Day 7 - Hypothesis

I know there was a study done somewhat recently that said we have a "sleep bank" of sorts. I'm too lazy to dig up a link :-) Anyway, the basic idea is that if you sleep more you can stay awake longer. If you sleep less you have to pay back the bank for that lost sleep eventually.

Hypothesis: Assuming the sleep bank idea is true, if I'm about 5 years in the hole as far as sleep debt goes. (I actually don't know how long I've had sleep apnea for, it could be more, it could be less). This is the reason why I "crash" once per day from 5am to 9am. If I "pay back" some of the debt I won't crash as hard for as long (if at all).

Assuming my hypothesis is true, the more good quality REM sleep I get, the longer I'll be productive each day (not to mention each waking period improving in quality). Since starting this new schedule it FEELS like this has been the case. I don't have proof though since I haven't kept detailed logs of each nap and how I felt during each waking period. I've been doing my tests at fairly random intervals each day to get a sense of how I'm doing at different times of the day rather than track every waking period.

Here's my idea to test my hypothesis: Take 5 extra naps per day at 10:30pm, 2:30am, 5:30am, 6:30am, 7:30am. If I keep this up for long enough I'll pay back the bank and feel that much better. At that point I can cut it back to 6-7 naps per day again with no ill effects.

I haven't decided to do this for sure, I need to confer with my wife first, but I'm thinking about it.

Of course I'm going to keep up with the exercise and diet changes as well since only good can come of those as well :-)

Day 7 - Another over-sleep

Somehow I managed to go back to bed for a "nap" between 5am and 6am and wound up not setting the alarm. My wife woke me at 6:45. It's all very fuzzy, but that's what I can piece together from the evidence. I'm going to assume the worst and say I slept for 2 whole hours.

Fortunately, I don't really feel much different from this time of day previously in the week. Maybe a tad bit more awake for 8:30 is all.

I'm going to count this as a learning experience ("always set an alarm") and move forward.

Day 6 - Daily wrap-up

Today was definitely the best since I started the transition. I've felt pretty decent all day long. I did end up taking 2 naps at 12:30 and 4:30 instead of one though. The second 12:30 nap was because I tried sleeping on the couch with the kids up and that just wasn't a great idea :-)

I'm not entirely sure what happened at 4:30. I just didn't feel well after my first nap so I rationalized that a second nap was necessary... After the second nap I was quite groggy for about 20 minutes but then I felt awesome.

So, except for my Achilles heel (5am to 9:30am) I'm in good shape at the moment. Since it started out as 3:30 to 9:30 it's getting shorter as time goes on.

Day 6 - Now this just isn't fair

Alright, so as I've mentioned before, I'm a basket case between 5am and 8:30am. Actually it really lasts until 9:30am. So, in the MIDDLE of a waking period I go from feeling useless, falling asleep at the keyboard, etc, to feeling fine.

Maybe this has less to do with hexaphasic sleep and more to do with my body's natural rhythm? I find the thought encouraging long-term. Mainly because it means I might be doing everything right and this is just a physiological hurdle I need to overcome. It does make sense given my historical sleep patterns and productive times.

On the other hand it does throw a bit of a wrench into my short-term plans of starting work at 5am. I guess it's too early to tell whether this will still be an issue by Monday, but if it is I'll have to do a bit of juggling.

Day 6 - Betrayed by produce

I think it's obvious. The vegetables are plotting against me, trying to get me to fail. I can't be sure exactly what their motivation is, but it's well documented that they're not trustworthy. I mean how can you trust something that "eats" sunlight?

So, once again, the 4:30 to 8:30 window has proved to be my undoing. I think I did a little better to start with (I took extra naps at 6am and 7am) but I was essentially useless the entire time. Exercising helped keep me awake from 5 to 6, but nothing I tried (games, reading, listening to music, I even tried watching a little TV) really grabbed my attention and kept me up.

I'm honestly not sure if these extra naps are helping my transition or hurting it. At the time they sure seem like a good idea though :-) They also have the nice side-effect of chewing up 20-30 minutes of the clock at a difficult time of the day.

The bright side is that I seem to have conquered my over-sleeping problem. My adaptation of Placebo's MP3 is proving quite effective at motivating me to get out of bed to shut off the infernal racket. I've learned a few tricks to adjusting the "alarm" part just enough that I don't get used to it either. All in all I'd say I'm probably a good 70-80% of the way along the path to polyphasic sleeping.

Day 6 - Did I say 20 minutes of cardio? I meant 2 minutes...

Holy smokes am I out of shape! Yikes! 2 minutes in to my cardio I felt like I was gonna die. I pushed through to 4 minutes but I think that's it for me tonight. Sheesh, what a whimp!

The good news is the cardio did wake me up like I planned. The bad news is I still feel like I should go down for another nap before 8:30, and 8:30 is still 3 hours away.

I'm gonna fight it as long as I can. Time for some video games :-)

Day 6 - Woke up on time (yay)

I woke up on time and without incident for my 4:30am nap, which is cool. I'm still more tired now than during my other waking periods though. I haven't exercised yet, so hopefully that will help.

Day 6 - Feeling a bit sleepy

I'm feeling a bit sleepy at this point. I could just be paying the price for my under-10-minute-nap earlier though. I feel like I've been awake too long working on a project.

My 4:30am nap is coming up in about an hour and a half and I'm a bit nervous. Of all my naps this has been the hardest to do correctly, probably because when I was a monophasic sleeper this was the only time of the night I was almost certain to be asleep. Most days I didn't get up until after 7am.

The 4:30am nap also has the distinction of being one of the most important post-adaptation naps, since I plan to start work at 5am. This will allow me to get home in time to give my wife a break in the afternoon and also allow her to do stuff without the kids.

Maybe I've built up too much around this one nap in my head, but I'm determined to conquer it tonight. I've even modified Placebo's excellent MP3 to add a very Very VERY obnoxious alarm about 1 minute after the gentle rooster crow. It's something I don't think anyone is capable of sleeping through (though I've managed to sleep through quite a bit in the past).

Immediately after I wake up I'll be hopping on the elliptical machine (now conveniently located right next to the bed) for 20 minutes to get the blood pumping. Finally, I plan to go for a walk if needed to get me through to the 8:30 nap.

Of course it'd be great if I wake up before the alarm and don't need to do any of this... Oops, now I'm dreaming while I'm awake again :-)

Interesting change

My 3 year-old (the one who has been sickest this week) seems to have adapted to my polyphasic schedule the fastest. I was once the heaviest sleeper in the house, now I'm the first person he calls out for in the middle of the night. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing yet, but it's definitely different :-)

Day 5 - Shorter than 20 minute naps?

I think my 8:30 nap this evening was the first sub-20 minute nap I've had since I started the adaptation period and I feel great. The entire day I was fairly foggy but most of that fog seems to be gone now, and my test scores are up. On the other hand, I don't feel as good in other ways (I'm yawning periodically, and really looking forward to my next nap).

Of course this was a bit of an extreme. I think I was asleep for at most 7 minutes. But it still has me wondering if I shouldn't set the alarm back a few minutes to 18, or maybe even 17 minutes. I'm not going to tempt fate this evening, but I'll experiment with it a bit tomorrow and see what happens.

I didn't follow my night plan last yesterday because my first waking period was so good and my second was so bad. Tonight I'm determined to follow through. I have a 40 minute walk planned between 1am and 4am, and I'm going to do some cardio on our elliptical machine at 5am.

I've also decided to stop trying to be ultra-productive while I'm completing the transition. When I'm done with the transition period I'll have plenty of time to be productive. Until then my focus needs to be sticking to the schedule and doing things that keep my mind/body entertained.

Last post of day 5. I'm hoping day 6 will be the start of a more even feeling throughout the entire day.

Day 5 - So much for feeling great...

My 4:30 and 8:30 naps haven't been as restful as I'd hoped, so I'm dragging a bit. It feels kinda like I haven't slept all night. I think the problem both times may have been sleeping a bit too long. 20 minutes seems like an ideal amount of time, 30 minutes not so much...

Back to the drawing board with the alarms I guess.

Day 5 - The crash

Well, as I said, the night wasn't over. I was feeling great going into my 4:30am nap but I woke up unable to think clearly. I waited about 15 minutes and decided to take a second nap in the hopes that I would shake the grogginess. I woke from the second nap in worse shape than the first. Sigh.

The 3rd nap was almost instinct. I don't remember even trying to fight it.

About the only real good news about that block of naps was I set my new MP3 alarm and a backup alarm before each nap so I didn't over-sleep. It does seem like things are getting better each day now, so I'm rather hopeful about tonight. It was definitely cool having 5 hours of extra productivity yesterday :-)

Day 5 - 4am and still going strong

It's an amazing feeling given the last 2 days, but I'm actually still awake and alert. I had a brief period of tiredness about 30 minutes ago (near the time I've been forced to take an extra nap the last few days) but I simply got up and walked around, grabbed a healthy snack of some veggies and I'm wide awake again.

Incidentally, to ward off any future over-sleeps I've created a playlist that starts with one of Placebo's MP3s and ends with about an hour of loud rock music. Since creating the playlist I haven't even slept through the end of Placebo's MP3, but it's a little relieving to know that it's there just in case.

The night is far from over, but right now it feels like I'm past the hump. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high though.

Oh, one last thought before my 4:30 nap. Vitamins are good. I take 2 or 3 different vitamins per day and I had been taking them all at once like I used to on monophasic sleep. Today is the first day I realized that splitting them up into multiple doses makes more sense since I'm awake all night. I don't know how much of an impact this had on how I'm feeling tonight, but it definitely seems like a good idea...

Day 5 - Doing oddly well

I've been feeling pretty darn good for the past 14 hours or so. In fact it's kind of eerie how good I feel after feeling so terrible just before. I expected to feel better very slowly and adapt gradually. I made a ton of preparations for tonight so I wouldn't get bored and fall asleep.

Quite the opposite seems to have happened though. I felt better near noon on day 4, as before, but then I just kept feeling good. I didn't crash right before nap time, I even extended one waking period by 35 minutes with no ill effects. It's just odd.

I guess I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop here. This can't be it can it? The night is still early so things might still get harder, if so I'll be sure to mention it. Until then, I'm just going to enjoy feeling as awake as I did at noon :-)

The BEST Wife EVER!

So, I'm sure people wonder what it's like to be married to someone crazy enough to attempt something like this. If so, head on over to my wife's blog.

For those of you in a serious relationship, there's basically little chance of success with something like this unless you have a supportive partner. My wife has been tremendously supportive of me since the very beginning. She has put up with my ranting about plans, obsessing over strategies, and the significant interruption this has all been to her daily routine.

Throughout all of this, her only request has been that if I'm going to do this, I have to commit whole-heartedly to succeeding. She even took the whole "I want to do this as a vegetarian" thing in stride :-)

Not wanting to let her down has kept me on track during some of the harder points.

I'd also like to take this time to point out that while most people would have said "ok fine, eat what you want but you're on your own" my wife decided to start cooking a vegetarian dish for me at dinner every day. Did I mention she's a fabulous cook? What more can I guy ask for?

Love you hon, I couldn't do this without you! Thanks!

Day 4 - Mid-day still feels like the best

I'm mostly awake again. I can at least concentrate on the same thing for more than 30 seconds, and I can type a bit :-)

Back when I started this thing I decided that I was going to take a page from Steve Pavlina's book and take extra 20 minute naps as needed throughout the day if necessary. The past 3 days I think I've taken 2 or 3 extra naps per day. Today I've already taken 3 extra naps, and that doesn't count when I fell asleep sitting up (for how long I don't know).

Except for the one time I know that I fell asleep sitting up, I think I've stuck to 20 minute naps all day so far, which is good. I've felt like hell most of the day though.

I'm still not remembering any dreams when I wake up, and since I started using the MP3 to fall asleep I haven't noticed any incidents of dreaming while being awake. I just hope I'm getting SOME REM sleep in there somewhere.

If the transition plays out like other people have blogged, today and tomorrow should be the hardest days and in 2 or 3 more days I should feel at least 80% most of the day. In another week I should be at 100% most of the day. I sure hope that's the case because honestly, when it gets bad, it's getting harder and harder to see the "benefit" of this plan. I'm afraid that in my exhaustion I'll decide to throw away all the work so far and just sleep. That would suck. Kinda :-)

Tonight I'm going to do 3 new things to try to get through:

1. I'm going to exercise (yeah, I know, I should have started with this, but due to having company I didn't have access to the exercise equipment for the first 3 nights)
2. NO TELEVISION AT ALL! I resolved to do this last night, but when my son started throwing up again, I thought "well, there's not much else I can do with a sick kid on my lap". I'm more and more convinced that TV is sucking all the energy out of me at night though. If I get the urge to do something mindless I'm going to play some video games. Which reminds me, I need to make sure I have some games ready to play in case of emergencies :-)
3. I'm going to go outside for at least 20 minutes per waking period. I've been avoiding the outside like the plague at night, mostly because I'm so cold during the adaptation period. I think I need to force myself to go outside and take a walk though just so I don't fall into the trap of sitting down and talking myself into watching TV.

Okay, I've got to figure out how to take my 12:30 nap now (the wife isn't back and I have the kids, hopefully she'll show in the next 15 minutes).

Day 4 - And the hell begins

After my blog entry from last night, things just got progressively worse and worse. Today even my daytime naps haven't been terribly refressing. I'm actually falling asleep at the keyboard here as I type (boy does that make it hard to compose a sentence).

From looking around, right around now I SHOULD be hitting rock bottom. I sure hope so since this is pretty annoying.

Okay, can't focus. If I can more later I'll post again.

Day 4 - Feeling pretty good

I just woke from my 12:30 nap a little while ago and I'm feeling quite good. The MP3 plan is working very well. I find myself going to sleep faster to the static, and waking up in a pretty good mood. Thanks Placebo!

Okay, I wrote the above about 60 minutes ago and about 10 minutes later I had started to fade already. Still an improvement over previous days, but I'm not staying awake easily at night yet. At this point I'm planning to go back for a second nap at 2:30 so that I can hopefully avoid another over-sleep.

One of the interesting things about this schedule is how quickly you can get overwhelmed by tiredness. People have described it as "hitting a wall" and it's a very good analogy... You can be going along nicely and then all the sudden you just cease to function properly. I can tell that I'll have to be very careful when I start driving again to avoid the 30 minutes before a nap whenever possible.

Day 3 - Day time is getting easier

I've found the naps during the day to be very refreshing, much more so than during the night. Last night I actually over-slept for 3 naps. One was 50 minutes instead of 20, one was 90 minutes and the last was 60 minutes.

Of course it was a very rough night. Our son got sick something like 7 times over the course of the night. Good thing I was already planning to stay up, because I wouldn't have gotten any monophasic sleep anyway :-)

To remedy the over-sleep problems, I've decided to start using the MP3 nap files created by Placebo. These have a nice white noise for X number of minutes follwed by various sounds to help wake you up (rooster, cow bells, etc). As a backup I'll be setting my alarm. At night I might add an additional alarm to ward off the inevitable "5 more minutes couldn't hurt" feeling :)

Day 3 - Night time is hard (again)

Tonight is going far better than last night, but this is still by far the hardest part of the day. Of course it doesn't help that my middle child threw up 30 minutes before my 12:30 nap. I got him cleaned up, back in bed, and had started my nap just in time for him to throw up again. I lost count at 5 times, but he's still throwing up. Poor little guy.

I didn't exactly miss my 12:30 nap, it was just cut about 10 minutes short. I did manage to get in a longer nap at 1:30 but I've been dragging since then.

Ah well, I knew what I was signing up for when I started this. I had hoped that 20 minute naps would be short enough that I wouldn't have to worry about conflicting with things like late night kid problems. I guess I just didn't get lucky on that front.

On the bright side, only an hour before my next nap. I'm really looking forward to that one, assuming I can get the kid down and solve the throw up problem before then... Fingers crossed.

Day 2 - Recovered and doing okay

Busy day so I haven't posted, but I did manage to recover from my night time oversleep fairly well. A combination of the extra 2 naps plus some activity to get the blood pumping (dancing to music for example) got me back on track.

I did have a minor oversleep of about 15 minutes at noon, but it didn't seem to be long enough to affect me negatively.

One interesting thing I've noticed today: I'm starting to "dream" before I actually fall asleep. I don't know how else to describe it. I'm aware of my surroundings still (kids crying, people talking) and yet I'm visualizing strange things (like in a dream) at the same time. Maybe this happens to other people but I've never experienced anything like it. It was pretty disturbing the first time, but now I've started to realize it's a cue that I'm almost asleep.

Unfortunately I'm not remembering any dreams when I wake up yet. That does seem to be an indication that your body has started to adapt. Of course I can't say that I remember dreams very often anyway so I'm kinda curious what that will be like :-)

Day 2 - More recovery

I wound up taking naps at 3:30, 4:30 and 5:30 to recover from my oversleep incident. I feel somewat normal again. I only hope it lasts until my next regularly scheduled nap. After the success late yesterday I'm even more determined to se this through to the end.

Day 2 - Recovering from the oversleep

So basically instead of sleeping for 20 minutes at 11:30 I wound up sleeping for about 2 hours and 20 minutes. I'm not entirely sure why I woke up since I had long ago turned off the alarms, but I'm grateful that I didn't sleep longer.

Recovery from the oversleep is still ongoing, and it's been really really hard. So far I had to take another extra nap at 3:30 and I'm about to do my 4:30 nap. I'm starting to feel like I can at least form a coherent sentence again. Of course I might be imagining that...

On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the most alert, I think I was somewhere around a 2 after the oversleep. With one nap since then under my belt I think i'm at a 4 now and climbing. With luck the next nap will restore some semblance of balance.

Fingers crossed.

Day 2 - Oversleep

Argh. Exactly what I feared. I tried taking an extra nap at 11 PM and woke up at 2 AM. And if that weren't bad enough, I feel worse now than I did before I slept.

Ah well, moving on. Next nap is at 4:30, I'm going to do something active between now and then to make sure I stay awake.

Day 1 - Reflection

It has definitely been an up and down day. I started off feeling great, but long about 10 AM I crashed. I barely felt able to carry on a conversation. Then I had two really difficult naps at 12:30 and 4:30. At about 6 PM something interesting happened: I started feeling better.

My 8:30 nap went great, and I've been feeling very good again up until about 15 minutes ago when I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion again. With every passing minute I feel like I'm losing the ability to communicate.

Part of me is tempted to take an extra nap right now, and the other part is telling me to wait until 12:30. I'm not sure which way I'll go just yet.

Oh, and the best news today was that when I started feeling better, it really showed up in my test scores. I had my best results on almost every test since I started logging the results earlier in the week. This gives me hope that in the end, if I stick this out, the rewards will be well worth it.

Day 1

So the first thing I've discovered is my discipline is still pretty weak. I've already started sleeping through the alarm chirp. Twice already I've actually taken the time, in my groggy semi-conscious state, to reset the alarm and fall back asleep. Fortunately I wound up getting up before it fully counted down the second time, but this is only day one so I'm a bit concerned.

I'm going to double my resolve for the next 24 hours and resist any urge to reset the alarm. Easier said than done though.

The good news is that when I'm awake I'm fairly functional. Just a general feeling that I've been awake a bit too long. I'm going to go back and read these posts after this is over and see if I'm still making sense :-)

Interestingly, my test scores continue to be about the same. Even when I FEEL like I'm a complete zombie I'm still scoring about the same. I'm not sure what to make of that yet.

Day 0 Nap 4

These next two naps are the first real test since they're during the time I slept monophasically. I'm starting to feel the normal "tired before bed" feeling, so I'm curious to see if the naps help with that. I don't expect much though because this is still the first day.

I have a few physical activities planned during the night, so I don't think staying awake will be a problem.

Day 0 Nap 1

Very odd nap. It felt like I was half awake and half asleep. I must have fallen asleep at some point because I woke up to the alarm. I feel fine though, no real change from normal. Not that I expected anything. Tomorrow is when things should get more interesting.

Nearly Forgot: Diet Changes

Another popular idea at the moment is that vegans might have an easier time adapting to this schedule. Since I'm weak I don't think I can manage a vegan diet but I've cut out pretty much all meat except fish (occasionally). I'm still eating dairy as well (mainly in the form of cheese. I love cheese).

In addition to a mostly vegetarian diet, I'm also trying to drink more water. Keeping well hydrated is always a good idea and since I'm going to be awake more hours of the day it's even more important.

I haven't completely decided yet, but for the first day or two I think I'm going to try eating most of my meals shortly before each nap. This is for two reasons:

1. I get sleepy after eating (even on this more vegetarian diet, though not quite as badly as I used to)
2. Although you're not supposed to eat before a long sleep I figure 20 minute naps won't hurt

Lastly I'm going to try eating something during each of my 4 hour waking blocks (in other words, eating shortly before each nap). This should spread out my energy throughout the day. Plus eating smaller meals more frequently is supposedly healthier anyway. This seems like a good balance.

But as with everything... We'll see.

Day 0

The big day is here. I've been "test napping" for about a week now and the last few days I've tried to take as many naps at my scheduled times as possible to get my body on schedule. I already feel tired at the appropriate times now, so tonight will be my first night of just naps.

My times are as follows:
12:30 am/pm
4:30 am/pm
8:30 am/pm

I'm napping for 21 minutes, with a backup alarm at 26 minutes. I found a nice kitchen timer that has a warning chirp 5 minutes before the timer runs out, and a continuous beep when time runs out (plus it starts counting up at that point). I've conditioned myself to get up after the chirp but it's nice to have a backup alarm just in case. Using the count-up function I'll be able to track any oversleeps.

Speaking of conditioning. I've always had a problem with alarm clocks. I hate them. But after reading Steve Pavlina's polyphasic blog entries (and the two about how to become an early riser) I decided it was time to work on my discipline muscle :-) After about 2 weeks of practice I now wake up (even after a full night sleep) to the single chirp of the kitchen timer. Quite amazing really.

Why 21 minutes? Most of the records I've found of people who have started this crazy schedule have started with 30 minutes (some even longer) and end up going shorter and shorter. I figure why not just start out at 21 minutes, which seems to be a pretty common end point for those who are successful at the adaptation. Heck, it might actually make the transition EASIER since I won't be slipping past REM sleep into something deeper.

Unfortunately, the last 2 naps I've tried to take have not gone terribly well. I can usually fall asleep in a matter of minutes. For the last 2 naps, I ended up getting up after 10-15 minutes when I couldn't fall asleep. I'm guessing it's the excitement about switching to the schedule today. Kind of ironic actually :-)

Anyway, my next nap is 12:30 so we'll see how that one goes. I typically get quite tired at this time of day anyway so hopefully I'll slip right into the schedule without incident. Even if I don't fall asleep I'm not going to get up early.

That's about it for now. I'm planning to log something here each day at least, if not more often. We have company this weekend though so I might end up writing mostly at night after everyone is asleep.

Transition date moved up to Friday

I've decided to start the adaptation period on Friday instead of Sunday. There are a few reasons, but one of them is I'm impatient.

I'm continuing my baseline testing and I still don't have a database ready yet. I'm definitely slow and inaccurate. I wonder how much that will change on the new sleep schedule? Should be interesting at least.

Now that was a little rude...

Oops, I forgot to mention where I found the links to the tests I'm planning to use. I found 3 of them on polyphasicsleeping.com in one of the blog posts there about testing. The other two (Simon and the sheep test) I found through google.

I've just done my first round of tests and man am I a mess. Not very accurate nor fast. As soon as I get my database up and running I'll link to the test results (I'm hoping to get it all set before I start the transition. If not, I should have lots of time afterwards to do it... Heh). On the plus side, I don't really have anywhere to go but up from these numbers :-)

I've found quite a few new useful polyphasic sleep sites. One points out that what I'm attempting is actually hexaphasic sleep (6 sleep periods per day). Hopefully I'll get around to adding some links on the site to all the more useful places I've found.

7 days till I start the transition! Should be interesting :-)

Polyphasic Sleep Schedule

It's been travelling around the internet for years, so here are the obligatory links to the first places I heard about it nearly 5 years ago:

Everything2
Kuro5hin

Polyphasic sleep simply means sleeping more than once per day. There are many variations but the one most often cited is the "Uberman" sleep schedule. This is one of the most hard-core versions available, resulting in a mere 2-3 hours of sleep per day. So naturally that's what I'm going to attempt.

The current Wikipedia page on polyphasic sleeping is pretty decent as far as history goes. There are also some links to success/failure stories as well as proponents and detractors.

Just a warning... This is not to be undertaken lightly. While little formal research has been done, there is lots of anecdotal evidence that very few people can manage this schedule successfully. Even less is known about the long-term effects.

That having been said, there is a growing fan base for the idea. I suspect the idea will gain momentum for a while and eventually fade away again. Kinda like the low-carb diet (yeah, I did that one too).

So, here's my plan:

On Sunday March 26th I'm going to be giving up my normal nightly sleep and switching to 20 minute naps every 4 hours. My times are currently 12:30, 4:30, and 8:30 (interestingly, the times are the same whether in the morning or night).

Between now and then I plan to run through several tests/games to get a baseline of my reaction times and such on a monophasic schedule (so I'll have something more objective to compare to after the adaptation period).

Why am I doing it? Darn good question. My main motivation is a potential solve for my obstructive sleep apnea. Basically when I fall into a deep sleep, the muscles in my throat relax and I stop breathing. So then I wake up enough to start breathing again and the cycle repeats. This makes it very difficult to get enough quality REM sleep each night. So I started thinking to myself "what if on this schedule I didn't fall into such a deep sleep, since these are only naps, and I could enter REM sleep immediately?" Well, it sounded plausible in my sleep deprived mind anyway ;-)

So, whether it's completely logical or not, I've decided to take the plunge and try this out.

The games/tests I've decided to use are as follows:

1. Typing Test (3 minute)
2. Physical Reaction Time Test from either here or here
   
3. The "Simon" Game (still looking for where to do this from, might just find a copy and host it myself)
4. Visual Threshhold Acuity

If all goes well I'll get all the data into a database so I can do some analysis (plus I'm just plain lazy so the easier it is to track, the more likely it is I'll log/blog it).