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.

Day 8

Today was a little trying. I felt tired at my 10:30 pm nap, so I did not set my alarm. I am a believer in listening to what my body needs. I woke at 2:30, and still felt tired. Because my next nap was only in 3 hrs, I did not have coffee as I usually do. I felt vague and had a headache and some nausea. I ended going to bed early, and again did not set my alarm. I woke at 7:15 am. and immediately vomited. Turns out that I have the flu. I am not actually surprised, since I have been hanging out with people all week that have been struck down by the flu. Of course, I wonder if I would not have gotten it if I had been on a mono-phasic schedule, but there is no way to know. It is true that I have not been eating particularly well, so that might have contributed. I will be fixing that aspect of this schedule tonight.

On the other hand, after my nap at 1:30, I felt fine. I got outside and did a little work on the land. I did feel a little weak, but that is typically how I feel the day after I am ill. I had a nice supper tonight, and all seems well. Certainly, I have gotten off lighter on this flu than any of my friends that came down with it.

Day 7

It has been a week. I am continuing to do well and I am enjoying this new routine. Today, for the first time, my sleep schedule interfered somewhat with my social schedule. A friend's 50th birthday party started at 1:00pm, which is a hard time for me to make. My wife and I went, and I took a nap in the car, which worked just fine, and went in at 2:30. So I made an appearance, but it was a little weird / socially awkward. I don't think that there is a way around that sort of thing - it is just going to be an artifact of this lifestyle. I think that I would rather be able to stay at events until 10pm and miss the occasionally 1 pm party.

I also still need to work out a sane eating schedule. I tend not to be hungry for a few hours after I wake up, and I tend not to want to eat for a few hours before I go to bed, which on this schedule leaves a vanishingly small window. Additionally, I don't like breaking up my work-flow for a meal. With cooking, eating and clean-up, it can easily be an hour, which breaks my "day" into two almost useless segments. I think that I will start cooking during the night wake cycle, and nosh on the meal during the day.

Day 6

My friend and I ran the St. George River Race this weekend, placing 2nd. I have been wondering how this sleep schedule would affect extreme physical performance. We shaved a considerable amount off our time (compared to last year), and I had excellent endurance, reflexes and focus. We finished at about 12:30, and by the time we had loaded the canoe and gear and I had driven home it was about 2:00pm, so I was a half-hour late for my afternoon sleep and really feeling it. I decided to just let my body do what it wanted and did not set an alarm. I woke some time later, and decided to lounge in bed and drifted off again. When I finally woke up and checked the time I found that it was 3:32. I had "overslept" by 2 minutes. I think that the first time I woke up must have been after the first 45 minute cycle, which is when I have typically been waking up in the afternoon. So I felt like I had spent a lazy and luxurious "morning" in bed, all within my proscribed 90 minute nap.

While I am going to continue posting my experiences, this, along with other things, has convinced me that the "experiment" is a success. Unless there are unforeseen issues down the road, I am going to keep this pattern indefinitely.

One of the other bonuses that I have noticed - which seem to be completely counter to all the other polyphasic sleep blogs that I have read - is that I am thinking and moving much faster. I have been having this weird, but pleasant, time-dilation thing. For example, I often wash the dishes as I am waiting for my coffee to brew. I know from experience that washing the dishes in the morning takes about 12-15 minutes. Over the course of this experiment I will find that I have finished washing the morning dishes and that my coffee is not ready - it will have only been about 3-4 minutes. This has been happening a lot with a number of different activities. I think it is related to the mindful focus phenomenon that I mentioned before.

Day 5

I originally thought that I could be somewhat flexible in my sleeping time - especially if i pushed a nap earlier rather than later. However, that turns out not to be the case. If I move a nap time more than about 20 minutes (or more) earlier or later, I wake up feeling foggy, groggy and generally jet-lagged. This feeling can last a couple hours, and on one occasion lasted a couple hours over the next nap period. I had to move a couple of naps to accommodate some things that I had scheduled before I started tri-phasic sleep. Fortunately, all those glitches are past, and all my future commitments will be with full consideration of my sleep schedule. 

One of the other "side effects" that I have noticed is that I am much more focused than I have ever been before. All my life, I have had distracting, slightly intrusive, thoughts. For example, I might be doing the dishes and be thinking about an architectural design problem at the same time. I might be doing architecture, and be thinking about the ramifications of the tau manifesto. I would spend time that I SHOULD be doing one thing and use that time doing something meaningless - usually surfing the web, but sometimes just doing stuff to avoid doing what I should be doing. The especially frustrating part of that was that I would have resistance doing even the things that I WANTED to be doing. My brain seemed to just be perverse.

Now, however, no resistance. I do a task with complete focus and when i have reached a completion point (either work done, or work on it for a specific amount of time) I move on to the next task. I have gotten more done over these last 4 days than I would have thought possible. I don't seem to need any "downtime", by which I mean that I don't have any desire or interest in doing non-productive recreational activities such as mindless web surfing, watching tv shows, playing video games, or unproductive puttering. I have always had a lot of interest and respect for the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, but have always imagined it to be beyond me. While I think that I am a long way from enlightenment, this new experience of mindful focus has been liberating.