Day 15 - had to push back my afternoon nap

A friend had some car problems, and that lead to me pushing my nap back until 4:00. I did not want to nap in the car, because I was wearing my wetsuit and had been in 32 degree water. I was warm enough, but a long way from comfortable, and I knew that I would not be able to stay warm if I slept. My body temperature has always dropped when I sleep, and that effect has gotten more pronounced. I crashed out at 4:00 and slept until 5:15. I woke up alert and refreshed, but as I am approaching my evening nap, even though I have only been awake for 4 hours, I will be ready to hit the bed.

I am trying out sleeping 1:15 instead of 1:30, because I have been waking up dreaming. If 1:15 does not work consistently, I will try 1:45. There is a sleep monitor app for the i-phone. That would be really nice to have so that I could chart my cycles. 

Day 9 and 10

Got over the flu after my 2nd sleep schedule, and had a bit to eat. Went to bed on time, but slept in by 1/2 hour. I did not use an alarm. Had a productive night and was completely on track for the next few cycles. My energy level still feels great. I had a good game of Ultimate today.

After Ultimate, we went to celebrate a friends birthday, and I had a couple of beers. I ended up missing my next nap by 2 hrs. I woke up fine after 1 1/2 hrs, but it makes for a short wake cycle tonight. I do feel a little groggy, but whether that is due to the beer, to pushing back my nap, or to the fact that I have not yet had my morning coffee is hard to say.

Really, other than the slight social frictions that are occasionally caused by my mid-day nap, and that I have a hard time keeping my evening nap firm (again mostly because of social events), my sleep schedule doesn't feel much different than my old one. I get up and am a bit groggy till I have had my coffee. I get hungry about an hour later and fix myself something to eat. I can not have coffee again, which I used to do, because by that time it will interfere with my nap. Coffee seems to affect me for about 4-6 hrs, so if I am going to have some, I drink it within the first hour of getting up.

My body, surprisingly, seems to treat each waking cycle as a "day". I tend to be sore the cycle after strenuous physical activity, and pretty much is gone the cycle after. I slept for most of the cycle that I had the flu, the symptoms peaked, and I was in recovery for a cycle, and then I was fine. It seems unlikely that my bodies biological rhythms would be 3 times faster than they have been my whole life. Rather I imagine that my sleep cycles are long enough so that my body gets most of whatever sleeping bodies do, done. Reading other poly-phasic blogs, I am struck by the difficulty that they have had adapting to the schedule and by the constant complaints of tiredness. I think that the difference might be that my tri-phasic sleep schedule includes 3 NREM periods. Even though we don't know what the NREM period is for, apparently it is important for our bodies to have. Just based on my personal experience (i.e. a wild-@$$ guess), I think that there must be something that is important to body healing in there and while it must not be a critical sub-routine (since people on the uberman can keep those schedules for months at a time), it does create some time of pressure or stress on the mind or body. Sleep is really such a fascinating field.