Day 144 of triphasic sleeping, so nice to be back on schedule.

Back on schedule. As I wrote in my previous post, I had a little bit of trouble getting back on schedule. It turned out that I was a little under the weather. I am not sure what I was sick with, but it was some sort of mild flu-like malaise. I think that at this point in the experiment, I have to admit that the triphasic schedule does put some stress on my body - if my diet becomes sub-par, or I am a little run down with allergies, or have an injury, or stop exercising, or whatever, I start to become tired on this schedule. This seems to be the minimum sleep that I can get by on. When I am fit and healthy I have no problem maintaining this schedule, but if I am not at my peak, I seem to need to get a little extra sleep. The first method I try of adding in extra sleep is to make my evening nap a double cycle: ie, 180 minutes. Usually that seems to be enough, but if it is not, I sleep right through my night wake cycle, getting up at the usual time of 6:00 for my morning wake cycle. On day of that has been enough to get be back on track with only 2 exceptions since March - one exception was due to injury and one due to flu. On both occasions I slept throughout most of the day. Not including the days that I have slept in from injury or sickness, I have averaged 4.2 hrs a night. If I include the days that I have ended up "sleeping in", I have averaged 5.1 hrs of sleep per night since the end of March, when I started this. Before I did this experiment, I was averaging 8.2 hrs per night on average, so I have gained the equivalent of 28.25 days so far this year.

Triphasic sleeping is like having 

a discount time machine!

So, have I gotten an extra months worth of productive time? Certainly my projects have expanded to fill the extra time, and I really feel it when I go off schedule and only have 16 hrs in a day. I do a form of task tracking called "Getting things done (GTD)", and so I can compare what I have gotten done this year versus last year. Based on that, I would have to say that I probably gotten MORE than an extra months worth of work done. A substantial portion time has been used visiting my grandmother up in Dover-Foxcroft. I have been made 7 more trips up there than I did last year, and those take a full day. I have really appreciated having the time to do that. I have put surprising amount of time into this blog, which is sort of a wash since if I were not doing triphasic, I would not be doing this blog :). Other time has gone into my business start-up, leisure time, bread-making, and other little things. All in all, I really enjoy the quiet time to myself at night. No matter how crazy my days get, I get this little 4 hour time at night to catch up, or relax, or spend pursuing my personal projects.

Changing around my schedule - update

Well, that did not work very well. Two 45 minute naps are not the equivalent of one 90 minute nap, at least for me. Perhaps next time I will try breaking it into four 20 minute naps like the Uberman, but that seems awkward as well. Over the course of the last month I drifted off my triphasic schedule, only doing it about 1 or 2 days a week. I have found the monophasic schedule to be difficult. I still get very tired around 1:00 pm and I have been sleeping more than 8 hours a day. After the triphasic schedule, it feels very sluggish.

Now however, I have the flexibility to go back on my triphasic schedule. I tried to do it on Monday, but gave up during the night and went to sleep early (at 3:00am instead of my scheduled 4:30am). Last night I again went to sleep at 3:00 instead of 4:30 (still getting up at 6:00). I am not sure why it is harder to do the schedule this time than previous. I have not had trouble switching back and forth before. A few possibilities:

1) Allergies. I have seasonal allergies that make me feel groggy and tired. I am taking Loratadine, which mostly works, but perhaps not as well on a triphasic schedule as it does on a monophasic. I will try taking 2 tabs a day.

2) Standardizing my afternoon nap better. Yesterday I did not get to nap until 2:00, when the nap works best scheduled at 12:30. Today I have a dentist appointment at 11:15, but I think that I might be able to get back by 12:45, so that will be better.

3) Diet. I do substantially better on the schedule when I am eating very well, and while my diet is ok, I have been eating a lot of starch and skimping on the veggies. I will try to get back on CRON (optimal nutrition) and see if that makes a difference.

I will update in a few and let you all know how it is going.