photo credit: MattHurst

I finally have all my stuff in my new place. Needless to say, things have been crazy and I haven’t been following a polyphasic sleep schedule. Or any sleep schedule to speak of.

I had people helping me move so it’s not as if I could just say, “Okay. You guys move the living room furniture to the truck while I take my 1:30 nap.” Right.

I have noticed a huge dive in energy, motivation and that fun euphoric feeling has vanished. This can probably be partly attributed to the sheer craziness of moving, but I do miss the schedule as well.

I’m still unpacking and getting settled in my new place. Of course, I’m a geek so my desk and computer equipment were the first things I got set up. Now it’s time to reorganize everything in a smaller space and get back to work.

I will be resuming a polyphasic sleep schedule, but I’m not sure if it will be Uberman or Everyman. I plan to start early next week. Things are still pretty crazy and I’m working on securing a vehicle so naps in the middle of the day are a bit out of the question.

As soon as I decide which plan to follow I’ll start writing daily again.

Day 20 of polyphasic sleeping. Wow. The last few days have really been great.

Yesterday I skewed my schedule a bit to spend the evening with my best friend and that went just fine. I took longer naps earlier in the day in order to skip my 5:30. I think the results – everything going smoothly – might have been partially psychosomatic since I felt like I’d “saved up” some extra sleep, but whatever the reason it worked fine.

The funny thing is, I only checked the time once when I was there and that happened to be at 5:30. I’m not sure if was a coincidence or my body tell me it was nap time, but it was interesting.

That’s really all I have to report. I’m moving in a couple of weeks and so I’ll be having the cable cancelled fairly soon here. Not sure exactly when. So if I appear to go missing, I’m really just packing. I’ll be back by the 1st or 2nd of February.

photo credit: joelogon

I’m still a bit foggy today after yesterday’s unplanned break from the polyphasic sleep schedule. It’s been more difficult to get up from my naps. I think this might be because I feel like I’m a bit sick. Nothing major, just a sore throat and a sinus headache, but my immune system could be trying to tell me something. Whatever it’s saying, I’m ignoring it, though.

Every nap makes me feel a bit less tired and foggy so I think I’m on the right track. I’ve also noticed that if I do something that takes my full attention – like coding or reading – I’m better able to stay awake.

Tomorrow I have dinner plans so I’ll be altering my schedule a bit. Instead of 1:30 AM, 5:30 AM, 9:30 AM, 1:30 PM and 5:30 PM, I’m going to stay up a bit later and sleep at 3:30 AM and adjust the rest of the schedule accordingly. Well, mostly. I’ll be leaving the house around 4:00 PM so I’ll probably sleep at 3:00 PM and then when I get back from dinner at no later than 7:30 PM. As long as I don’t oversleep, this should work just fine.

I’ve been sorting through my Internet Marketing information products in the past few days and trying to finally get something out of them. I download a bunch of stuff over the last two years and haven’t even looked at most of it. It’s time to clean that up somewhat. Also, it’s fun to learn new things and just as fun – sometimes – to read really crappy ebooks.


I know that must sound terrible, but the inspiration for Internet Marketing Proofreading came from the fact that so many information products are just terribly organized and written. I plan to create a contact list of the writers (good and bad) and send an email advertising my new service.

I don’t want to target just the poor writers because that seems kind of mean and maybe even inappropriate. Plus, what would I say? “You suck at writing! Hire me!” I doubt that would be the best approach for bringing in new clients.

Aside from that, I have a few paintings to finish and one I’m itching to start. Plus, this week I have to seriously begin organizing and packing up my house. I also need a job. Maybe a nine-to-five, maybe not. So if anyone reading this needs a writer, editor, blog designer, web content specialist please contact me. =)

photo credit: Silenus81

As it turned out, sticking with the polyphasic sleep schedule was the best way to go (Thanks, Keri!). Even though I felt like sleeping all afternoon I stayed up until my planned 5:30 PM nap and got up on time. Same for the 9:30 PM and 1:30 AM.

I still can’t get over how incredibly foggy I got just from getting a little bit of extra sleep at a time not on my new schedule. I’m still a bit drowsy and could definitely have slept right past 2 AM, but I jumped right out of bed and I think I’ll live.

Though I feel like I’m paying constant attention to my alertness and moods because of this experiment, I also feel a lot less anxious that usual. It’s as though having at least something solid in my schedule gives me comfort. An anchor so I feel less adrift.

Ultimately, it has shown me that since I left the ratrace I have felt somewhat off-balance. Don’t get me wrong, I like the freedom. I love the freedom. But I need to develop a more clear-cut routine for myself. It doesn’t have to be super-strict, but I need a bit more order than I have had. Even if it’s as easy as making out a rough chart of what I plan to do the next day and when, I think I’ll feel less anxious and get more accomplished.

Has anyone jumped around among different polyphasic sleep schedules? For example, since I’m currently following the Uberman schedule, how difficult would it be for my body to adjust to the Everyman schedule. Would it be best to make the change before I’m too solidly adapted to Uberman or after I’ve adapated to Uberman since then my body will be used to polyphasic sleep in general?

Any feedback – even opinions sans experience – would be appreciated.

photo credit: gcardinal

It’s day 15 of my polyphasic sleep experiment. I’m going to divide today’s log in two because I want to be sure I get down my current state of mind while it’s still fresh.

I had it all planned out. My best friend was coming to pick me up today around noonish so I needed to shift my schedule a bit. That hadn’t been a problem all week so I figured it wouldn’t be today either. I haven’t spent much time with Keri over the last few months and I miss her a lot. So I was really looking forward to a nice day at her house, just chatting and watching movies and reading.

Up until last April, Keri and her son, Tyler, were my roommates for about three years. On nice days, Keri and I would sit on our back porch and paint or read or just chat. One day a couple of years ago we were sitting on the porch. I believe we were each reading separate books, I remember mine was about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (a subject I’m, admittedly, a bit obsessed with).

I read aloud to her a particularly interesting passage. However, out of context it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Or, at least, it didn’t have the same punch without the write groundwork laid out in the previous sections of the book. So I gave her the background and then just kept on reading aloud.

This quickly became our thing. We’d choose a book together and I’d read it aloud. Sometimes she’d read aloud, but I have trouble paying attention if I’m not reading and she has things like knitting and nails to do so mostly it was me reading. In the following two or three years, we swept through a ton of chick lit novels – some bad, some excellent, but most just somewhere in the middle. Utterly forgettable. Anyway, the point of this tangent is that Keri and I rarely read together anymore and I really miss it. Today we had planned to put in some reading time and I was really looking forward to it.

So back to this morning/afternoon. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I nap at 1:30, 5:30 and 9:30 both AM and PM. If you haven’t been reading, well, you know how. I figured if I slept a bit longer during the 9:30 AM nap I could make it past the 1:30 and maybe even shift the 5:30 a bit if I needed to. So I got in bed at 9:45 and I set my alarm for 90 minutes.

As planned, my alarm woke me up at 11:15. I grabbed the alarm, turned it off stretched a bit and …

… the next thing I know I’m still holding my alarm and the clock says 1:16 PM. Damn it. Keri, my best friend, isn’t a stickler for time, but I tend to be. She was supposed to call before she headed over and when I retrieved my phone from the kitchen I discovered she had – several times, in fact. While it’s always good to know that someone cares, I knew she’d be worried.

Keri isn’t one of those people who hits redial until she reaches you. She’s a Virgo so she calls once, leaves a message and the ball is in your court. Except I live alone so I’m sure she had all sorts of terrible

I called her immediately and she was on her way to my house (luckily she only lives ten minutes away or I would have felt much worth), having grown tired of worrying and hoping she’d simply find that I’d overslept. I could tell from the slight irritation in her voice that she’d been quite worried. Some people show relief or anger when someone they’ve been worried about finally pops up, but Keri was irritated. She was nice, though, and said she understood that the sleep experiment was still underway.

Now it’s time to explain my state of mind at this point. I’d woken up after 3 1/2 hours of sleep completely disoriented. I knew things weren’t right and when it struck me what was wrong I got emotional. To be more specific, I got weepy. This is not unusual for me. When I’m overtired, overanxious or, really, over-anything, I tend to cry. I wasn’t quite at the crying point until I apologized for my mishap.

Keri said she had been worried, was glad that I was okay and admitted she was a bit bugged. You see, I suffer from a bit of agoraphobia and sometimes – even when it’s just a quite afternoon at my best friend’s house – I tend to cancel at teh last minute. This, understandably, pissed Keri off quite a bit. She told me she wasn’t mad though and said it was okay if I wanted to cancel.

By this time I was crying and still feeling very foggy and disoriented. Missing a Saturday afternoon appointment with a friend by an hour is not generally something one gets overemotional about. Unless you’re me. And I think that switching up my sleep schedule played a huge role in my state of mind as well.

When we got off the phone, I was still very upset. I popped a Xanax, poured myself a glass of Kool-Aid and stood in the kitchen trying to figure out just why my emotions had gone so wacko. Yes, I suffer from anxiety so wacko emotions are never a huge surprise, but I haven’t had that problem since I started polyphasic sleeping so it seemed to come out of nowhere.

After a few minutes of calming down, I called Keri back. I immediately started crying again and apologizing. She told me to stop apologizing. We made plans for steak and a movie Monday night so all is well. I told her all I wanted to do was sleep and she warned me against it. Her logic, as usual, was sound. If I decided to sleep the day away – which is no doubt what i’d do – my schedule would be even more disrupted and I’d have to go through at lease some level of adaptation again. So as much as I want to be lying in bed – dreaming of bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens or Portia DeRossi; take your pick – I did the dishes and now I’m sitting in the living room writing this before I can overprocess it.

The thing is, now that the Xanax has kicked in I can take a more objective look at my overreaction. I think that, for the most part, my body is so adapted to polyphasic sleep that I got sort of stuck trying to do more than one REM cycle at once. I know there are folks who “take a day off” every once in awhile to sleep for longer periods of time. This is something I can considered trying. Well, I think I just did and I don’t think it’s for me.

The bottom line is, as a routine oriented person, it’s got to be all or nothing. So I plan to return to my reguarly scheduled programming: all polyphasic, all the time.

I will be writing again later in the day to record my mindset and alertness level after this morning’s chaos.

photo credit: Steve & Jemma Copley

I believe I’m completely in the swing of things now when it comes to my polyphasic sleep schedule. All of my naps in the last couple of days – except one that I had to push back because of an appointment – have been just wonderful. I fall asleep quickly, have vivid (and sometimes lucid) dreams and wake up feeling completely rested.

As much as I had read that polyphasic sleeping was awesome, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. But I’m a complete convert.

One of the biggest perks is that all of my insomnia symptoms have disappeared. I used to approach bedtime with a bit of anxiety. Even if I was absolutely exhausted it would take me at least half an hour to fall asleep. Some nights I’d give up after an hour and just stay up, even though I was painfully tired.

Now when it’s time to take my naps I konw that even if I don’t fall asleep it’s no big deal. I get to try again in three and a half hours. And it seems that since I’m not longer worried about falling asleep, it happens quickly and easily. It’s like magic.

Even my cats seem to have adapted after two weeks. I say, “Naptime!” and the follow me into the bedroom to cuddle up. When I get up, they follow me back to the living room to cuddle up. The first week they were confused and were quite irritated with the short periods of sleep.

My best friend asked me today what the cons were of polyphasic sleeping. The only thing I could think of was that I still sometimes miss long, lazy sleeps. But I don’t miss them enought to switch back to monophasic sleeping.

photo credit: laffy4k

I messed up my schedule somewhat today – partially by accident and partially because of an appointment I couldn’t reschedule. The key for me has been to make sure I stick with a strict routine, but today’s routine was more like a polyphasic sleep smattering rather than a schedule.

Waking up after my nighttime naps is still the biggest challenge in this experiment. This morning at my 5:30 AM nap I learned that my new alarm gives up after 60 seconds. I never have understood alarms that give up so quickly – especially as little as a minute. Anyway, I was in the middle of cooking something so I didn’t get to bed until after 6 AM and when the alarm went off at 6:40 I felt awake and thought I’d just lie in the warm bed for a few minutes. And then I woke up at 8 AM. I supposed it could have been much worse if I wasn’t well into adapating to this schedule.

Then I had a 12:30 PM appointment with the people who are going to paint my house and re-carpet it when I move. They didn’t arrive until almost one and didn’t leave until after two. So my 1:30 PM nap was pushed back to about 2:45 PM.

I completely spaced on my 5:30 PM nap – I guess because it was so soon after I’d woken up – and now it’s 8 PM. I can’t decide if I should wait it out until my 9:30 PM nap or go ahead and sleep now and slowly get back on track. I’m feeling tired, so I’m not sure I can make it another hour and a half and then get up when I need to. Especially since the late PM and early AM naps are the most difficult for me to stick wtih.

In all honesty, I’m surprised at how flexible I can be now that I am mostly adapted. Yes, I do have a breaking point when it comes to stretching out waking time. Today I was awake from 8 AM to almost 3 PM and now I’ve been awake from about 3:30 and it’s nearly 8 PM. So it’s good to know that when I do have plans that last longer than four hours I won’t completely hit a wall. And so far it seems that I can generally get back on schedule fairly quickly. Only 12 days in I’d say this bodes well for the pros of maintaining this sleeping schedule – or another form of polyphasic sleep if I need to work around an outside-the-house job.

One more interesting thing today. During my afternoon nap today I had a lucid dream. I haven’t had one since I started the experiment so it was great. It was so lucid that I told the girls I was talking to in the dream that I knew I was dreaming because I was wearing a shirt I didn’t own. They laughed and I said I’d prove it and suddenly I was wearing a different shirt. I don’t remember the rest of the dream and it’s not terribly interesting, but it’s good to know that my brain is seriously adjusting to a polyphasic sleep schedule. I love the energy I get from the Uberman schedule, but I wouldn’t want to give up my vivid and lucid dreams. I’m glad to know I don’t have to.

photo credit: |subma®in|

Since I wrote such a long post yesterday about my Perception of Time on a Polyphasic Sleep Schedule, I decided to skip my Day 10 update. So this update will be for days 10 and 11.

While my body and brain seem to adapted to the polyphasic schedule, there are still some weird kinks to work out. I mentioned meals and contact lenses in my post yesterday. There is also the fact that my cats are used to me staying in bed with them for at least a stretch of eight hours each day. They’re not adapting as quickly as I am. When the alarm goes off, they follow me around for a bit, expecting me to get a drink of water or use the bathroom and then go back to bed. Then, for about the next half hour to an hour they run from the living room to the bedroom, letting me know what they would like me to do. It’s actually kind of amusing, but I hope they’ll get used to it soon.

I have found that the hardest stretch of time for me is the time between my 5:30 AM and 9:30 AM naps. When I wake up from the 5:30 nap it’s still dark and I really want to go back to sleep – or not get out of bed at all. Even this morning, I considered taking an extra nap at 7:30, but knew that would just make things worse.

I think this urge has a lot to do with the weather. It’s been gray and either raining or snowing during the entire trial so far. This is not at all unusual for Western Washington – at any time of the year (except the snow) – but usually I can just crawl back into bed if I feel like it. So getting up in those dark, cold hours is definitely still difficult – even if I don’t feel sleepy.

And, the honest truth is, I rarely feel sleepy. And sometimes I don’t even sleep during my naps. This is especially true for my 1:30 PM nap. I just sort of lie there, drifting in a quiet alpha state while the kitties purr happily. When I wake up I feel as though I’ve slept, though.

The only thing I don’t like about this polyphasic sleep schedule is that I haven’t been dreaming much. Or if I have been, I’m not remembering them. I have always had vivid, memorable dreams and I’m starting to miss them a great deal. Hopefully this is just part of the adjustment period and my subconscious will kick back into gear soon.

I have read where some folks – after the initial adaptation period – take a day off every once in awhile and allow themselves a lie-in. I know I couldn’t do that now, but I might look into it at some later date. I really do love sleeping and, though I appreciate the productivity and love my energy level, I am starting to miss the time with my memory foam mattress.

Overall, I’m really glad I’m trying out polyphasic sleeping. I’m not sure how long I will stick with it – at least 30 days because that seems to be the standard for a serious experiment – that depends on how things suss out once I’m fully adapted.

My Thick Glasses

I’ve been promising for the last few days that I would try to explain how my perception of time has changed since I started my polyphasic sleep schedule. The change has been quite dramatic and is very difficult to explain.

I’ll start off by saying that if you get a chance to try a polyphasic sleep schedule definitely go for it. Even if it’s not practical for you to stick with, it’s a really cool experiment. I still don’t know how long I’ll be sticking with it, that all depends on what type of out-of-the-house job I get. I think even if I get a full-time job I will switch to Everyman (I’m on the Uberman schedule right now) so I can continue to have the extra productive time.

For the first few days, I felt quite foggy and ocassionally just wanted to sleep for an indefinite period of time. Since I’ve been working from home, I rarely wake up to an alarm so having one that went off thirty minutes after I put my head on the pillow took some getting used to. However, once my brain realized that thirty minutes was all it was going to get, it got with the program fairly quickly.

I was afraid I would have an unending feeling of needing to catch up on sleep, but that hasn’t been the case at all. In fact, most of the time when “naptime” rolls around I don’t even feel that tired. However, I stick with it and once I’m in bed I fall asleep fairly quickly. More quickly than I have ever fallen asleep in my life.

I have suffered from insomnia for much of my life. I’ve had major anxiety issues since I was a child. And really for no good reason – my childhood was comfortable, safe and I was always in the care of my great parents. I guess some people are just born worries and that’s me. I was afraid with more time to worry I might become even more neurotic, but I find that I’m much more relaxed than I have been in a very long time. I think it has to do with knowing that I have so much time to get things done.

So let’s talk about time in general. I’ve always been a night owl so working in the middle of the night doesn’t feel weird. However, in the past when I have worked at night I have been aware of the time, not wanting to stay up too late and sleep the next day away. Sleeping polyphasically, I know I won’t be doing that so I’m much more productive and less worried about hurrying to finish things up so I can get to bed.

I’m having a bit of trouble with my daytime naps because of the daylight. I could buy a sleep mask, but I’ve been feeling crafty, so I’m going to make one. I’ll be writing a how-to on that for anyone who is also in a crafty mood. I don’t really sew, but I can stitch some elastic to a piece of cloth. I think. =) And that should solve the light issue.

One of my biggest fears going into this was that I would be really irritated that I couldn’t lounge around in bed for nine hours at a time. However, I have found the opposite to be true. When it’s time to nap I know I have to – although I can push it back or forward by about an hour if I have to – and sometimes I don’t want to. It does feel a bit like an obsession at this point because I’m still adapting, but I have a feeling that will go away with more time on the polyphasic schedule.

Having always been a procastinator, I feel like this polyphasic schedule is helping with that. Technically I can say, “I’ll do that tomorrow,” but I don’t really have a sense of today and tomorrow at this point. It all feels like one continuous movement of time. I have a massive to-do list and I keep notecards for the next three or four “cycles” – as I’ve started to call them.

For example, I will create short lists (between five and ten) of tasks to do between 2 AM and 5:30 AM, 6 AM and 9:30 AM and 10 AM and 1:30 PM. Then I work my way through the list for each cycle. If I don’t finish them, I add them to the list for another cycle. This helps me stay very productive and I love having a clear roadmap for my time.

I don’t add meal times, painting or reading to the to-do lists. If I feel like doing those things, I just do them. The lists aren’t set in stone, they just make sure that I don’t get bored. I started doing this about four days ago when I found myself feeling like I had too much time to feel. As soon as I wrote down all the things I have to do, I saw there was no reason to waste any time. This removed the urge to throw an extra nap in just to kill time that I had started to feel. Up to this point, I still haven’t needed any extra naps.

The two things I’m still figuring out as far as establishing a set schedule are my contact lenses and my meals.

Without my contact lenses I am legally blind so my glasses are very thick. I wear them only for a few minutes in the morning and before I go to bed so taking out my contacts signals long-term sleep to my body. I could wear them 24/7, but with all the reading, writing and painting I do, my eyes really need a rest. Currently, when my eyes start to dry out and bug me, I switch to my glasses. I see no reason why this can’t continue to work, but I’m still getting used to the fact that it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to go to sleep.

As for the meals, I’m eating about two a day and a few snacks in between. My appetite seems to have decreased and I have no idea what caused it. I make sure that I don’t eat right before a nap because that tends to make it harder to fall asleep and then harder to get up as well. Other than that, I’m just listening to my body. I have had some weird cravings, though. The foods themselves aren’t weird. I have always loved bananas and those Danish sugar cookies, but I have never craved them before.

Another reason I believe this schedule is really working for me is because I have always thrived on routines. For the last several months I haven’t had a routine at all. I have been somewhat productive, but I have also spent a lot of time jumping around from task to task, not really completing anything. Having to-do lists set within my polyphasic sleeping cycle has improved my productivity ten-fold (at least), helped my mood (I always feel better when I’m busy) and, so far, greatly increased my overall quality of life.

Before I conclude this post, I would like to point out that I am single and work at home. Having complete control over my schedule has made this experiment possible. If you have a nine-to-five, a family or even just a partner, chances are it will be much more difficult to make such a dramatic lifestyle change. However, an Everyman or biphasic sleeping schedule could work for you.

So despite the “weirdness” of sleeping six times a day for thirty minutes at a time, I really think a polyphasic sleep schedule suits my life very well.

In yesterday’s update I promised I’d try to explain how my relationship with time has changed in these last nine days. I’m still not exactly sure I can make it clear. It’s really one of those things you have to try to understand – like sex or smoking marijuana or being in love. Not that it’s as big an event as those things (except maybe pot), but it’s that sort of thing that seems to alter your entire life and the way you look at the world.

I’m going to try to cover that top tomorrow. Things are still on track, but I had to skew my schedule again today because my best friend came to visit. So I’m feeling a bit off kilter after two days of being off track. It’s crazy how fast my body has gotten used to this routine. Anyway, I will try to be more philosophical tomorrow.

For today, you can admire the beautiful Betty Crocker timer ($5.99 at Safeway) I purchased yesterday. It remembers the countdown time so I’m all done setting and resetting alarms. Hooray! Plus it’s loud and very annoying. Aside from the cats being pissy about it, it’s definitely a hit. And so stylish!