30 days of polyphasic sleep.

I am still loving my triphasic sleep schedule, and expect to continue on it indefinitely. The three "days" per 24 hour cycle work well for me. I am more productive, and I am having more fun as well. I really enjoy the time that I am awake at night. I have been doing a lot of design work and more cooking. I have been baking bread and making cheese. I have been able to pour considerable amounts of time into my new business, Fiddlehead Homes.

I have been tracking my sleep time carefully over the last two weeks. I am averaging 4.9 hours of sleep. I average about 4.5 hours a night typically, and then, about once a week, I sleep through the night and lose my night "wake" period entirely. So far this has happened the night period after white-water kayaking. Out of the 4 times that I have gone whitewater kayaking or whitewater canoe racing, I have slept through the night 3 times. I am not sure if that is a coincidence or not. It has been pretty well documented that we don't need sleep for our muscles. They are able to repair and build themselves during any sort of low-activity/rest phase. Whitewater kayaking is new for me, so it may be that I am sleeping through the night in order to process the new skills. One theory of sleep is that we process new skills (specifically - motor sequencing and motor adaptation tasks) during Non-REM sleep, which is the part of sleep that my schedule is deficient in. On the other hand, it could also be that the kayaking has nothing to do with my need for the extra sleep, and it is simply a coincidence. It could be that I slowly accumulate sleep debt and need to pay it back, and that the days that I can go kayaking are also days where I don't have anything pressing scheduled for that night. I will have to continue to be consistant about tracking it, and see whether I can come to any conclusion.

Negative effects:

My wife, who was born and raised in Texas, has been enjoying suddenly being the tough one when it comes to the house thermostat. I have become much more sensitive to cold. I have been keeping my home about 5 degrees warmer since I started this experiment, and I often have on an extra layer and have the heat lamp on, when I am at the computer. If I am up and moving around, I don't really seem to have that issue. It is just when I am sitting, sleeping or otherwise inactive.

I have gained about 3 pounds over the last 4 weeks. My weight fluctuates by about 3 lbs per day, so at first it was hard to see that trend, but it is clear now. I will have to watch this very carefully. I have definitely been eating more sweets and fatty food. I am not sure whether that has to do with moving my office out of the bedroom and into the dining area, or because I am burning more calories per day, or is some negative artifact of sleeping less.

I do tend to fade a bit at about 3:30am until about 5:00am, when I begin to become more alert. I am debating about whether to change my schedule a bit to take that into account. I may add in a nap and do a 40 min nap at 3:30 and do a 40 minute nap at 6:00, but that seems a bit clunky.

I have difficulty taking medicine "two times a day". I currently take Loratadine for my allergies, and I am supposed to take them every 12 hours. With a triphasic day, that means that I take them first thing in the "morning", then in the middle of the next "day", and then skip a "day". I almost always get it wrong an skip one or take an extra one. With Loratadine the consequences are minor to the point of not making any difference, but I need to come up with a system for the future, when I will have to take a medication regularly.

Dancing cabaret knights - 

a negative effect of triphasic sleep.

The last negative effect that I have noticed is that I constantly have some song stuck in my head. This has never happened to me before, I used to just have thoughts, dialog, or silence; now I have some little tune playing all the time. My wife says that she always has a tune playing in her head, and I have always been unable to imagine what that could be like. Now I know that it is very slightly irritating. My current tune is "Camelot". Unfortunately, it is not from the musical of the same name, but from "Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail".

Overall, the positive effects powerfully outweigh the negative, so onward I go.