Polyphasic Sleeping - Days 5 & 6
I’ve decided to stop keeping such meticulous notes: no more multi-paragraph entries discussing every twitch I had as I was falling asleep, goodbye to the monotonous entries about my yummy oatmeal with flax seeds. This experiment shouldn’t really be about the quality of my sleep anyway, but rather, about the quality of the awake periods. Therefore, you can stop cringing every time you see a new post from me; “great, another tome of a post from Trey about his little naps”. Banished!
In their place, I intend to provide more general overviews about how the experiment is going, discuss how I see the viability of living a polyphasic lifestyle, and get back to other topics dear to my heart (I now have more time to sit and brood about the state of the world – beware).
So, how were days 5 & 6? First of all, I’m really surprised that I made it this far. When I started this, I set an internal “reevaluate, and turn back to monophasic if necessary” plan. March is a very busy month for me, and if I wasn’t going to be as productive as I was in monophasic mode, I’d have to postpone the experiment. The date set to make this evaluation was last night.
Unfortunately, I was so tired last night that I was unable to think about it in those terms. All I could think about was cuddling up with my wife in our nice warm bed, and NOT SETTING AN ALARM! Oh, that memory foam mattress pad was calling my name. Luckily for the experiment, Erin and I began discussing the pros and cons of going back to monophasic sleep.
As many of you know, when it comes to reasoned debate, I always have the energy. We had a good discussion of the pros and cons of polyphasic sleep, and by the end, we’d decided to throw in the towel. But debating the issue woke me up so much that, after talking about the decision for another 20 minutes, I had to crawl out of the warm bed, get dressed and head back into my nocturnal sanctuary—the other room in our tiny apartment. I didn’t decide to keep putting myself through this insane regimen just to prove all of the naysayers out there wrong, but because, after the prolonged “should I/shouldn’t I” discussion, I was re-energized, ready to take on the night that lay before me.
I ended up pushing through with relative ease and had my best day yet, with one caveat. I had my first run-in with oversleeping. Well, it wasn’t so much as oversleeping, as tired miscalculations. After returning from the dentist, I had about an hour and a half before a business meeting. I decided to get my nap in a little early, and through that shroud of sleep, instead of 25 minutes, I set the alarm for 1 hour and 25 minutes. Erin realized my prolonged absence about an hour into it and woke me up, but I think it still counts as oversleeping.
Now, even though all of the polyphasics out there talk about oversleeping like it’s the plague, I have to say that after the initial super-drowsiness wore off, I felt fantastic for the rest of the night. If I continue to have trouble with drowsiness at night, I might play with working in a longer nap every now and then. For now, though, I’m going to hop back on my horse and see if I can’t see the other side of this adaptation period.
And one final note about my 9pm nap. Erin took it with me. Mmmmmm, to have a warm loving body next to me, this is easily the thing I miss the most.
