Sleep Experiment - Day 6

June 26, 2011 – Day 6

Today felt like a set back. The groggy feeling upon waking up from my three-hour sleep persisted throughout the day and no amount of successful napping could alleviate the feeling. Correspondingly, the lack of sleep and perception of a set back put me in a foul mood. This sleep project soon became demonized, stupid and pointless, whereas yesterday it was pretty great and I never wanted it to end.

The most interesting thing about my exhaustion today is that nothing seemed to have sparked it. I couldn’t think of a single mistake in my routine yesterday that could have caused me to feel so gross today. I can only hypothesize that my sleep debt (the physiological desire to sleep) built up to such a point that the amount of sleep I received did not fully eradicate it. Therefore, I felt tired as none of my naps provided adequate time and intensity of sleep to balance my sleep debt.

This notion of unbalanced sleep debt leads the body to compensate by adapting and increasing the intensity of the sleep. Do you think it is these small incremental adjustments (after the initial adjustment to 4 hours) that continually improve the quality of polyphasic sleep?

The sleep pattern I followed today is broken down as follows:

6am – wake up. I found it quite easy to get out of bed this morning. However, I did not feel very rested. I proceeded to go for a walk and eat breakfast, a previously sure-fire way to clear up any lingering grogginess. However, no amount of walking or eating or any busy work could shake the groggy feeling.

11am – 1^st nap. I quickly fell asleep and woke up with my alarm.

11:20am – wake up. I did not feel refreshed or alert. I wanted to keep sleeping until the groggy feeling went away.

4:20pm – 2^nd nap. I fell asleep fairly quickly. This nap was basically identical to my first nap of the day.

4:40pm – wake up. I felt much the same as after my first nap. The only positive is that I did not feel any worse than I did after nap 1.

9:40pm – 3^rd nap. I happened to be out at a friend’s house during the time of my third nap. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow their bed to get my nap. I managed to get a few minutes of sleep and having my eyes closed refreshed me a little.

10:00pm – wake up. I still felt groggy but managed to make it through the rest of the night without too many problems.

Data:

Because of my active social life I didn’t manage to complete the 3-back test like I was supposed to. I don’t think that my working memory data is going to amount to anything.

That’s all for today. Like I’ve noted throughout this post, I am really tired and have felt groggy all day. Hopefully this will pass tomorrow and I’ll be back to a polyphasic normal.