This is the the first morning after switching to a 3 hour core sleep period. It was tough not to sleep in (especially since it was dark outside), but I managed to get up and make it to the office.

My new schedule looks like this:

• Core sleep: 3:00 a.m - 6:00 a.m.
• Nap 1 Target: 11:30 a.m. (+/- 1 hr)
• Nap 2 Target: 5:30 p.m. (+/- 1 hr)
• Nap 3 Target: 11:00 p.m. (+/- 1 hr)

This morning, I was a bit tired thick-headed until 7:30, but I’m hoping it will go away soon, or at least after my first nap.

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Ahh, I am happy to report a great nap today. Fell asleep quickly and woke up right before my alarm went off, again. I brought some earplugs from home and they made a huge difference. All the little daytime noises, like a car driving by, or a loud conversation would no longer bother my ears right as I am about to fall asleep. I feel about 75-85% of what I would consider my peak performance. Compared to the 95 % I would give myself after a normal 8 hr night, it ain’t too shabby. I’m guessing I’ll feel even better tomorrow.

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After drinking last night, I was able to wake up at 7:00 am, but felt hungover and couldn’t convince myself to get out of bed (it didn’t help that is was a Sunday). I wound up getting out of bed around 8:45 a.m. still feeling groggy and tired. Hopefully this doesn’t mess up my day too much.

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A great nap! It was a bit noisy upstairs at the office and I thought I wouldn’t get any sleep at all, but it turns out after 5 minutes, I was long gone. Also, I accidentally set my nap alarm for the AM instead of the PM, but I woke up on my own just 1 min after it should have gone off. My body learns!

My next two naps also went extremely well. I felt 100% refreshed after my afternoon nap.

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I am now ready to transition to a 3 hr core, 3x 20 min schedule - netting 4 hrs instead of 5.5 hrs. I decided to wake up at 6:00 a.m. instead of 7:00 so I can make it to the office earlier. The only downside is it will be darker outside when I get up so the morning sun will be less effective at helping me wake.

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So apparently it was a bad idea to skip my evening nap last night. I wasn’t tired when the time came around and since we started playing Drinking Jeopardy, I decided to just power through. The game was a blast, however by 1:00 a.m., I was exhausted. I only managed to stay up until 1:30, but fell asleep quite nicely!

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I woke up right before my alarm again! 6:53 this time. Very interesting. I’m very groggy at the moment (8:15 a.m.) so I assume this is what I get for missing that nap last night. At least Jeopardy was amazing!

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Yes! Two great sleep sessions! In the one at 6:00 p.m., I managed to dream, and dreams confirm REM sleep! Additionally, I successfully kept it down to 20 minutes, and when I awoke, felt alert and refreshed.

Later in the evening, I had had 5 beers and managed to take another good nap. I was drowsy afterwards but once I ate I felt fine. After a few more drinks, tiredness overtook me and now, as of 1:55 a.m. am going to head to bed (even though its a half hour early. From what I’ve read, this shouldn’t affect my schedule because if you’re tired, you can go to bed earlier as long as you make sure to wake up at your regular time. Thats what I’m planning on doing so lets hope it works out.

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Again I wake up right before my alarm (6:47 am)! Interesting.

Nap success! I woke up briefly after about 15 min of lying down, but I actually felt asleep for both segments of the session. I was tired before hand, but I also tried some strategies to help fall asleep including attempting to clear of busy thoughts and rocking my head side to side as I lay there to subdue the office distractions. I felt great afterwards - if the past few days is as bad as it gets, then this is a piece of cake!

So far I have been allotting myself 3×30 min naps and 4.5 hrs of sleep at night resulting in an estimated 6 cycles (3 naps and 3x 90 min core segments), one more than the required amount. This has been a nice transitional phase, but since it’s about time for a challenge. After a few more days, I plan to reduce my nap times down to 20-25 minutes and use a two-cycle core sleep period of 3 hours.

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Yay, another successful nap! I went to sleep quickly and woke up after 15 min, but I’m still pretty sure I slept before and after the interruption. I figure if I suddenly can’t remember where I am, I probably fell asleep.

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Looks like we will be playing the greatest drinking game ever, Drinking Jeopardy! I’m thinking of skipping my nap so I can keep playing, we’ll see how I feel.

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Up to this point, my naps have not been providing me with much restful sleep, which is why I had an extremely difficult time waking up this morning. I’ve been good about getting out of bed quickly (to make sure I don’t snooze) but it took a 20 minute shower before I felt like moving around. The good thing is that I haven’t really felt very tired during the days while at work, so I have remained productive.

Also interesting to note, I woke up being fairly awake around 5:50 am. That would be a total of 3 hrs and 20 minutes. If that is the accurate end of my second cycle, that will be good to know for when I switch to a shorter core sleep.

Took my midday at 1:15 pm - again, I didn’t think I slept, but I feel just fine now, so I suppose it did something. We’ll see how it goes later today.

My afternoon nap was more of the same - I took it a little early, and still didn’t seem to fall totally asleep. Because of this, I extended the time a bit and woke up much groggier than I would have liked.

We went to play racquetball today at 9:00 pm (should have been 8, but stupid google adwords shut down on us, right after Bob Barr was interviewed on FoxNews - infuriating!). Alarmingly, in the first game, my coordination was extremely off; I was miss-judging where the ball was and totally missed the ball on a number of swings. However, after I was down 11-1 to Brian, I got back into a rhythm and continued to play very well the rest of the hour. I don’t know if I can attribute it to sleep deprivation as I have felt fine for the most part so it probably was due to not having played for a week.

12:57 - Another mediocre nap, but I feel alright. We’ll see how I do tomorrow!

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Well, I fell asleep quickly last night, and again woke up right before my alarm went off. My alarm was scheduled for 7:00 AM and I awoke, fairly refreshed at 6:53; it looks like 4.5 hours times my cycles just right. Hopefully it scales well and 3 hours will be perfect as well when I am ready to try that.

8:10 a.m. - After rising from bed I was a bit tired, but once I moved around and took a shower I felt refreshed and awake. Looking forward to the midday nap. Hopefully I can fall asleep fully this time.

11:35 p.m. - Fail at all three naps. I still havent been able to get fully asleep - just to the half-and-half state. I took my third nap a little early (10:15 pm) since I was at home and planned on going out afterwards, but it didnt seem to matter. In my last nap, I even crawled in bed like I was going to sleep for the night, but still no sucess.

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Last night, I successfully went to bed around my target time (2:30am) and was able to fall asleep relatively quickly. I do not recall waking up at all during the night, and I actually woke up naturally a few minutes before my alarm went off. I am guessing this means one of my cycles had just ended and I received an optimal amount of sleep. Even with my excitement at the possibilities of the schedule and my desire to succeed at it, I was still extremely tired for the first 10 minutes of the morning and had an immense desire to lie back down to sleep in. I am definitely looking forward to my first nap.

By the time the midday nap came around, I was a little drowsy, but skeptical of whether or not I would be able to actually fall asleep. Additionally, since I hadn’t made any office-wide announcements I was a little anxious about seeming strange/crazy to my co-workers, thus making it a little difficult to wind down. Unfortunately, I was only able to doze for about 15 min before general activity and other noises woke me up. Hopefully I will be able to have a good nap this evening.

Well, bad news again, I was only able to half doze/daydream in my second and third nap. For the latter, since I was waiting on some people before I could do more work, I let myself “snooze” for an extra 20 min or so, but never really fell asleep. Well good luck to me for tomorrow.

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Last night I slept for 7 hours; I would have been perfectly capable of making it through the day without a second thought, however after all this sleep schedule research, I was interested to test out my napping abilities (or lack there of). So when I found myself a little drowsy around 8:00 pm, I decided it was a perfect time to give it a shot.

When I first laid down, I was certainly skeptical - I have never known myself to fall asleep quickly. However no sooner than I thought that, I went into what seemed like a very lucid daydream phase, which I “awoke” from about 15 minutes later. Now I know that 15 min is barely enough time to get a restful nap, and its hard to tell for myself whether it was actually sleep or not, but that time did go by in what seemed like an instant, and I felt refreshed and awake afterwards. I interpreted this as a good sign.

So after spending an hour tweaking my 3 nap schedule around, I came to this first draft:

• Core Sleep: 2:30 a.m. - 7:00 a.m.
• Midday Nap: 12:40 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
• Evening Nap: 5:40 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
• Night Nap: 11:20 p.m. - 11:40 p.m.(adding up to an extra 10 min per nap until I think I don’t need the buffer anymore).

Waking up at 7 a.m. gives me more than enough time to make it to the office by 8:00 a.m. and have a good block of working time before my midday nap. I get another good working block in the afternoon and have another nap scheduled just before a normal dinner hour. Additionally, being napped by 6 p.m. will not interfere with the frequent evening racquetball trips. My 11:20 nap seems to be the most inconvienent as it can get in the way if staying up and interacting with other people. Usually, anyone at the office who I would be playing games with would need to be heading home by this time, however if games run long or if people decide to stay up late on a particular night, this nap will interrupt our games. Possible solutions include shifting the nap earlier or later depending on the activities, taking a break from the games and joining later (boo), or possibly skipping the nap all together (as it technically is an extra nap).

I’ve done my research, I have my plan - it is possible, here goes! Good luck me.

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My ultimate goal for this experiment is to find a sleeping schedule or strategy that will maximize the amount of functional waking time, while minimizing transitionary side-effects, and maintaining a flexible and practical schedule. I’m looking for a sleep method that will provide the most benefit with the least amount of restrictions. I found information on sleep schedules that shorten the amount of sleep during the night by utilizing short naps throughout the day. After a week of research and deliberation, I decided to use the Everyman schedule as my first attempt at pholyphasic sleeping.

The key to understanding how a polyphasic sleep schedule can work is learning how sleep actually provides rest to the human body and mind. There is a theory that in order for a person to feel rested and alert the important factor is not only the amount of time slept, but rather the amount of sleep cycles experienced. I also found documentation (source) indicating that most people need five, 90-minute cycles, transitioning from light sleep to deep sleep to REM sleep over the course of a night. The fascinating thing about taking short naps throughout the day is that your body and mind find a way to condense benefits of an entire 90 minute cycle to fit into a mere 2o minutes. You can see this in action when after a short nap you find yourself feeling alert, awake and refreshed, while when you take a longer nap (40 min to an hr) you might wake up groggy and tired.

Armed with my goals and this newfound knowledge, I set out to create my ideal schedule.

As an inexperienced napper, I was very skeptical of the efficiency of napping abilities. For example, I fully expected it to take 10 minutes for me to fall asleep for naps, on a good day. In light of this, I created a schedule consisting of a 4.5 hour core sleep period (3 cycles) and three 20 min naps (3 more cycles) spaced throughout the day, thus giving me 6 total cycles per day as opposed to the standard amount of 5. I eventually would like to adjust to a 3 hr core, 3×20 min nap, however I theorized that an extra 90 minute cycle over night would ease the transitionary period both to make up for napping deficiencies and so my body could acclimate to the schedule with less sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is the biggest hurdle for adopting a polyphasic sleep schedule and can render people mentally incapacitated until recovery, and I wanted to make sure I would be able to function at full capacity for work responsibilities.

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