Day 9 and 10

Got over the flu after my 2nd sleep schedule, and had a bit to eat. Went to bed on time, but slept in by 1/2 hour. I did not use an alarm. Had a productive night and was completely on track for the next few cycles. My energy level still feels great. I had a good game of Ultimate today.

After Ultimate, we went to celebrate a friends birthday, and I had a couple of beers. I ended up missing my next nap by 2 hrs. I woke up fine after 1 1/2 hrs, but it makes for a short wake cycle tonight. I do feel a little groggy, but whether that is due to the beer, to pushing back my nap, or to the fact that I have not yet had my morning coffee is hard to say.

Really, other than the slight social frictions that are occasionally caused by my mid-day nap, and that I have a hard time keeping my evening nap firm (again mostly because of social events), my sleep schedule doesn't feel much different than my old one. I get up and am a bit groggy till I have had my coffee. I get hungry about an hour later and fix myself something to eat. I can not have coffee again, which I used to do, because by that time it will interfere with my nap. Coffee seems to affect me for about 4-6 hrs, so if I am going to have some, I drink it within the first hour of getting up.

My body, surprisingly, seems to treat each waking cycle as a "day". I tend to be sore the cycle after strenuous physical activity, and pretty much is gone the cycle after. I slept for most of the cycle that I had the flu, the symptoms peaked, and I was in recovery for a cycle, and then I was fine. It seems unlikely that my bodies biological rhythms would be 3 times faster than they have been my whole life. Rather I imagine that my sleep cycles are long enough so that my body gets most of whatever sleeping bodies do, done. Reading other poly-phasic blogs, I am struck by the difficulty that they have had adapting to the schedule and by the constant complaints of tiredness. I think that the difference might be that my tri-phasic sleep schedule includes 3 NREM periods. Even though we don't know what the NREM period is for, apparently it is important for our bodies to have. Just based on my personal experience (i.e. a wild-@$$ guess), I think that there must be something that is important to body healing in there and while it must not be a critical sub-routine (since people on the uberman can keep those schedules for months at a time), it does create some time of pressure or stress on the mind or body. Sleep is really such a fascinating field.

Day 8

Today was a little trying. I felt tired at my 10:30 pm nap, so I did not set my alarm. I am a believer in listening to what my body needs. I woke at 2:30, and still felt tired. Because my next nap was only in 3 hrs, I did not have coffee as I usually do. I felt vague and had a headache and some nausea. I ended going to bed early, and again did not set my alarm. I woke at 7:15 am. and immediately vomited. Turns out that I have the flu. I am not actually surprised, since I have been hanging out with people all week that have been struck down by the flu. Of course, I wonder if I would not have gotten it if I had been on a mono-phasic schedule, but there is no way to know. It is true that I have not been eating particularly well, so that might have contributed. I will be fixing that aspect of this schedule tonight.

On the other hand, after my nap at 1:30, I felt fine. I got outside and did a little work on the land. I did feel a little weak, but that is typically how I feel the day after I am ill. I had a nice supper tonight, and all seems well. Certainly, I have gotten off lighter on this flu than any of my friends that came down with it.

Day 7

It has been a week. I am continuing to do well and I am enjoying this new routine. Today, for the first time, my sleep schedule interfered somewhat with my social schedule. A friend's 50th birthday party started at 1:00pm, which is a hard time for me to make. My wife and I went, and I took a nap in the car, which worked just fine, and went in at 2:30. So I made an appearance, but it was a little weird / socially awkward. I don't think that there is a way around that sort of thing - it is just going to be an artifact of this lifestyle. I think that I would rather be able to stay at events until 10pm and miss the occasionally 1 pm party.

I also still need to work out a sane eating schedule. I tend not to be hungry for a few hours after I wake up, and I tend not to want to eat for a few hours before I go to bed, which on this schedule leaves a vanishingly small window. Additionally, I don't like breaking up my work-flow for a meal. With cooking, eating and clean-up, it can easily be an hour, which breaks my "day" into two almost useless segments. I think that I will start cooking during the night wake cycle, and nosh on the meal during the day.

Day 6

My friend and I ran the St. George River Race this weekend, placing 2nd. I have been wondering how this sleep schedule would affect extreme physical performance. We shaved a considerable amount off our time (compared to last year), and I had excellent endurance, reflexes and focus. We finished at about 12:30, and by the time we had loaded the canoe and gear and I had driven home it was about 2:00pm, so I was a half-hour late for my afternoon sleep and really feeling it. I decided to just let my body do what it wanted and did not set an alarm. I woke some time later, and decided to lounge in bed and drifted off again. When I finally woke up and checked the time I found that it was 3:32. I had "overslept" by 2 minutes. I think that the first time I woke up must have been after the first 45 minute cycle, which is when I have typically been waking up in the afternoon. So I felt like I had spent a lazy and luxurious "morning" in bed, all within my proscribed 90 minute nap.

While I am going to continue posting my experiences, this, along with other things, has convinced me that the "experiment" is a success. Unless there are unforeseen issues down the road, I am going to keep this pattern indefinitely.

One of the other bonuses that I have noticed - which seem to be completely counter to all the other polyphasic sleep blogs that I have read - is that I am thinking and moving much faster. I have been having this weird, but pleasant, time-dilation thing. For example, I often wash the dishes as I am waiting for my coffee to brew. I know from experience that washing the dishes in the morning takes about 12-15 minutes. Over the course of this experiment I will find that I have finished washing the morning dishes and that my coffee is not ready - it will have only been about 3-4 minutes. This has been happening a lot with a number of different activities. I think it is related to the mindful focus phenomenon that I mentioned before.

Day 5

I originally thought that I could be somewhat flexible in my sleeping time - especially if i pushed a nap earlier rather than later. However, that turns out not to be the case. If I move a nap time more than about 20 minutes (or more) earlier or later, I wake up feeling foggy, groggy and generally jet-lagged. This feeling can last a couple hours, and on one occasion lasted a couple hours over the next nap period. I had to move a couple of naps to accommodate some things that I had scheduled before I started tri-phasic sleep. Fortunately, all those glitches are past, and all my future commitments will be with full consideration of my sleep schedule. 

One of the other "side effects" that I have noticed is that I am much more focused than I have ever been before. All my life, I have had distracting, slightly intrusive, thoughts. For example, I might be doing the dishes and be thinking about an architectural design problem at the same time. I might be doing architecture, and be thinking about the ramifications of the tau manifesto. I would spend time that I SHOULD be doing one thing and use that time doing something meaningless - usually surfing the web, but sometimes just doing stuff to avoid doing what I should be doing. The especially frustrating part of that was that I would have resistance doing even the things that I WANTED to be doing. My brain seemed to just be perverse.

Now, however, no resistance. I do a task with complete focus and when i have reached a completion point (either work done, or work on it for a specific amount of time) I move on to the next task. I have gotten more done over these last 4 days than I would have thought possible. I don't seem to need any "downtime", by which I mean that I don't have any desire or interest in doing non-productive recreational activities such as mindless web surfing, watching tv shows, playing video games, or unproductive puttering. I have always had a lot of interest and respect for the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, but have always imagined it to be beyond me. While I think that I am a long way from enlightenment, this new experience of mindful focus has been liberating.

Day 4

Wow, I am really enjoying this. Woke up from my "night" nap about 5 minutes before the alarm went off. I actually had a little bit of trouble falling asleep. I feel well-rested and alert. I took a little time organizing my next few days which are going to be extremely busy. I am finding a little bit of difficulty keeping track of which day it is, since I have 3 "days" for every terrestrial day that passes. I use a modified GTD (Getting things done)  time management system, which at the heart consists of a 3x5 memo notebook which lives in my back pocket. I have always used a page a day for my checklist, but recently, because of this tri-phasic sleep system, I have gone to a page per waking cycle. It allows me to keep track of the day, and to plan my meetings, phone-calls, etc for times that other people are at work. From my perspective, that is every third "day" (7:00am - 1:30pm) since when I wake at 3:00pm, and have breakfast etc, the normal workday is pretty much over.

The schedule that I have fallen into is a day of meetings, errands, phone-calls etc. A social day or day off. and then a project-oriented day. So I end up with the schedule that follows:

Having a day off every two days rocks, and I am looking forward to the weekend, which will be like a 5 day vacation. This weekend, I have a canoe race, a movie, a seminar, and two parties that I am going to, and I will still have plenty of time for my martial arts class, as well as a full 5-hour day of pruning apple trees.

Day 3

Doing great. I had a lot of energy yesterday - went and played Ultimate for 3 hours and then hung out with friends to play Spades. I have played a lot of spades with these guys over the years, and since you need to be able to track the cards that have been played, it is a mentally challenging game. It makes a easy marker to gauge my memory performance and since the guys will give me serious grief if I am not operating up to expectations, I can use it as an informal, but impartial gauge of my mental acuity. I did stay out late last night, and my evening nap was delayed by about 2 hours, which caused me to be quite tired. I awoke without an alarm, however, and had my morning nap on schedule, where I also woke without an alarm. I did linger in bed for about 1/2 hour, pleasantly drifting/half asleep, but that is typical for me, so I am not sure anything should be read into that.

I feel some of the effects that I associate with sleep deprivation - there is a slight feeling of pressure in my fore-brain, and my thoughts are slightly... slower than normal. I do not feel other effects that have always associated with those two indicators though. In the past, when sleep deprived to the extent those conditions, I always have felt foggy and often I have slight tracking problems - my eyes will glide over text without quite reading it. I do not feel those. On the contrary, I feel alert and focused.

Some observations: I have not been eating as well as I usually do, because every meal seems like breakfast, and my breakfasts do not typically contain of vegetables, which is what I eat for lunch and dinner. I tend not to be hungry for quite a while after I wake up, and I don't want to eat a big meal just before I go to sleep. I assume that this will sort itself out; it is just an unforeseen side effect of poly-phasic sleeping.

I have also found that I am getting a LOT more done. Not only have I gained 4 hours, but I also tend to think of each block as a "day". It is only 6 1/2 hrs, so I need to be focused to get my goals in for that waking period. I spend significantly more time in productive work. Out of the 6 1/2 hours, I tend to have a solid 4-5 hr block for projects, which has been working out well for me.

Below is a diagram of the Weaver Tri-phasic sleep cycle. The darker green represents the sleep schedule. Although I have an 1 1/2 for the afternoon nap, I have been waking naturally after 40-45 minutes. I don't know if this will continue or not.

Day 2

Day two of my polyphasic sleep experiment. I decided to go with a circadian-driven triphasic model, of my own design. Currently, I have that set up as three sleep cycles, two of which are at night and one during the day. I think that this model has a nice safety built in, in that if there is a need for the sleep that happens during NREM sleep, I will likely sleep through the night, and be able to otherwise continue my experiment from there.

I am currently sleeping 90 minutes per sleep cycle, and have not needed an alarm, which is actually unusual for me. I have been setting one, but I have been waking about 5-10 minutes before it goes off. I have heard that the first few days are the hardest, but I feel that it is easier than the typical monophasic cycle that I was doing before. We shall see how it goes. 

Preparation

So, I have been interested in poly-phasic sleep for a while. It is fairly well known that Aspergians have a different sleep schedule than neuro-typicals and I hypothosis that Aspies are more easily able to go on a poly-phasic schedule than NTs. Certainly, anecdotal stories (which, obviously do not actually take any weight as evidence) are suggestive that poly-phasic sleeping may be linked with Aspergers.

The next question was to pick a sleep-schedule. There are enough to choose from (Everyman, Uberman, Dymaxion, etc.) to suggest that pretty much you can make up your own schedule. I don't see why you couldn't have a schedule of 5 sleep-cycles per 24 hrs. After looking at a number of blogs of people that switched and maintained polyphasic sleep for at least 4 months, the most common cited reason for giving it up is that it interferes with your social and working life. As the rest of the world is on monophasic sleep, it becomes difficult to schedule things with the rest of the world.

As I work for myself, I do not think that I will have a great deal of difficulty accommodating my work schedule. If I am unavailable for 30 minutes during the work day, that is unlikely to be noticeable. On the other hand, having a sleep schedule that deeply restricts social events would impact my life significantly. My social schedule includes ultimate (5:00 till 8:00), dinner with my wife (anywhere from 6:00 to 9:00), dinner parties (5:00 till 11:00), going to movies (6:00 to 9 or 9 till midnight), and weekend activities which can happen anytime during daylight hours.

Since most events start at 5 or 5:30 because of peoples work schedules, it seems obvious that I need to stick a nap in that gets up at around 4:30 or 4:45. This seems to fix the schedule. On the uberman, with it's six sleep cycles/day you have 4 hrs between naps. That means that the next nap is at 8:30. Clearly this is very awkward. With the dymaxion schedule, the next nap is at 10:30, which is more do-able. Five phases puts a nap at about 9:20 which is a bit early socially, and interferes with going to the movies, but has the benefit of putting a nap at noon, which is simple to incorporate into a work day.

The simplest model to incorporate would be one that has three sleep phases per day, so every 8 hrs. One at 4:00, midnight, and 8 am. This doesn't seem to have a name, so if I can get it to work, clearly I get to name it. It also has the advantage of going to bed in the dark (mostly) and getting a nice re-set from the morning sunlight when I get up at 8:40. Additionally, it might be the easiest to adapt to, by splitting the core night-time sleep of the bi-phase pattern.