The Science of Sleeps

Ever since Mr. Bonus Charles Buchta arrived our sleeping schedules have been obliterated. Not that we were Mr. & Mrs. Early to Bed, Early to Rise before but now we're at the mercy of a tiny infant stomach and lungs who let us sleep when they damn well feel like it.

For Kasey this isn't so bad as she's still on maternity leave and can sleep when Jonas does and make up the time. But for this humble workin' man it's a wee bit worse. I have a little wiggle room in the form of sympathy from my newly-dad-ed boss, but I'm not pushing that envelope (especially in these hard times) and thirty minutes here or there is nowhere near enough to help me out. Most nights I get close to four hours of sleep max. You know shiz is bad when you wake up after five hours and go, "Wow, that felt like a lot of sleep."

Weekday mornings find me getting up late, throwing on clothes I preemptively left out for myself the night before (as not to waste time looking for them in the morning) and driving into work with busted face, bleary eyes, and sometimes slight hallucinations. Totally safe, I know. One Saturday I stood up out of bed, almost fell over, and noticed my eyes weren't working in conjunction. I called up work and croaked, "I'm going to be two hours late." and went back to bed. The first couple hours of work aren't any picnic either. Where once caffeine was my friend, she is now more like an ER nurse. Something has to change.

In comes polyphasic sleep, which I discovered by putting "alternate sleep schedules" into Wikipedia and Google, my homeboys. Polyphasic sleep is sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period instead of all at once like most folks do. The majority of the animal kingdom (including babies) sleep this way, and early humans probably did too. This is how your pets sleep. This is how I want to sleep. I'm not going to get eight hours of sleep a night for a looong time but I don't want to become one of them grumpy parent-zombies looking unhealthy and aged past my actual years. Plus I have no time or energy for bike riding or really anything else and a polyphasic sleep schedule actually gives you more awake hours in a day than a regular sleep pattern does.

Here's a basic rundown of how I understand it to work: When we sleep for eight or nine hours the really good stuff that energizes us and makes us feel rested is REM sleep. But REM sleep is only a small part of that chunk of time, with other stuff around it going on in cycles. Getting oneself on a polyphasic sleep schedule trains the brain/body to go directly into REM sleep when conking out, so one gets more sleep in less time. Here's some nifty diagrams that show what I mean, as well as the different polyphasic schedules:



Two days of research later and I'm all set to get on a proven polyphasic sleep schedule, the Three-hour Everyman. This means I have a "core nap" of three hours and then three twenty-minute naps spaced evenly for a total of four hours of sleep per twenty-four. Which is basically what I'm doing now but without the naps and the awesome added benefit of going straight into REM sleep three or more times a day. Multiple people have lived on this (and the more extreme Uberman schedule -only two hours of sleep a day in six naps- which is super tempting to try but too rigid for my lifestyle) for long periods of time healthily and report that they feel more refreshed and awake than they did sleeping all at once.

I'm excited! I love self-experiments like these; the last big one I did was years back when I fasted for ten days. At the beginning it seems impossible, and even more so as you get two, three, and four days into it. Then you find out how adaptable and magic the body and mind are when they not only rise to meet the challenges of change, but begin to thrive. And "beating" your body through willpower is an amazing feeling. By day five of the fast I never wanted to eat again! The thought of having four more hours a day to do crap in is awesome too. I've always been a night person but love the sunlight and social interaction that comes with day time, so this seems perfectly suited for me.

Downsides include a rough couple of days/weeks for the adaptation period as your brain goes, "Sleep damn you, sleep!" and you go, "Noooo, have to wait..." or "Twenty minutes is all we get right now! So shush!" and being looked at like a weirdo. If you don't stick to a schedule during the adaptation phase your brain won't learn to do the Instant REM thing and you'll be tired forever. After about a month you can play around with when you sleep and for how long (buffers are determined by the schedule you are on, the 3-Hour Everyman gives me an hour each way to play with) without any adverse affects. Here's the schedule I have planned out for myself:

Core Nap:
2:00am to 5:00am

1st Nap:
10:00am to 10:20am

2nd Nap:
4:00pm to 4:20pm (hurr)

3rd Nap:

10:00pm to 10:20pm

Back to Core Nap at 2:00am

I've "officially" started today, which just means I took a twenty minute nap at 10:00. Jonas has me going to bed around 2:00am anyway and only recently have I started to do a big nap after I get home from work, but it hasn't lasted me long enough. So I'm hoping that technically I've already been going through the worst of the adaptation phase and just have to work to keep to a schedule, which is kind of tough for me.

So that's where you guys, my Internet buddies and cell phone pals, come in. I'm gonna need help getting up and staying up (hurr, again) and human interaction is the best way to do this. Up at 1:00am Eastern time? Text me, see if I'm on IM, make sure I'm still awake. Go to bed earlier than that? No problem, there are big chunks between 4:00pm and 2:00am where I need to be up and active. Drop me a line! See if I'm sleep deprived enough to be doing weird things. We can play online games together or something (NOTE: I have no cool consoles, it'd all have to be on the compooter). Help me stay on track. Give me stuff to do.

I'll be keeping a journal of the experience and all the things I'm going to do to try and stay awake as well, and I'll put those up weekly I think.

Have a safe and happy 4th of July! Don't lose an eye or any virginities that don't need losin'.

- David

Kudos to DustinCurtis.com for the cool graphics and PureDoxyk for not only "inventing" these schedules but having a crap-ton of information about polyphasic sleep and her first-hand experience with it all over the Internet.