A diversion

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Flirting with Polyphasic Sleep - Part 2

It’s been a few days since I started altering my sleep cycle, and it’s been more than 48 hours since I decided to adapt to the Uberman cycle. The first tip people will tell you who have attempted polyphasic sleep, according to many blogs and websites I have read about the topic, and I can now confirm this as truth:

DO NOT OVERSLEEP.

I did this twice already, at the 4 AM spot. My schedule currently goes 12, 4, and 8. Yes, this screwed me over because not only was it difficult to get up from naps afterward, it makes you tired like you haven’t slept for a few days. And on the Uberman schedule, you basically haven’t. It does way more harm than good, because all of the sleep you missed in the middle of adapting, your body is going to want to make up for. [more]

I set multiple alarm clocks, and somehow, I manage to turn them all off and crawl back into bed. This is going to stop though, knowing the root cause of my midday fatigue.

To prevent oversleeping, in the event that I become too exhausted, I take an extra nap, at the advice of Steve Pavlina’s polyphasic sleep logs. So far, so good.

Despite these minor setbacks, I feel very well-rested after just a nap or two. And at the annoyance of those who doubted the Uberman sleep cycle, it looks like I just gained 11/12ths of my life back by not spending it sleeping. Freakish, but awesome, no? I suppose we will know by the end of the week whether I have fully adapted or not.