Surviving on 4 hours of rest per day - my attempt at polyphasic sleep

[TheImptuous]

So Mark and a few others expressed some interest about my experiment with polyphasic sleeping in this thread. The specific regimen is the Everyman 3 sleep schedule, which involves a core sleeping period of 3 hours plus 3 20-minute naps throughout the day, for a total of four (count 'em: 4) hours of sleep per 24-hour period; theoretically, this adds about an entire day's worth of time to my schedule that I otherwise would've spent sleeping. I've only been doing it since Monday, but so far, so good, though there have been a few bumps along the way.

A little backstory: I've always had issues falling/staying asleep. I could lie in bed for hours with nothing happening, and I'd end up getting nowhere close to a decent night's sleep, resulting in a daily ritual of I-don't-want-to-get-out-of-bed-itis. For example, before starting Everyman, I kept trying for a number of weeks to wake up at 6:30 to go for an early morning run. Number of 6:30 runs accomplished? Zero. Number of early morning runs accomplished since I began Everyman on Monday? 5. So something is happening, but goddamned if I know how much of it is physiological and how much of it is placebo.

So my schedule looks like this: Sleep 1 am–4:15 am, nap at ~9 am, ~2 pm, and ~9 pm; the nap times can start an hour before/after the designated time, though I've found that waiting too late to nap can be a bad idea.

Hitches encountered so far: not really falling asleep while napping, sleeping in (eg, getting out of bed at 5 as opposed to 4:15), not really being sure of what to do with myself at 4ish in the morning, one time extending my night-nap until 4:15 (probably because I ended up taking it at 10, by which point I was overly tired), sometimes having a general jet-lagged feeling.

Overall, I'm very pleased with what I'm experiencing. Energy levels are noticeably up, and I haven't needed to rely on caffeine that much, except during pre-dawn hours as a precautionary measure. I'll see how it goes, but it feels pretty good to have implemented this.

Links
Wikipedia

Steve Pavlina
Puredoxyk (Personal blog for the author of the Everything2 article linked above)

[Mark]

Thanks for sharing this. I attempted the uberman when I was in college and failed miserably. I'm going to give this sleep schedule a go when I get back from Ecuador. I already survive on 5-7 hours of sleep pretty decently and enjoy my occasional power naps, so I don't think this will be as painful and drastic as the uberman.

Also, noticeable effects of caffeine? Alcohol?

[TheImptuous]

Eh, my morning coffee is more of a prophylactic measure to counter any impulse I might have to go back to sleep, especially since it seems so natural to do so when the sun isn't even up; after that I've been sticking to decaf. I only had two beers Wednesday night and they seemed to have the usual effect that two such beers would have. Tonight (Sat) is a party at a friend's place, so I'll get to see how Everyman meshes with that situation.

[Mark]

Cool, let me know. I don't mind cutting the caffeine out of my life if necessary (Steve Pavlina said it wreaked havoc on his nap schedule). But alcohol I'm more concerned about... I'm still a bit of a party-hound.

[TheImptuous]

Got up early and did a long run broken up by some arm work. Got to see the sun rise over the Charles. One weird thing I'm noticing is that at the beginning of the nap I feel like I'm just not falling asleep, and by the time the alarm goes off I have this other feeling of "oh shit! I napped too long" whereupon I immediately snap into realizing it's only been 20 minutes at most. But then these are 20-minute naps that make up for what would otherwise be ~1.5 hours in a normal sleep schedule.

[TheImptuous]

As of 1 am it'll be 1 week in. So far, so good.