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khed · 01-13-2009, 07:40 PM

This is a fun thing to try if you have the time. I gave it a go last fall and lasted 7 days. Oversleeping your naps is your worst enemy, try to avoid it at all costs. My experience was that the first phase is essentially pretty serious sleep deprivation. You need to be pretty sleep deprived to force your body into REM in the first few minutes of your nap. Once you habituate quick REM things get easier. I found myself adding in additional naps (but never over sleeping) which I think was actually helpful as long as I didn't add in so many that I wasn't still tired (I'm only talking about the beginning phase as I didn't make it past that). It takes a certain amount of naps to train your body to recover in a short period of time, the more naps you have the more practice your body gets.

I started to feel better (less sleep deprived) around day 5, and had a fairly normal day on day 6, dropped my guard a little that night and slept all day on day 7. :-(

A long sleep like that will effectively destroy all the work you've done up till that point. Not only will you be starting over from scratch, but it will be worse as your body will be convinced that it can "store" up its sleep needs until it can force a long sleep, so the naps will be less effective. So my advice is that everything you do should be geared toward not oversleeping the naps. Take more naps if you have to, but don't oversleep them.

I'd like to try again sometime but haven't been in the right place in my life since. I'd like to head up above the arctic circle and give it a go during a perma-day, I think it'd be a great fit. :-)

Good Luck!

01-13-2009, 07:40 PM	#2 (permalink)
khed Junior Member Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 14	This is a fun thing to try if you have the time. I gave it a go last fall and lasted 7 days. Oversleeping your naps is your worst enemy, try to avoid it at all costs. My experience was that the first phase is essentially pretty serious sleep deprivation. You need to be pretty sleep deprived to force your body into REM in the first few minutes of your nap. Once you habituate quick REM things get easier. I found myself adding in additional naps (but never over sleeping) which I think was actually helpful as long as I didn't add in so many that I wasn't still tired (I'm only talking about the beginning phase as I didn't make it past that). It takes a certain amount of naps to train your body to recover in a short period of time, the more naps you have the more practice your body gets. I started to feel better (less sleep deprived) around day 5, and had a fairly normal day on day 6, dropped my guard a little that night and slept all day on day 7. :-( A long sleep like that will effectively destroy all the work you've done up till that point. Not only will you be starting over from scratch, but it will be worse as your body will be convinced that it can "store" up its sleep needs until it can force a long sleep, so the naps will be less effective. So my advice is that everything you do should be geared toward not oversleeping the naps. Take more naps if you have to, but don't oversleep them. I'd like to try again sometime but haven't been in the right place in my life since. I'd like to head up above the arctic circle and give it a go during a perma-day, I think it'd be a great fit. :-) Good Luck!