In this technological and fast-paced world, it seems as if I can never do all that I want to do – there simply isn’t the time. Since early high-school (around the time I stopped playing videogames after I recognized how many hours I had spent on them and what I could do if I used those hours for progress with something else) I have been looking for ways to be more efficient. One of the easiest changes I found, had to do with medication. I had been taking an allergy medication that tended to make me drowsy, causing me to sleep an hour more every night and still feel sleepy during the day. Over the course of about 3 years taking this medicine, I calculated that I had wasted over 1000 hours because of it. This is a lot of time…imagine where you would be now after spending 1000 hours on any one thing? 1000 more hours for practicing piano? This would mean quite a lot. 1 or 2 hours a day turns out to add up really fast!
So, ever since then I have been looking for ways to save time and energy, and to be more efficient. I’ll post later on a conflict of interests, or a paradox, that arose from my search to be more efficient. Although I had heard previously from a friend about a method of sleeping that Leonardo da Vinci used to be uber-productive, it wasn’t until this past December that I came across reading material on this special method called Polyphasic sleeping.
I came across a wonderful description and a daily log of the experience of adapting to a polyphasic schedule through the most popular blogger on the subject, Steve Pavlina. He recorded his experiences day-by-day, and to date is one of the most successful polyphasic sleepers whose results can be found online. I have similarly recorded my own day-by-day experiences and have posted them on this site. I have found that my experience has been different from many other bloggers in that I have not had a terribly difficult or tiring adjustment phase and I have not been very strict in my scheduling of naps. According to most bloggers’ information, the way I have gone about trying polyphasic sleeping should be quite unsuccessful. However, quite to the contrary, I have had the ability to be productive every day that I have been on the schedule. However, also in contrast, my approach has been closer to the everyman than the uberman, because I tend to oversleep about one nap a day, generally by just an extra hour. Also, I have tended to miss a nap pretty often due to other demands on my time during the day or from a lack of tiredness. Two things that are commonly stressed when bloggers describe the adaptation of the uberman schedule are; the need for rigidity and the fear of oversleeping. In my experience, rigidity is useful, but not the most important and when I oversleep, I have not learned to fear it but simply to understand it. I have been told the adjustment phase is terrible, and that you feel like a zombie for days. Yet this feeling has only occurred for me in the middle of the night, in the first few days of my adaptation, when my body was very used to falling immediately back to sleep if I woke up. Also, this feeling like a zombie has never been bad, it is best described simply as a feeling of nothing. On the early morning of my second day taking naps throughout the day, I quite enjoyed my first time feeling zombie-like as I ate breakfast and watched the snow falling outside through a window. Sure, I wasn’t thinking very much but I certainly did not feel sick or unhealthy. To be fair, it is possible that by keeping to a schedule closer to the Everyman than the Uberman I have allowed myself to get at least some full cycles and avoid any serious sleep deprivation.
So, anyway, the topic of sleep has always interested me and the way we sleep has never felt completely right to me. After reading about polyphasic sleeping, I found that a lot of it made sense to me and that almost all the main characteristics of a polyphasic sleeper match with my personality and style of life. For anyone that may be interested, I believe it is important to weigh how much these points fit you. Here is a site that lists 10 reasons NOT to be a polyphasic sleeper. If I come across one of the lists with characteristics of polyphasic sleepers I’ll post it later.
Filed under: Polyphasic Sleeping
