Joachim Schwarz . net

For the last 3 days of my polyphasic sleep trial I was experiencing mixed results. I had some naps that were refreshing and some that left me almost more tired than before. I also had some more consecutive naps and one oversleeping incident.

Having a nap that isn’t completely refreshing during the day isn’t as bad, because I have many people and things around, that distract me and keep me engaged. But during the night the options are limited and I’m more likely to do mostly sedentary work. I also tend to do mostly passive things like watching animes or reading.

I noticed, that the times I couldn’t get myself out of bed where those when I felt like I was falling asleep standing before a nap. Instead of doing something from my EBFL I rather opted to take an additional unscheduled nap.

Those naps aren’t  bad per se, since some of them really left me refreshed and with enough energy to stay awake for the rest of the cycle. But if I took those naps when I was really extremely tired I could almost be certain not to get out of bed afterwards.

To prevent this in the future I will allow myself only an additional nap at 2am and 6am. I will also allow myself to nap only if I’m not about to fall asleep standing. Should this be the case I will do some items from my EBFL first.

I noticed that for some naps I had pretty bad sleep inertia and I couldn’t get myself going after waking up. Yesterday evening I found that I could get rid of this pretty easy by practicing a speech, or doing something else engaging. Practicing a speech is an activity that’s both,  mentally and physically engaging as I have to remember it and I also have to stand up and use body language while doing it.

Last evening started pretty good. I felt wide awake and refreshed after waking up. I could concentrate easily and I was  even able to watch a movie without getting particularly tired. This was still the case after my midnight nap, but before my 4am nap I started to get increasingly tired and I decided to take an unscheduled nap at about 3am. As it turned out this was a mistake. At first I added another nap after this one and then I somehow forgot to set my alarm again which lead to an oversleep of a couple of hours.

Even though I said I would allow myself only one try this time, I don’t see this as a failure yet. I think I came too far down the road to adaption to revert to monophasic sleep right now. Also at the moment I feel pretty good. I had no problems getting two restful naps already in which I hit REM sleep after the oversleeping incident.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 9:47 am and is filed under Sleep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.