Days 15 to 20
Crazy week. The daily details are foggy at this point so I'm just going to go over the highlights.
NOTE: In case it hasn't been obvious, I define each new day as starting at midnight, so Friday was day 0 and 12:00am on Saturday was day 1.
On my polyphasic days I've continued a 1.5 - 3 hour over-sleep per day. I haven't set a core sleep time yet, mainly because of everything else going on.
Day 18 (Tue) I semi-accidentally got 6.5 hours of sleep. My wife was in the hospital on Monday until Tuesday morning (she's recovering nicely, thanks for asking) . I had been debating whether I should just do a monophasic night to get through the inevitably hectic day on Tuesday, so I guess my subconscious decided for me. The cool thing is I got the entire thing on tape, which is a treasure trove of useful info about my sleep cycles and habits.
Day 20 (Thu, today) I did another monophasic night. This time it was entirely intentional, since I'm sick. Here's an interesting tidbit: Since I started this schedule every member of the family, all 3 kids and my wife, have been sick repeatedly. At least one kid has thrown up each day of the last 3 weeks with few exceptions. Often all 3 of them repeatedly. Not fun, but that's not the interesting part. While I've occasionally felt a twinge of being sick it never lasted more than a few hours. That is until I had that monophasic night on Tuesday. THEN I got sick.
Once I actually got sick the polyphasic schedule didn't seem very good when trying to get BETTER. I managed to make it through yesterday, but by the end of the day I just felt too ill to continue. So today I slept from 1:30am to 7am, and I took a 2 hour nap as well.
As far as sickness goes I feel better. I don't know if I'll be able to jump back to polyphasic tonight yet though. I'm tempted to do one more monophasic night just to get this out of my system entirely. As for my mental state I'm fuzzy and slow. Polyphasic sleeping has had such a profound impact on my mental state that I can't even imagine going back to monophasic long-term.
That brings me to my fun project of the last week. I noticed from all the video footage that my REM cycle seems to last something between 10 and 18 minutes. It's been hard to tell any closer what the ideal length might be since it takes me between 2 and 11 minutes to fall asleep each nap. At first I thought I'd simply increase my nap time to 30 minutes to provide enough time for 11 minutes to fall asleep and 18 minutes of REM. That didn't work very well since if it took me 2 minutes to fall asleep I would wake up after REM was over and feel like crap.
The second idea was to do ultra-short naps of under 20 minutes. I felt amazingly good with 2 to 10 minutes of REM but at the end of each wake period I was a wreck, and after a few in a row I felt a bit manic.
That led me to my current toy. I wrote a little program to wake me up after I've been asleep for X minutes. I've experimented with X between 15 and 18 so far, with 17 seeming like a decent compromise. The cool thing is this is based on how long I've been ASLEEP, not how long I've been laying down.
The program uses a deadman switch to determine when I fall asleep. I use a mouse button, which I press and hold when I lay down. At the point that I let go of the switch the timer starts counting down for the designated number of minutes. There are also a few safeguards built-in:
Anyway, it's still highly experimental, but it's working pretty well so far. When I've polished it a bit I'll post the source (it's just a short Perl-Tk script so very very easy to modify). Maybe I should start a sourceforge project for it? :-)
Anyway, that's it for now. As things get back to some semblance of "normal" over the next few days I plan to increase the frequency of my posts again (and re-start my tests, and post my test data, and.... Wow I have a lot of plans... Heh). Oh, and if I do fall off the face of the planet I promise to post the source for my little script before I do (hate it when people talk about something like that and then disappear!)
NOTE: In case it hasn't been obvious, I define each new day as starting at midnight, so Friday was day 0 and 12:00am on Saturday was day 1.
On my polyphasic days I've continued a 1.5 - 3 hour over-sleep per day. I haven't set a core sleep time yet, mainly because of everything else going on.
Day 18 (Tue) I semi-accidentally got 6.5 hours of sleep. My wife was in the hospital on Monday until Tuesday morning (she's recovering nicely, thanks for asking) . I had been debating whether I should just do a monophasic night to get through the inevitably hectic day on Tuesday, so I guess my subconscious decided for me. The cool thing is I got the entire thing on tape, which is a treasure trove of useful info about my sleep cycles and habits.
Day 20 (Thu, today) I did another monophasic night. This time it was entirely intentional, since I'm sick. Here's an interesting tidbit: Since I started this schedule every member of the family, all 3 kids and my wife, have been sick repeatedly. At least one kid has thrown up each day of the last 3 weeks with few exceptions. Often all 3 of them repeatedly. Not fun, but that's not the interesting part. While I've occasionally felt a twinge of being sick it never lasted more than a few hours. That is until I had that monophasic night on Tuesday. THEN I got sick.
Once I actually got sick the polyphasic schedule didn't seem very good when trying to get BETTER. I managed to make it through yesterday, but by the end of the day I just felt too ill to continue. So today I slept from 1:30am to 7am, and I took a 2 hour nap as well.
As far as sickness goes I feel better. I don't know if I'll be able to jump back to polyphasic tonight yet though. I'm tempted to do one more monophasic night just to get this out of my system entirely. As for my mental state I'm fuzzy and slow. Polyphasic sleeping has had such a profound impact on my mental state that I can't even imagine going back to monophasic long-term.
That brings me to my fun project of the last week. I noticed from all the video footage that my REM cycle seems to last something between 10 and 18 minutes. It's been hard to tell any closer what the ideal length might be since it takes me between 2 and 11 minutes to fall asleep each nap. At first I thought I'd simply increase my nap time to 30 minutes to provide enough time for 11 minutes to fall asleep and 18 minutes of REM. That didn't work very well since if it took me 2 minutes to fall asleep I would wake up after REM was over and feel like crap.
The second idea was to do ultra-short naps of under 20 minutes. I felt amazingly good with 2 to 10 minutes of REM but at the end of each wake period I was a wreck, and after a few in a row I felt a bit manic.
That led me to my current toy. I wrote a little program to wake me up after I've been asleep for X minutes. I've experimented with X between 15 and 18 so far, with 17 seeming like a decent compromise. The cool thing is this is based on how long I've been ASLEEP, not how long I've been laying down.
The program uses a deadman switch to determine when I fall asleep. I use a mouse button, which I press and hold when I lay down. At the point that I let go of the switch the timer starts counting down for the designated number of minutes. There are also a few safeguards built-in:
- A max timer in case you don't let go of the button for whatever reason (roll on top of it, etc)
- The timer resets when you re-press the button in case you accidentally let go when getting comfortable
- It also DOESN'T reset if you let go for more than a few seconds (in case you actually fell asleep but didn't realize it)
Anyway, it's still highly experimental, but it's working pretty well so far. When I've polished it a bit I'll post the source (it's just a short Perl-Tk script so very very easy to modify). Maybe I should start a sourceforge project for it? :-)
Anyway, that's it for now. As things get back to some semblance of "normal" over the next few days I plan to increase the frequency of my posts again (and re-start my tests, and post my test data, and.... Wow I have a lot of plans... Heh). Oh, and if I do fall off the face of the planet I promise to post the source for my little script before I do (hate it when people talk about something like that and then disappear!)
posted by Jeremy | 12:48:00 PM
4 Comments:
didn't know about this, i'll bookmark you.
with sympathy, M
"Scientists who experiment on themselves always come to a bad end."
--- ME
I can come up with any number of movies to back up my point.
LOL. Now that's a great saying!
My next experiment is with teleportation and a common household pest. I'm debating between an ant and a fly. Seems like a fly has been done before though....
5 days since last post???
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