try a polyphasic ultra-short sleep schedule

I tried, I couldn’t keep it up. I like to think not because I was getting inadequate rest, but rather because it completely destroyed my social life.

1. Do your naps on time, every time.
2. Don’t snooze the alarm; that misses the point.
3. You can expect to be in a daze at least some of the “regained” time.
4. My eyes get all gummed up and irritated when I do this. It’s as though I’m not really generating enough tears to keep them wet. I may need to consider eyedrops if I were to do this long-term.
5. Spending the “regained” time all on 43T also misses the point :(

I can’t recall actually dreaming in a while now – so that was probably good for me – but 7 hours? And I was doing so well! I didn’t really feel deeply tired or anything. Now I feel like a zombie (which means, of course, that I’ve actually been a zombie before, or I wouldn’t know how it feels to be one). It wasn’t really my fault, though. My PDA’s alarms don’t go off if the battery gets too low; I just don’t know how low that is. When I turned it on, the alarm that should have gone off several hours ago went off. The battery was at 21%, which I don’t think is unreasonable. I guess I need to swap batteries more often when I’m using it as heavily as I am right now. And I guess I’m also glad that happened at home, at night, rather than at work and in the daytime. But it’s time to punish the PDA so that doesn’t happen again.

I just slept 7 hours. I remember hearing my alarm go off, and turning it off (one side effect of this whole project is that I have been able to avoid the snooze button and just get up on the first ring), laying back down “for just a moment” and then waking up when it was already light out.

Ah, well. My napping yesterday was seriously bad – my two-year-old is not on the same schedule and thinks it’s amusing to do belly-flops on people who are trying to sleep. So after getting very broken sleep on the majority of my naps yesterday, I probably needed it.

I missed a nap yesterday afternoon, and got progressively more tired. I overslept on the last one by two and a half hours! No matter; I’ll pick up where I left off and keep trying.

Day 3. OMG, this sucks. Why can’t I just stick knives in my eyes or douse myself in gasoline like an ordinary person? I missed a nap yesterday afternoon, and I hadn’t really been sleeping on any of them prior to that (I’m something of an insomniac anyway, but that doesn’t mean missing sleep is good). I’m sleeping now, but it’s a dead sleep, not REM, and I’m still not dropping off right away (I think that’s about to change). And the caffeine headaches aren’t helping either. A nice little drive, and I’ll probably be out. The thing is, I’ve got a 1-hour commute between here and work. If a car flies off the road at 75 miles an hour and wraps itself around a tree in a huge fireball, but there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Is dying stupidly an acceptable risk?

I went ahead and started this, beginning naps and reducing sleep by an hour a night. Today was day 1. I feel fine – my brain feels a bit like it has a stuffy nose – but I gained back a whole hour this evening. Suddenly an hour seems like a very long time. I’ve already finished all the things I would do in an ordinary day. So what do I do now? I have an hour to myself and nobody to spend it with, plus I’m not terribly far behind on the other things I’m doing right now. It’s just weird.

1. A couple of weeks off to get started
2. A job that would accommodate time for scheduled 30-minute naps
3. Aforesaid job to accommodate space for the same (nothing quite like co-workers waking you up all the time by switching on the lights)
4. Patience
5. US$155 if I actually want to read Why We Nap.