Post your polyphasic sleep logs here

[David Hausladen]

This is a thread for anyone's personal day-by-day logs of their experiences with polyphasic sleep. I am intending to start polyphasic sleep tonight, and I believe micth has also expressed an intention to go polyphasic in the near future, so there should be at least two sets of logs here soon. There's an active discussion of polyphasic sleep (tips, debate, whatnot) in this thread*, so if you've got comments or ideas, please post them there! I'm looking forward to seeing how many people take the plunge and try out this schedule. For anyone looking for background information, I'd check out Steve Pavlina's posts about his experience (the first is here).

* Since this thread was started the original thread discussing polyphasic sleep has gone dormant. It's still a useful resource, though, for the advice posted there.

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 0

I will be starting polyphasic sleep in about two-and-a-half hours, so I'm posting a brief description now of the method and strategies I'll be using.

The schedule will be Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion" sleep, which is four 30-minute naps per day. My naps will take place at 12am, 7am, 12pm, and 5pm--those times are slightly irregular, but they work best with my schedule. For each nap, I'll start three* alarms set for 30 minutes and each placed at a different place in my bedroom, and then go to bed. Following every nap, I'll immediately go outside for a quick 15-minute walk to keep me from falling asleep again and help me to wake up completely*.

My goal is to follow the schedule for at 30 days, from 2006-11-06 to 2006-12-05, and then evaluate whether it's been successful enough that I want to continue it long-term.

I should be posting the log for my first day in a little over 24 hours, once I've had the first four naps.

* Actually starting the schedule very quickly convinced me to make two minor alterations to the plan. First, two alarms is enough, especially if I place them on opposite ends of the room. Three alarms is overkill and it's too likely to wake my dear mother when I scramble to turn them all off at the end of the midnight nap. Second, following my naps can be any kind of activity, not just walking, as long as it gets me out of the bedroom immediately and wakes me up; it's somewhat impractical to walk at 12:30am, so I'll go down to the kitchen for a midnight snack instead. Similarly, after my 7am nap I can take a shower to ensure that I wake up. The critical point is that I get out of bed and don't fall back into it.

[micth]

Originally Posted by David Hausladen

micth has also expressed an intention to go polyphasic in the near future, so there should be at least two sets of logs here soon.

Near future = in about a month
I've got exams + turning 18 coming up... plus i wanna spend about a week before hand getting totally prepared for it, so i'll probably start around 10th of December.

I'll be looking forward to reading your log though, should be interesting... good luck with it

[set]

i've done polyphasic sleep before and end up in frustration because of my inflexible schedule. I think most people need 6 set of REM so the four 30 min nap would be interesting to watch.

After reading all these posts about sleeping less i got inspired and decided that i'm going to do this no matter what! I'm not sure how is this going to turn out but here's my plan

I will squeeze 5 sets of 20 to 30 min nap (20 min works best for me last time i check) at night in 8 hours time.

scheduled 11, 1, 3, 5, 7

then a nap at 5:30 evening

that way i can keep my schedule and polyphasic at the same time. I plan to dedicate the nights to learning and working on my internet business. When the time is right for me to quit my job i plan to migrate to normal polyphasic or the 4 nap plan. (or maybe if this work out because it might go better with the monophasic sleep the world is in)

Good luck to myself.

[David Hausladen]

set, that's an interesting schedule. I'm not sure whether one can put all the naps in the evening, but if you could it opens up a lot of new possibilities!

It's really hard to work out a polyphasic schedule that works with a "9-to-5" job or school commitment. The ones that I've seen that are most promising for that are triphasic (three evenly spaced 45- or 90-minute naps) and the "core" sleep schedules (3 or 4.5 hours at night and then two or three 20- or 30-minute naps during the day). Your idea is very interesting, since it would work with a "9-to-5" job and still keep sleep down to 2 to 3 hours total.

Good luck with it--looking forward to seeing how it goes!

[MercuryLime]

Originally Posted by David Hausladen

It's really hard to work out a polyphasic schedule that works with a "9-to-5" job or school commitment.

I think it'd be interesting to try going polyphasic before I get out of high school. I would schedule it naps at: 2:00am, 7:00am, 12:00am (nap during lunchtime), 5:00pm (convienently after sport practices), and 10:00pm. It seems like it could somehow work out, leaving me with a lot of extra time for a job or homework.

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 1

Just a short while ago I awoke from my fourth and last nap for yesterday, successfully completing my first twenty-four hours on polyphasic sleep. On a scale of difficulty from 1 to 5, with 1 being trivial and 5 being near or at the limits of human capability, I'd put the difficulty of my first day at a 3. It required a fair amount of discipline and a bit of willpower, but I didn't feel at all stretched to my limits by today.

The first half of my day, I had sporadic bouts of drowsiness mixed with periods of alertness (but even during those I wasn't especially energetic). I had one 15-minute period of intense drowsiness from about 11am to 11:15am where my head was nodding even while I was sitting and reading at my computer. My solution to most of these periods of drowsiness was to get up and do something else; I think I got about five or six short 10-minute "refresher" walks today! The second half of my day, I was much more energetic, with only a couple periods of minor lethargy in the afternoon, and none at all in the evening.

I think keeping a log of my level of alertness, recorded in 15-minute chunks, may well be helping to keep me a little more alert than otherwise, since it means whenever I feel sleepy I immediately gauge the intensity of the feeling and record it before quickly determining how to deal with it.

Another helpful tactic that I neglected to mention in my "Day 0" post that I don't eat less than two hours before a nap--there's too much potential for body temperature/a blood sugar drop/digestion to cause me to oversleep. In general, I eat less than an hour after waking up so that the food provides me with energy during the cycle, but doesn't interfere with the subsequent nap. (I don't expect I'll always have to monitor things this closely; mostly I want to be as careful as possible during the adaptation period.)

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 2

Day 2 would score a 4 out of 5 on the scale of difficulty mentioned earlier. It started off well enough, with just a little sluggishness in the early morning. However, from 4:30am to 11am, I experienced nearly irresistable drowsiness--even when I used walks and activities to try to resist them--to the point where the last couple hours of that time period included two unplanned short naps. The good news is that after the second unplanned nap I was pretty much okay for the rest of the day; as with Day 1, the afternoon and evening were pretty much free of tiredness.

I'm not too concerned about the extreme lethargy and unplanned naps I experienced--it's only the second day of the schedule, and I'm pleased with the fact that the majority of the sleep deprivation has thus far restricted itself to half my day or less. I expect that if I haven't yet experienced the worst of it, I will have by the end of Day 3 or 4, and from that point it's all downhill (i.e. my body's continually improving adaptation will make my naps more and more restorative so that sleep deprivation becomes less and less prevalent).

I do think my situation this morning wasn't helped by the fact that my early and late morning meals (~2am and ~8am, respectively) were both lacking in protein. Incorporating more protein into my early and late morning meals should provide me with additional energy for the first half of my day, making this morning's scenario less likely.

[set]

well for me, failed on the first day. overslept after l listened to holosync CD

Last night was my second day and i went thru it with not much problem. on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the hardest its merely a 2 or 1 1/2. I only experience 1 REM out of 5 attempt sadly. ( for people who don't know, if you dream you're in REM)

Luckily I got the REM on my final sleep so i was able to wake up refreshed and now working at my 90% . Because of my lack of REM I'm going to expose myself to as much sunlight and heat possible to avoid sleepyness. (good thing i live in asia)

One thing I did that i think is going to help me tonight is I condition myself to wake up as soon as the alarm clock rings with deep emphasis to myself on no negotiation allowed. meaning i don't allow myself to talk myself into continue sleeping. So the 4 naps that didn't go into REM wasn't a waste.

What I did the whole night? I was basically listening to John Reese's Traffic secrets. It was interesting so i kept me alert until 5 am where i start to get a bit drowsy. I keep getting hungry the whole night so i kept eating grapes (read somewhere it helps)

It's been a successful night and from how it goes, will be a successful day 1

Hang on david and have a nice nap

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 3

Difficulty 4 out of 5; while Day 3 was more difficult than Day 2, I was better prepared for it, having a better idea of what difficulties to expect and what tactics would help. Practically all of that difficulty of Day 3 came from the time from 4am to 12pm, which is now clearly defined as the main battleground for my polyphasic sleep adaptation. That makes sense to me, since those were almost exactly the hours during which I was sleeping monophasically before. I expect that over time my body will gradually realize that that's no longer time to sleep.

I managed to avoid unplanned naps through constant vigilance, though during the hardest part of the day I did zone out quite a bit (technically, I think my "zoning out" was involuntarily dropping into Stage 1 sleep for a few seconds at a time). I even discovered that when I feeling most exhausted, I could zone out while walking down the street! (This prompted me to decide it wasn't safe to go out walking during such times.) The crazy thing about this symptom is that it's one that I didn't experience even at the height of my bout with mononucleosis during high school--during which I fell asleep in practically every class, every day, no matter how hard I tried to resist. It's perversely fascinating to explore sleep deprivation at this depth, but I'll be very glad tomorrow or the next day when it begins to back off.

My report for Day 3 may sound predominantly negative, but I'm actually very optimistic about the present situation. I managed to not take any unplanned naps or oversleep despite the difficulties mentioned--this bodes very well for my long-term success, especially since I think I've gotten past the most difficult part. I'll know for sure in the next twenty-four hours.

[David Hausladen]

set: Great to see your first sleep log!

The sunlight and heat idea is an excellent one, and hopefully will be quite a bit of help to you. My intention in taking short walks all the time is basically working toward the same effect, using outdoor light and sensations to keep my body awake.

In terms of waking up, the "no negotiation" tactic is definitely a must! The other thing that helps is having your alarm(s) far out of reach of your bed.

Looking forward to seeing your next log. Keep it going!

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 4

There's a lot of theories and conjecture in this report, since I'm thinking about causes and effects involved in the various aspects of polyphasic sleep adaptation. Feel free to respond with comments or criticism--I'm no scientist, and my ideas are mostly just guesses based on limited evidence. That said, on to the report...

Today was a difficulty 4--a little less intense than Day 3 but with several new variations and complications. As usual, practically all of the lethargy and drowsiness fell between 4am and 12pm. My 7am nap turned out badly--I woke up feeling worse than when I had fallen asleep--and around 8:45am I decided to take an extra half-hour nap. Strangely, the extra nap didn't seem to improve my energy level at all. This makes me think that maybe my morning tiredness is generally not because my naps don't provide me enough energy, but rather primarily because my body is used to sleeping during those hours. (This brings up a lot of interesting questions that I should probably explore in a separate post or maybe even a separate thread.)

On another note, an effect of sleep deprivation is a weakened immune system, and I think that's an indirect cause of several symptoms have cropped up just since I started this adaptation: a minor but significant outbreak of acne and mouth sores, both of which had been almost completely absent under my previous free-running sleep schedule; and today, an isolated episode of nausea lasting for most of the afternoon. I'm not saying that sleep deprivation caused these, but rather that by weakening my immune system it may have allowed them to take hold where they otherwise would have been resisted. If that's correct, then they should go away once the adaptation is complete (since that would remove the sleep deprivation, which would bring the immune system back up to full strength, which would fight off whatever's causing the symptoms).

I think from here on out every day will get a little easier than the last as my body gradually adjusts its circadian rhythm to match the demands of the new sleep schedule. Once I'm completely adapted, it might be interesting to figure out how my body temperature rhythm (the primary factor in daily sleep patterns) acts once I'm completely adapted.

[taylor]

Thanks for posting these David. They are very much appreciated.

[David Hausladen]

taylor: You're very welcome! It's great to know this record is helpful to others.

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 5

Now at the end of Day 5, I feel like Thomas Edison on his thousandth light bulb attempt when he turns on the power and, unlike all that went before, this one suddenly works. That is to say, until today the adaptation has been continually losing ground or holding even, but today things started to turn around.

Difficulty 3.5 out of 5--still some intense drowsiness, but I'm finally seeing the first signs that my body is adapting. Those who have followed by previous logs know that "zombie time" for me has been 4am to 12pm. Today, I was stunned to find myself completely awake and alert well into that time period. I didn't start to experience significant drowsiness until 6:15am. Once it got going, the tiredness was still pretty intense and tempted me (as always) to take extra, unplanned naps. However, I got to the 12pm nap without giving in, and after that I was alert for pretty much the rest of the day. The overall amount of tiredness today was significantly less than the ones preceding it, and unless today was a complete fluke I expect every day from here on out will be slightly easier than the last.

Not much more to this adaptation, I think--lots of days, maybe, but the hardest part is done!

[Jm4362]

I plan to begin my own polyphasic sleep experiment on December 11: I was lucky enough to plan out a class schedule next semester that allows equally-spaced naps. So I'll have the whole month to decide if it's viable for an actual school situation. I'm really surprised at how few people are trying this out. In particular, are there any other females trying polyphasic sleep?

I don't forsee any problems during the adjustment period, as I'll be on winter break. I'm not sure how I'll plan the adjustment, though. I've heard of splitting up your normal amount of sleep into the number of naps and then gradually shortening the time. That sounds logical. The other, is of course, diving straight in and weathering the sleep deprivation until the body adjusts. Hmm--I think I'll go with the first, unless there's another method I've missed?

~Jm4362

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 6

According to a certain cliche, death and taxes are supposed to be inevitable. Well, I'm here to say that under polyphasic sleep, oversleeping is almost as unavoidable.

I should have known something was up when I started getting intensely drowsy around 2am (normally this hadn't started until 4am, and the day before it waited until 6am). It was the opposite of what I expected to happen in my predictions from yesterday, and is the earliest in the morning I've ever had significant tiredness. I continued to experience this, on and off, from 2am until my 7am nap. At that point, I went to sleep as normal for my regular nap, but I woke up five hours later, at 12pm. What happened?

Checking the alarms after waking up, as well as my memories, confirm that both alarms were set correctly. I tested both alarms afterward and discovered that they both go off indefinitely. Therefore I must have gotten up, shut them off, and gone back to bed. In doing so, I was either totally unconscious the whole time or I was somewhat conscious, but not enough to remember the incident.

For better or for worse, it doesn't make a difference. There's almost nothing I can do to improve my oversleeping prevention, which is already good enough that I've gone almost a whole week before encountering a problem. And one bout of oversleeping in a week is not nearly enough to nullify my efforts at adaptation for that week. I expect that even if I encounter oversleeping again (which is likely), it will be less and less of a problem as time goes on and by body gets better at sleeping polyphasically. Also, I've thought about incorporating a planned core sleep every week or two, which would probably help to prevent oversleeping.

For the record, my day after oversleeping was predictably easy, with practically no lethargy. The only nap I skipped was the 12pm one, since that's the time that I woke up from the oversleep. The 5pm and 12am naps went smoothly and normally.

Despite the unexpected difficulties of today, I think I'm still moving smoothly toward a successful adaptation, and expect to be there soon.

[micth]

Originally Posted by David Hausladen

Therefore I must have gotten up, shut them off, and gone back to bed. In doing so, I was either totally unconscious the whole time or I was somewhat conscious, but not enough to remember the incident.

That's pretty crazy hey, not even remembering it happen

Originally Posted by David Hausladen

There's almost nothing I can do to improve my oversleeping prevention

I read about a guy who rigged a hose above his bed, and if he didn't get out of bed before the first few alarms went off, he'd be drenched in water... that eliminated the problem of oversleeping

I'm glad that your adapting, and thanks for the logs, they've been very informative

[David Hausladen]

Jm4362: I'm glad to see you're going to try polyphasic, and I hope it works well for you! If you're looking for helpful ideas you might check out micth's original thread on polyphasic sleep (it's dormant now, but still useful). As to which adaptation method to use (gradual or "cold turkey"), my experience with gradual adjustment last summer was that it was slower but somewhat less painful. This was the method used by Claudio Stampi (technically, used by Stampi's test subject) when he was studying polyphasic sleep for his book Why We Nap. There's a summary of the relavant chapter from that book a little ways down on this page which might help you if you decide to use that method.

Good luck with it! I look forward to reading your sleep logs in December.

[Mello]

I've held a log while I started to do polyphasic sleeping at Learning new ways but ended it after only 5 days. Basically I already started to get in sync with the sleep pattern but my girlfriend didn't like me trying this all that much.
It's quite a detailed log, including dreams and observations on things that seem to change when applying a sleeping schedule so drastically different (recalling when things happened is more difficult because there is no great barrier called a full night sleep).

[David Hausladen]

Mello: Just read your sleep log. It sounds like you didn't exactly have the ideal situation for this kind of thing, but made a great effort at it anyway for as long as you were able to. I was never able to adapt to polyphasic sleep when I tried to make the switch at college (i.e. while living with a roommate). That's not to say it isn't possible, just that roommates/housemates pose an added challenge.

[Considerate]

I've heard about polyphasic sleep for a long time and circumstances have made it easy for me to try. I work from home, I live alone so all the time will be mine to manage.

I tried starting yesterday, with scheduled 20 minutes naps at 1, 5, 9 am and PM. By my calculation, that would be 2 hours of sleep per 24 hour cycle.

It started well but I overslept badly from 5 am to 1 pm, basically a night's sleep.

This time I had only one alarm clock which I think I managed to close while sleeping.

I'm curious to hear suggestions about this sleep schedule and about how to prevent oversleeping. Multiple alarms are a must as I see, but is there anything else in our arsenal?

[David Hausladen]

Considerate: Here's what I can come up with off the top of my head for oversleeping:

As you said, one alarm is too easy to turn off. Three is overkill. Two is just right. I strongly suggest putting both alarms out of reach of your bed and in different parts of the bedroom.

Watch what you eat when you're getting close to a nap; preferably, eat nothing at all in the hour beforehand (for me it's the two hours beforehand, but my schedule has six-hour cycles instead of four). You don't want digestion and/or blood sugar level to mess up your energy level and cause your body to sleep too soundly.

In darkness, your body produces melatonin, which makes you sleepy. For that reason, if your room is considerably darker at night than during the day, you will be more prone to oversleeping at night. For this reason I keep a lamp on at all times and my blinds closed, so that the light level in the room doesn't change too much from day to night. I'm able to sleep fine with dim or moderate light (which this setup provides), though I suspect bright light would be a little more problematic. (Once I'm better adapted I think this setup won't be as necessary.)

[Wanderer]

Can I just say a huge thanks for posting this sleep log, I hope to do this at somepoint in the future and am finding your posts very useful in my aim to sleep like this.
Thanks again

[Mr. Punch]

This is sort of unreal, the concept of polyphasic...

But I have read Steve P's posts about it and in some way it makes sense.

For those of us who are unable to do it by the book - 6*20 min. naps a day - there is "the core" sleep set up. Maybe 3 hours at night and then 2*20 naps? Opinions and experiences on that?

[David Hausladen]

Wanderer: You're very welcome! When you do your own polyphasic sleep adaptation, I would encourage you to also post a day-by-day log here. My hope is that by accumulating sleep logs from several different people, we gradually get a much clearer picture of how polyphasic works and how best to do the adaptation. Right now the waters are still very untested.

Mr. Punch: Don't forget the other variants: 4*30 is the one I'm using, and I suspect that 3*45 would also be feasible.

[David Hausladen]

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 7

Difficulty 3 out of 5: Today was significantly easier than any previous days since the first. That could be a sign that the polyphasic sleep adaptation is progressing smoothly, or it could simply be a lingering effect of oversleeping on Day 6.

The intense drowsiness I used to experience from 4am to 12pm seems to have distributed itself through the day somewhat since the oversleeping incident. I still experienced the most difficulty from 8am to 12pm, but I also experienced a few other short periods of tiredness in the early morning, early afternoon, and evening.

I wish I had more to say about Day 7, but less news is good news here. If things begin to settle into regular patterns, I'll probably decrease the update frequency (i.e. post one entry covering several days), much as Steve did in his (much more detailed) record, so that there's not too much repetition among my log entries.

I feel now much as I did at the end of Day 5: lots of days left, but the hardest part is done!

[set]

as for me..I overslept too much

A number of reason here

1) psychology - my parents would always wake up in the middle of the night and would be critisizing me. needless to say i have a strong motivation to just sleep and forget bout polyphasic.

2)the sleep schedule - might not be a good idea after all- I would have a hard time to sleep at night because i just slept like 2 hours ago!

I guess i'll have to wait until i quit my job.

[Ati]

Very interesting board here and thanks to all you contributing

Couple things..

I am trying to add serious musical study to a full time and very meaningful job as an internal medicine doc in a small mountain town here in Montana.

I'm not kidding about the musical study, I am intent on becoming fully able to play jazz guitar and sing vocals, with the intent of playing with some of the musicians or the kind of musicians that I most love to listen to. No kidding! (I'm 53 years old and when you get in your 50's the world is indeed your oyster as long as you can figure it out !)

(Yah, I'm one of the mods of the intention-manifestation board, you bet I practice a lot of that and I do)

So, the idea of adding some hours to my day is very enticing, as long as it is good for my health and energy overall.

I tried something like polyphasic sleep or core sleep, probably about 6 months ago and got really seriously overtired. I knew at the time it wasn't good for me then. Nothing else unusual.

I've settled on sleeping about 5:45 hours (10 to 3:45) and getting in a 30 minute nap in the afternoon (I can pretty often, not always get home by 3 or so).

I think I would do great if I had an extra 3 or 4 hours in the day, 2 would be a start.

I don't know if I/we? are just being "greedy" trying to get more hours out of the day or not. I'm open minded on this in both directions, we are and we aren't, I just don't know.

So, how would you go about this, any ideas? Seems the gradual rather than cold turkey way would suit my physiology better.

Any prescriptions to try?

Thanks, and I'll be following this post anyway just to see how things go.
Best wishes to all of you!

Ati

PS Three things I've learned, even just getting myself launched at 3:45 which has been real successful-

1. Has been mentioned here---make the decision on when you're waking up upon going to sleep--don't even think about it when it's time to get up, just do it without thinking and know that once up you'll feel more up in most cases.

2. I don't think this has been mentioned here--Light works wonders--I go right into the bathroom, turn the dimmer on full high, then right into our front room and turn ALL the lights on. That feels good and by then, my physiology is awake. Coffee is good too at that point, I know there are different opinions on coffee but 2 shots espresso in the am and that's it for the day.

3. Regular times, for what I'm doing at least, work well also. I find myself waking up a few minutes before 3:45am and I'll just get up then, turn off the alarm before it sounds. (I have a cat who's probably involved in this in some way. He's very ritualized and may be keeping time, waking me up in subtle ways-- often when I open my eyes, before I even move, he's looking wide eyed into mine, although he doesn't start purring til he sees my eyes open, I've checked that.)

[David Hausladen]

set: Don't worry about it. If you're still looking for a way to reduce your sleep hours without disrupting normal life, you might consider biphasic with a 3- or 4.5-hour* core sleep at night and then a 1.5-hour* nap during the afternoon or evening. This is probably the most "natural" sleep method you can achieve while using an alarm clock (the body's circadian rhythms are tailored toward this sleep schedule, with a major, prolonged drop in body temperature at night and a lesser, short drop in body temperature in the early afternoon). There will still be an adaptation period that you need to force your way through, but it shouldn't be nearly as tough as polyphasic, since it's not too far removed from monophasic sleep.

* I use multiples of 90 minutes for the nap and sleep times here because that's the average length of the sleep cycle (during long sleep periods; not applicable to polyphasic). This way you wake up at the beginning/end of a cycle, when it's easy to do so. If you wake up in the middle of the cycle, it will be harder to wake up and you'll have much less energy for your day. This is why people can get seven hours of sleep and still be tired!

Ati: From personal experience, the gradual method is easier because at first it's easier on your body. It does eventually get comparably difficult to the cold turkey method, but at least you have some time to work your way up to it. I suspect gradual adaptation takes longer, though (I can't say for sure because when I tried it last summer, I gave up before the adaptation was done). If you decide to use that method, I would point you to this page, which includes a description of the transition used for Claudio Stampi's 48-day study of polyphasic sleep.

As regards methods for getting up at 3:45--these are good techniques for waking up from polyphasic naps also. The only exception regards coffee, or rather caffeine in general: in a monophasic schedule you're awake long enough that caffeine in the morning or day is out of your system by the time you go to bed in the evening, so it's not a major problem. However, on a polyphasic schedule, it's best to avoid it, as it's almost impossible for caffeine to get out of your system in time to not interfere with your next nap.

If you decide to try polyphasic sleep, please write in to say how it goes!