Last night, I tried shifting my nighttime naps to be more frequent. I took a nap every 3 hours, which resulted in an extra nap by sleeping at 12:30, 3:30, 6:30 and then my regular 8:30. That seemed to work pretty well. This time around I’m going to depart from a strict uberman schedule and do more of a nap-when-tired approach. Sleep requirements seem to vary greatly from person to person, so I’m going to consider my own body’s signals to tell me when to nap.
This night has been really difficult. I’ve slipped up so many times lately that I’ve conditioned myself to take bad naps and sleep at night. Breaking that habit while sleep deprived is no easy task. After my 12:30 nap, I felt groggy and awful for about 40 minutes. I was struggling to fight off sleep when quite suddenly, the fog cleared and I felt fine. I was still tired but as functional as I’ve been during the day. Literally within the span of 1 second, my mind woke up. I’ve been F-ing with my sleep for several weeks now, and I’m still discovering new strange phenomena almost daily… More research needs to be done on polyphasic sleep. It’s fascinating.
A factor in the sudden recovery may have been my decision to take a 5 minute nap. I think that when I’m really tired, I click into the nap so fast that after 25 minutes I’m already past REM and into the sleep that makes you feel like crap when you interrupt it. I already tried shortening my nighttime naps to 22 minutes, but that didn’t seem to work. My theory is that by taking a 5 minute nap, I pop in and out of REM, resetting my brain into a more manageable state. Indeed, during the 5 minute nap, I had a dream and woke up relatively easily.
During my violin lesson today, my teacher said that I looked and sounded like I was getting good sleep compared to last quarter… I assured her that that was not the case. :)
Tonight and tomorrow night should be the worst parts of the adaptation, but I should be up to the challenge.