Intro to Polyphasic Sleep | First attempt (lasted 30 days) | Second Attempt (lasted 7 days) | Third Attempt (ongoing)
Well the last two days have certainly been a bit more interesting, polyphasic-wise. I did a bit of research and checked out what other polyphasic sleepers were doing and came across an interesting piece of advice. One polyphasic sleeper said it’s much easier to adapt if you have a regimental nap schedule with naps at predetermined times, then once you’re adapted you can move naps around. This is what I did the first time I tried polyphasic and to be honest it worked rather well. Another piece of advice is that while you’re adapting, if you miss a nap because you’re too busy to take it (which I often am) it’s better to try and stick to the schedule than to have the nap. So if you miss a nap you’re supposed to carry on as if you didn’t miss it, and just nap at your next allocated time.
That seems completely weird and counter-intuitive, but the last 2 days I’ve trialled it and (surprisingly) it works! Yesterday I pushed the time between naps in the day to about 10 hours, obviously skipping a couple of naps I would have normally taken during that time. When I got home, instead of having a couple of naps within a small period of time, I took 1 single nap and then upon waking forced myself to stay up for another 4 hours before having another nap. At first I was pretty tired and my body was screaming “Go back to bed!” but that faded after an hour, and by the time I’d had the second nap 4 hours later I actually felt fantastic!
Whilst you can successfully stack naps as a preemptive measure before you plan on staying up for a long time, it doesn’t seem to work if you stack naps after you get home. The problem with this if you’re having multiple naps in a short period of time when you’re really tired, which almost guarantees you’ll oversleep. If you wake yourself up completely between naps there’s less chance of oversleeping, because your brain knows that you don’t want to oversleep, no matter how tired you are. But if you don’t fully wake yourself up in between naps, that resolve to not oversleep fades somewhat and your subconscious talks you into staying in bed and going back to sleep for hours and hours.
So to cut a long story short, today was the first time I’ve pushed the time between naps to a significant amount of time and haven’t overslept or died from it. Finally, success!
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