Polyphasic Sleep

I’ve mentioned before my sudden and intense love for Steve Pavlina’s blog.  I started reading it a little before Thanksgiving, so I guess that means I’ve been hooked on it for nearly a month.  I guess that also means my 30(ish)-day trial for "being an early riser" is up.  This is definitely a habit I will be continuing.

The basic idea here is that instead of hitting "snooze" about seven or eight times (I’d gotten so bad that my initial alarm was at 6:50 so I could be up by 7:30), I just pop out of bed at the FIRST alarm, and make myself start my day.  I also then don’t have a set bedtime, with the strong understanding that I should go to bed when I’m tired, and not too much sooner or later than that.

Some of the side-effects of this experiment I really expected.  Having more energy in the morning and being on time for work every day were among them.  Some I would never have guessed.  I did not expect that after years a lifetime of being a snooze button addict, it would take less than a week for me to start waking up on my own.  Wooooah, Nellie.  Something that also surprised me was that I actually needed about 1.5-2 hours less sleep than before.  Talk about upgrading my day!  I now have almost two whole hours every day that I have for much more fun stuff.

All things considered, those side-effects don’t seem so weird to me.  The really weird ones I still can’t figure out.  I’ve started waking up at the end of pretty much each REM phase that I have.  I will wake up, remember a vivid dream, and fall right back to sleep again.  I’m remembering 4+ ultra complex/vivid dreams a night this way.  I wouldn’t have seen that coming a mile away.  I’ve also developed an immunity to cold.  I walk out to my car in the morning, scrape the snow off, and drive for 5-10 minutes before the heat fully works.  All this in a light hoodie.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I am a pansy of the first degree when it comes to cold.  Where are my hat and mittens?  My aptly-named deep sea diving coat?  (Many people, independently, referred to this coat in such a way; the name stuck)

I think the absolute strangest development is that I have become a morning person.  Wait wat?  You may ask, if you’ve known me for any amount of time.  Surely this cannot be true.  Not only do I wake up without the snooze button (or often without an alarm at all), but I enjoy my mornings, and am chipper the entire way through them.  I moved up my wake-up time by a half hour so I could exercise in the mornings.  I have time to eat a fresh-cooked bowl of steel-cut oats.  My mornings have become (dare I say it) healthy.

The only real down-side I see to this is that I start getting tired at about ten o’clock, which was better than when I lived in Snoozeville, but terrible compared to college.  My ability to appreciate night life has sunk to a depressing low since I got a real job.  I could try altering my schedule so my sleep pattern is a little later, but I’ve come to really like my mornings.  What’s a scientist to do?!

Experiment!  That’s always the answer!

Steve Pavlina successfully tried the Uberman sleep schedule many years back, and kept detailed logs of the process.  I was infinitely intrigued when I ran across them, and have since put in more research across the internet.  The idea of polyphasic sleep is to break up your sleep times into smaller, more efficient chunks.  I could try to explain it further, but pictures being worth what they are in words, this link probably does a better job.  (P.S. I love hyperlinks.  Probably comes from editing Wikipedia so much.)

The Uberman schedule clearly isn’t for me:  I can probably get away with one nap at work, maybe even two, but very much not with a +/-10 minute window.  I’m thinking… more like 4.5 hours of core sleep +2 naps or 3 hours core +3 naps.  As I researched this more today I realized…  I have tomorrow off (my work gives me a free day instead of a Christmas bonus), and Monday off for "Christmas".  I have a four-day weekend, which I will very likely not get again for a very long time.

Is this a perfect time to absolutely screw myself over trying to adjust to a new and strange sleep method?  Absolutely!!  I’ll just get Bryan to drive me everywhere.  😀  Four days should be enough to get over the initial shock and be functional enough to drive and work.

Am I completely nuts to be trying this?  Probably, but we knew that already.