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.