all at once after each nap. I miss the consistently-high moods and energy levels. Most of all I miss being able to call myself a true polyphasic sleeper. Sure, I’m technically one now, but all the oversleeps make me feel like a cheater. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.
So the last few days I’ve been sleeping on the floor, instead of the bed, to reduce the chance of getting comfortable and sleeping for hours. I’m finding it OK to get to sleep (it’s taking me on average 5 minutes to snooze). I’m taking longer than I would like to get up when the alarm goes off (about 10 seconds), so I need to work on that to bring it down a bit. I love my coffee so I’ve found some organic decaff so I get all that lovely coffee goodness without the horrible REM-sleep-ruining caffeine. I’m not letting the time between naps go more than 5 hours, which is painfully annoying during the day when I want to go out, but it’s manageable. Hopefully when I’m properly adapted to polyphasic I can push it further between naps. I’m allowing myself some food treats but for the most part I’m sticking to fruit, vegies, nuts, meats and milk. I’ve had a glass of alcoholic cider here and there but it hasn’t seemed to affect my sleep at all (there’s not a lot of alcohol there anyway).
So I’m going well at the moment, but I’m hesitant to say much more than that; I don’t want to get complacent as I’ve done in the past. Sometime in the next few days I’ll start blogging my progress again.
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