Sleep Experiment - Day 3

June 23, 2011 – Day 3

Today was difficult. There have been many times during my three years at university that I was forced to make it through one day having had only four hours of sleep the night before. Never have I had to do this two days in a row.

I woke up at 6am once again and went for a walk. This seems to be a necessity during the adaptation period to keep me from falling back asleep. The walk woke me up but didn’t make me feel any more alert.

The ‘fuzzy’ feeling I reported yesterday was back although far more pronounced. This prevented me from accomplishing anything today. I couldn’t sit and read, sit and program, or sit and watch TV for fear of falling asleep. Hopefully I will find it a little easier to concentrate tomorrow as I have actual things to do.

A breakdown of my sleep is as follows:

6am – wake up. Again, I had no trouble waking up after my core sleep. Unlike yesterday, I did not feel able to perform any significant tasks for the first five hours of my day.

11am – First nap. This was a welcome release for me. I managed to fall asleep at some point during the twenty minutes and recall having a dream (an indication of REM sleep). However, this dream was not entirely vivid as is often reported by other polyphasic sleepers and so I am hesitant to say that I have indeed tricked my body into going immediately into REM sleep.

11:20am – wake up. No issues waking up from this nap. I did not feel refreshed and this did not make the next five hours easier.

4:20pm – Second nap. I slept. Basically as soon as my head hit the pillow I passed out.

5:20pm – wake up. I overslept for the first time on this schedule. I have no recollection of stumbling across the bedroom to my alarm, but somehow I managed to turn it off and find my way back to bed. I am slightly optimistic that the short duration of this nap (I woke up on my own) indicates that my body is adjusting to less sleep and short naps. It should be noted that I felt like crap upon waking up from this nap. It felt like I had subtracted sleep from my two day total (i.e., more tired then when I started). This feeling abated after about 40 minutes and after that I felt incredibly refreshed and rejuvenated. Thinking about this makes me rescind my optimistic comment. The fact that I didn’t feel refreshed immediately seems to indicate that my body was interrupted during a long sleep cycle and breaking from this cycle caused my 40-minute hell.

9:40pm – Third nap. I couldn’t sleep

10pm – wake up. No issue waking up (I wasn’t asleep). I felt a little better having my eyes closed but I think any good feelings were still remnants from the hour-long slip up earlier in the day.

On the data front:

I haven’t looked at my reaction times but I felt that I performed equally, if not better, as compared to yesterday. However, my self-reported level of fatigue was greatly increased. It will be interesting to see what the data actually shows.

One thing I learned today was that I need to set multiple alarms. As the sleep pressure increases I foresee that it will be harder and harder to get up with my alarm. Hopefully I will be able to take necessary precautions with my wake up procedures so as to avoid oversleeping like I did today.

Looking into the future, I hope tomorrow is better than today. I know that adjusting takes a while but I want to see some sort of positive result. It’s hard to see how I will eventually recover all of this missed sleep. I guess I just have to keep going forward with the experiment and hope for the best.

P.S. There are a lot of insightful things I want to write about, including For the Love of Ray J, but I don’t have the brain power to make the words all smart and stuff. I really enjoy setting aside this time (about 12:30am to 1:30am) to write this journal and hope that in the future it can be less about the sleeping and more about the altered perspective I’m gaining by being awake and functional when most people are asleep.