Day 8

The numbness in my fingers may have been caused by napping while lying on my back. This was not normal for me to sleep on my back, but I did it because I thought it would be more likely that I would sleep during the naps. Maybe this is true for the first few naps, but now I am tired enough that I sleep within 5 minutes of lying on my side. My fingers are not numb any more, and I don't sleep on my back anymore, maybe this is related and maybe not, I did not do enough experiment to be sure.

I think that the time it takes to sleep is not very much related to the position one assumes before sleeping, but I think that the time required to sleep decreases by a lot if one stops moving, and I think that time increases every time one moves to change position even if it is a small move. So perhaps at first it is easier to not move when lying on the back because this is a new position for many people and it is easy to see if one has moved, and thus it is relatively easy to avoid moving. So I think that when one is able stay still in any position, then one can sleep in any position.

Running at night when I felt very tired was a very good way to become awake. But I had a stress fracture in my left shin for the first half of last fall, i.e. autumn,  (as far as I could diagnose myself, but I did not get x-rays). Now I ran many times per day for a couple days, yesterday morning it felt as though I had stress fractures in both left and right shins. I hope that it was only temporary pain, and that I will be able to run without pain in about a week. I will stop running for the upcoming week to give my body some time to heal. I guess the problem was not so much the running but more the fact that my body is not used to healing fast enough with very little sleep. In total I probably did not run for more than one and a half hour in 4 days, and did not walk for more than 16 hours in 4 days. (16 hours is probably an overestimate, but I probably walked at least 8 to 10 hours in 4 days.)

Walking at night to become awake can be quite dangerous. Yesterday morning I walked from home, all the way across downtown ( I sort of live downtown) to the old port between about 4:30 and 5:30. I had many microsleep episodes. For the largest part of my trajectory I cannot remember on which street I was walking, so I would not be able to know the route I took. At some point I did not even know where I was downtown, but I knew that if I continued walking in straight line I would be able to figure out where I was. After a while I indeed figured out where I was. At some point while I was still "lost" the buildings looked like some other building I saw before, so I thought I had done a full circle, but when I looked at my tracks in the snow, I knew I had not been there earlier because there was only one set of tracks. In any case I did not like the experience of walking alone at night downtown while I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Running would have woke me up, but I did not want to run because of the likelihood of getting stress fractures. But definitely walking even for 30 minutes did not wake me up. I was out there for about 2 hours or more. The rest of the time I spent at the port looking at boats and thinking, and obviously some of the time was spent walking back home. At some point maybe after 45 to 60 minutes I did finally wake up (that is stop having microsleep), but this is much longer than I would have expected, and I would not have gone out to take a walk if I knew it would take that long to wake up.

My perception of time seems to have changed. I very often put timers when I work or study. When the time is over either I take a break or I start another episode of work / study. Most of the time I set my timer to 30 minutes. These 3o minutes seem to take a lot longer to go by. Sometimes when I work / study I  estimate how long it has taken me to do a certain task, but when I look at my timer, I now see a quite different number. If I think that I spent 20 minutes on something very often looking at my timer convinces me that I in fact did it in 5 or 10 minutes. To a certain extent this could mean that I get stuff done quicker than normal but I think that this is not true, because I do not feel that I work / study faster or more efficiently than normal. In fact most of the time when I noticed this kind of discrepancy I had the feeling that I was working a bit slower than normal and /or less efficiently than normal. So perhaps I just perceive time differently.

Normally I cannot do tasks that require a lot of mental concentration while listening to music because I can't help but hear the voice, and even if there is no voice I find it very distracting. But for the past couple of days I did put some music sometimes to stay awake, and at some point I was working with the music, and I realized that the music was not bothering me. Somehow I was able to filter it out and work just as though there were no music. If I could do this reliably then I would probably be able to do productive work even when there are people talking near me. It would be very useful if I could learn how to filter out their voice at will. Time will tell if I can do this at will.

I think, and hope, that the hardest part of the adaptation is over. It seems to be easier to wake up for every nap. The 04:00 nap is really the hardest one to wake up after. For that nap I always feel that I would be much happier / comfortable if I went back to sleep, but I don't go back to sleep because I am pretty sure that this would cause the experiment to fail. Moreover I know that it does not feel that much better because I purposefully stopped another attempt a few weeks ago. I think that the "feel good" feeling only last until one starts sleeping which is not going to be a long time probably less than 5 minutes because one is very sleepy right after this kind of nap. After that it just feels like bad monophasic sleep because the body is not used to sleeping monophasically anymore. There is really no good reason for going back to sleep unless one thinks that the experiment is not worth doing.

I think that we all have some nap that is harder to wake up from. But I think that this does not mean that we are missing sleep because we function well for the other naps. And the nap that gives us problem is always the same one (or two). I think that the body is just not used to being awake at this time of the day. Perhaps some sleep inducing chemicals are produced during  these hours and the trigger to produce these chemicals would be our "internal clock". So I guess as long as the internal clock does not adapt it will not be easy to wake up from this nap. This is very speculative and I have no evidence that the body indeed works this way. But if the body works along those lines then it is better to avoid adding additional nap to deal with the extra sleepiness. If this hypothesis is true then it would take more time to adapt if we add additional naps because the discrepancy between the internal clock and our sleep cycle would get smaller thus there would be less of a need for the internal clock to change. I read a similar argument on the google polyphasic group. So this idea is not new to me.

Since the beginning of this experiment I took each scheduled nap, I did not add any other naps, and I did not oversleep. I did quite a bit of microsleep, but as far as I can tell this was always less than 30 seconds if I was sitting and less than 5 seconds if I was standing. I think that these last two numbers are overestimates. Apart from 3 naps which I took between 1/2 hour and 1 1/2 hour after the scheduled time, all my naps were started within +/- 5 minutes, and most of them were actually started within +/- 2 minutes of the scheduled time.

Day 5

I have been quite busy for the past two days, so I did not spend time blogging. Nonetheless I am still doing this experiment. Thus far I have not missed any naps, I have not overslept, and I did not add any new naps. So each day I did exactly 6 naps of no more than 30 minutes each. On day 3 started the 19:30 nap a bit later so I started it at something like 20:30. Yesterday I did something similar with the 16:30 nap. I did this because I went shopping, and I did not come back home fast enough to start the nap on time. I did not notice any adverse effect from doing that. I don't think that it will increase the length of my adaptation period because I did not get any more sleep than I should, I just got it at different times.

This morning at about 04:30 I took a walk to stay awake. After about ten minutes of walking I sort of fell asleep while walking. It is the same feeling that one gets when one falls asleep for a fraction of a second while driving. I was not expecting that that could happen to me while walking. I guess this can be dangerous, because it could be fatal if one fell asleep while crossing a street. Once I realized what had happened I started running, that effectively woke me up, and I have been able to walk for about 40-50 minutes after that without feeling sleepy. I only ran about 5-10 minutes about one minute at a time. I can normally run 10-20 minutes every other day without any problems, but I am reluctant to run that much every day, while I am in the adaptation period because I don't know how my body can cope with running and sleep deprivation at the same time.

I now dream during my naps. I don't know for how many naps I have been dreaming, but I would guess that I dreamed for most of the last ten naps.

Either the shaking/vibrating feeling in my arms and legs stopped, or I got used to it. In any case it does not bother me, so I cannot tell whether or not the feeling is there.

My fingers do get somewhat numb sometimes when I type. I think this may be due to me drinking perhaps less because I eat and drink at different. By drinking I mean drinking water, rice milk or fruit juice. I don't drink coffee, tea, or alcohol. I used to drink pop sometimes when eating in restaurants, I have discontinued that because some pops contain caffeine, and the caffeine could interfere with my adaptation period. I even stopped drinking pops that don't contain caffeine because pops are arguably not very healthy drinks. Also I don't drink any sort of energy drinks. Anyways it is hard for me to determine if I am drinking more or less than before, but if in fact I do drink less than my blood may be thicker, and I think that this could lead to numb fingers. Anyways it started bugging me yesterday because I was using emacs a lot to type xml code, and it looked like this could degenerate into the emacs pinky. The emacs pinky is the name of an overuse injury of the little finger that occurs for some emacs users. Hopefully I will be fine today.

Some people report feeling "zombie" during the adaptation period. In my case I can do productive work most of the day. I may be a bit less efficient than normal, but even this I am not sure. Definitely in the night/morning between 00:00 and 08:00 I feel very tired, it is very hard to stay awake. Even if it is very hard to stay I have not slept between my naps (except perhaps a few seconds here and there), so I did not oversleep. It seems that there is basically to types of mood; either I am sort of normal or I am very sleepy, but I would not label either of these two moods as "zombie". I would label my mood as "zombie" if I was not really sleepy, and at the same time unable to do non-trivial mental process like reading, writing, coding, or solving mathematical problems. When I am not extremely sleepy I can do these four things, so perhaps I am adapting differently, or maybe I am just too early in the adaptation period to feel "zombie". Maybe my definition of "zombie" is wrong. Maybe "zombie" should be the label for my mood between 00:00 and 08:00.

Day 3 nap 2

2008-12-26 8:56

I was still feeling quite sleepy when I got up from this nap. But now I do feel better.

E&A: 7-10

I am going to try to do some productive work (i.e. learn to use docbook to make software documentation).

Day 3 nap 1

2008-12-26 08:40

After nap 1 on day 3 (i.e. after 2008-12-26 04:00) I was feeling really sleepy. So I decided to go take a walk outside. I ended up taking a one hour long walk outside, after about 10 minutes of walking I did not feel asleep anymore. But within about 5 minutes of getting back to my apartment I started to feel asleep again. So to stay awake until the next nap I watched standup comedy on youtube. It kept me awake, but it was not productive.

Day 2 nap 6

2008-12-26 00:37

I did this nap on time and at home. I currently find it very hard to stay awake. But I guess this is just because of the time of the day. I find that in general it is much harder to stay awake from about 00:00 to 00:60.

E&A: 4-7

Day 2 nap 3, 4, and 5

For nap 3, 4, and 5, I was at my sister's place. I took both nap 3 and nap 4 on time. I took nap 5about 50 minutes too late because I did not realize that it was necessary to do nap 5 until about 50 minutes later than the "official" start time of  nap 5.

I felt like it was harder to start sleeping when I did my naps at my sister's place. Nonetheless I did sleep at each of those naps. I do not remember clearly whether or not I dreamed in this naps, but I think I did dream.

I felt normal during the time I was at my sister's place

PCAE&A for nap 3: 9-11

PCAE&A for nap 4: 9-11

PCAE&A for nap 5: 9-11

When I came back home, I took the subway system and I found it very hard to keep my eyes open for the last few subway stations before I reached my exit subway station.

Overall I think that taking naps away from home was a success.

Day 2 nap 2

2008-12-25 8:12

I think I dreamed. I feel much less sleepy than in the previous cycle.

PCAE&A:4-6

E&A:8-9

I still have the feeling that my leg and arms are sort of shaking, but it is just a feeling because  I cannot see my arms vibrating or shaking.

Day 2 nap 1

2008-12-25 5:23

I woke up slightly before my timer rang. I was quite sleepy when I got up, but now it is not too bad.

PCAE&A: 7-8

E&A: 7-9

Day 1 nap 6

I came back home from my sister's place about 40 minutes later than the scheduled time for my nap. So I took the nap about 40 minutes later than scheduled. Hopefully this will not adversely affect the experiment. Anyways I will take the next nap at the normally scheduled time.

I felt quite tired when I got up from the nap.

E&A: 2-3 when I got up.

E&A: 6-8 now (it has been about 20-30 minutes since I am awake)

Here is my schedule:

03:30 nap 1

04:00 awake

07:30 nap 2

08:00 awake

11:30 nap 3

12:00 awake

15:30 nap 4

16:00 awake

19:30 nap 5

20:00 awake

23:30 nap 6

00:00 awake

I think that I have a pretty effective way to avoid going back to sleep when even when I feel very sleepy like when I got up after the previous nap. First my timer is on a table far from my bed so I have to get up and walk to turn the alarm off. This in itself is not sufficient to prevent me from going back to sleep because I still feel very sleepy when the timer is off. And since I don't think as clearly when I am sleepy I may decide to go back to sleep. Two weeks ago after such a nap I convinced myself that it was better to go back to sleep, so I reset the timer for another 30 minutes and made a second nap. I was pretty upset afterward when I realized what had happened. So now what I do is this. Prior to starting the nap I set three alarms on my cell phone that will ring 10, 20, and 30 minutes after my nap is over. And since these alarms are sort of complicated to turn off, it is very unlikely that I will turn them off before going back to sleep. So if I do go back to sleep I will not sleep for longer than 10 minutes which should not completely upset my schedule.

There is also the likelihood that I may not wake up when my timer will ring because the volume is not so high, and if I am really sleep deprived I may not notice the timer's beeping. So to increase the likelihood of waking up I set my alarm clock to ring 5 minutes later than the timer (i.e. after 35 minutes). The difference with the alarm is that I set it to the radio and I put the volume at the maximum. My alarm is a small one speaker alarm so it is not extremely loud, but I think it is almost impossible that I would not wake up to the alarm. Also since the alarm is set at a radio station I cannot possibly get used to the noise of the alarm because the voice/music changes constantly. Thus far I have always woke up with my timer, but two weeks ago I had the chance to try the effect of the radio alarm. What happened is that I had forgotten to turn it off after getting up. I was looking for a piece of paper in my apartment when the alarm started. I have not been that surprised/afraid very often in my life. It felt like there was an explosion in my apartment (this is a little exaggeration, but just a little exaggeration) . So I know that my alarm would be effective if I would not wake up with the timer.

Day 1 nap 5

I went to my sister's place because it is was Christmas eve, so I made a nap there. The nap lasted 30 minutes but I don't think that I was asleep for more than 15 minutes if that. I made that nap right on time. For all the time I was at my sister's place I did not feel tired.

Day 1 nap 4

2008-12-24 16:15

This nap was different because I woke up about 5 minutes before the end of the nap. I stayed in bed anyways for the last 5 minutes. It is very hard to tell if I went back to sleep within the last 5 minutes. I do not remember having dreamed.

PCAE&A: 7-9

E&A: 6-8

Day 1 nap 3

2008-12-24 12:07

The sensation of shaking is still there.

I cannot remember whether or not I have dreamed. This is very similar to when my attempt of two weeks ago. There was a couple of days that I seemed to stop dreaming. The dreaming came back after a few  days. We will see how long it will take before I restart dreaming this time.

PCAE&A: 8-9

E&A: 7-9

Day 1 Nap 2

2008-12-24 08:06

I was not sure if I had started my timer so I turned on the lights and I saw that there was only 25 minutes left. I turned the lights off and continued the nap. So for this nap I certainly slept less than 25 minutes. I am unable to remember if I dreamed during the nap.

For the previous cycle my average E&A was PCAE&A: 7-10. PCAE&A stands for Previous Cycle Energy and Awarness. The previous cycle refers to the three and half hour preceding the last nap. Now I feel like E&A: 8-10.

When we are sleep deprived we seem to be more sensitive to cold. The temperature in my apartment is 75 F and I feel just right. Normally I feel just right when the temperature is about 72 F.

The shaking sensation is still there. It does not really bother me, but I feel it.

Day 1 nap 1

2008-12-24 04:11

At some point I think I woke up and I "heard" my dad talking to me, but this is impossible because my dad lives in a different city. It is possible that I did not in fact wake up and that this was just a dream, the other option would be that this was a hallucination. In any case I do not remember what my dad was telling me. This was sort of a weird experience. Whether or not I actually woke up, I felt that I went back to sleep. I definitely dreamed in the later part of my sleep.

Somehow it feels as though I appreciate my sleep more than when I sleep monophasically. Anyways I feel pretty alert now, so I will attempt to get some useful work done.

For the purpose of this blog I will introduce an energy and awareness scale (E&A). 0 on this scale means unable to stay awake and 10 means normal on a monophasic sleep schedule. Right now I would say I feel between 9 and 11. E&A: 9-11. 11 on this scale means I feel better than average. This scale is very subjective, and this is why I put a range. The range indicates the approximate degree of uncertainty. 

Another thing that I noticed is that it feels like my arms and legs are shaking/vibrating. But if I put my arms stretched out in front of me, I can see that neither my hands nor my arms are shaking. So if there is any shaking it occurs inside my arms, and legs. It may also be that this is just a sensation and that there is nothing actually shaking. Maybe that this is similar to shivering, but it is definitely not shivering because shivering is visible, and this is not visible.

Day 0 Nap 2

2008-12-24 00:22

I did sleep and I did dream. My naps are 30 minutes long. In fact I set a timer for 30 min, I start it, I put it on my table about 5 feet from my bed, and then I close the light and go to bed. So by the time I am lying on my back in my bed a few seconds have elapsed, and generally it takes a few minutes before I start sleeping. So even though my naps are 30 minutes long, I sleep less than 30 minutes.

Putting the timer on a table far away from my bed really helps, because I have to get up and walk to turn it off. So by the time I turn it off I am awake enough to stay up.

Right now I feel quite tired but this is the part of the day that is the harder to get through. I tried the Uberman sleep schedule two weeks ago, and I found out that I am generally more tired between about midnight and 6 am.

Day 0 Nap 1

2008-12-23 20:07

I was sort of dreaming when my my timer woke me up, so I was sort of sleeping. The change from awake to asleep was gradual, and it maybe that I was not fully asleep when the timer started to beep. I feel reasonably awake.

Safety and Disclaimer

I write this blog to increase the amount of data available about polyphasic sleep. Hopefully I will adapt to the Uberman sleep schedule and this blog will provide some useful information about what one may feel during the adaptation period. Possibly some people will find this blog useful while they experiment with polyphasic sleep. I would not do this experiment if I had reasons to believes that it will cause serious harmful long term problems to my health. But I am not aware of any evidence that polyphasic sleep is safe when done over many years, and I do not know how safe polyphasic sleep is even for shorter periods of time like one or a few months. Although I have not read about any serious health problems for those who adapt to the Uberman sleep schedule, maybe that there are serious health consequences that will show up only much later after the polyphasers have discontinued their experiment, or perhaps the few people that did not seem to get health problem are exceptions, or maybe I am an exception, and maybe I will get serious health problems as a result of this experiment.

Among polyphasers it seems to be well acknowledged that we do not know whether or not there are serious health problems associated polyphasic sleep. But I am unaware of any such serious health problems, so like other polyphasers I do try this experiment. I do so at my own risk, and I know that there is a risk. I have enough confidence in polyphasic sleep to try it, but I don't have enough confidence in polyphasic sleep to advise anyone else to do it.

One of the reasons why I try the Uberman sleep schedule is because I believe that my body will adapt and that there will be positive changes to my health and well being. So I do not deny that there will be changes to my health. Some of which may be permanent. Hopefully this experiment will not cause serious permanent problems to my health.

DISCLAIMER: If you are considering polyphasic sleep, or if you are already doing polyphasic sleep you may find this blog useful. However what I describe in this blog may not be safe to do, and even if it looks safe it may not apply to your situation. If you use this blog as a source of information for a sleeping experiment do so at your on risk.

Introduction

2008-12-23 20:16

I decided to try the Uberman sleep schedule. This is going to be my second attempt. I tried it for a week from december 7 2008 to december 14 2008, but I stopped because I had a university exam on december 18 and I was not sure that I would adapt quick enough to be able to study efficiently before the exam. I had been studying for the previous week, but it was not very productive because I felt sleep deprived.

My main reason to try the Uberman sleep schedule is to gain more awake time. With the Uberman sleep schedule I will sleep no more than 30 minutes every 4 hours, so it should require no more than 3 hours of sleep per day, and since I normally sleep 8 hours per day, I would gain about 5 hours per day.