ONE WEEK SUMMARY

ONE WEEK SUMMARY

Well it’s been about a week since I started trying this sleep schedule. I think it can best be described thus far as bumpy. I’ve certainly messed up a few times by oversleeping sometimes by choice, other times simply because I didn’t wake up to my alarm. There was, however, a couple of days when it felt like things were starting to work. I think day four and five felt really good. I was able to fall asleep almost immediately and would even wake up just before my alarm would go off. It felt like my body was trained and knew what to do.

The thing that has interfered the most with my napping is obligations I hold in life right now, such as finding an apartment or being at home with my family. You wouldn’t think it would be hard to snag 20 minutes of privacy here and there, but as it turns out, needed a very specific 20 minutes is apparently asking for too much. My sleeping pattern got pretty thrown off the day I went home.

 

AWARENESS AND FUNCTIONALITY

For the most part, I feel fairly present and aware when I’m awake. Every now and again though, something will happen that makes me think maybe I’m not as awake and aware as I think I am. For instance, I went running around 1 am just yesterday, and I was about halfway through my run when I noticed that there was only one song left on my playlist. I figured I’d wait until I ran out of songs before picking something new. About 25 minutes later when I finished my run, I realized that I never picked and new music. I hadn’t been listening to anything for the last 20 minutes or so. That’s really unusual for me because I usually get bored without something to listen to, and the fact that I didn’t even notice didn’t sit well. I’d spent the last part of the run listening to my thoughts and milling things over in my mind. It was sort of like I was dreaming, I could barely feel that I was running at all. I think on the whole, I’ve been much more in my head since starting polyphasic sleeping. What I mean by that is that I’m much more aware of what’s going on in my head that usual, and as a result, less aware of what’s going on around me. My body is happy to stay in whatever state it’s in. If I’m sitting, it’s happy to stay sitting. If I’m running, it’s happy to keep running. I probably could have run twice as far as I did completely on auto-pilot and not noticed the difference, all the while with my brain just buzzing along in the background in a sort of dream-like consciousness.

 

MENTAL CAPACITY AND MOTIVATION

I can definitely tell that I’m functioning at a much lower mental capacity that normal. My brain is slower and less interested in figuring out complicated things. It’s felt like my head is being held in a vice for the past few days. It’s not painful, but I can feel pressure just behind my temples, and when I’m especially tired, the pressure increases. It clouds my thinking sometimes. I’m also pretty sure that my short-term memory is not functioning as well as normal either. I’ll think of something I want to look up online, and then go do simple task, like going to the bathroom or getting a drink, and when I return, I can’t remember what it was I wanted to look up, only that there was something. I tend to remember in about 10 minutes after I’ve stopped thinking about it, but I can’t seem to access things in my short-term memory as easily as normal.

My motivation is taking a serious hit too. Every time I wake up, I just want to lie back down and sleep. I try not to think about how hard the next few days are going to be because when I do, I just want to give up. A friend of mine who has successfully sustained polyphasic sleeping for an extended time tells me that I’m about to hit “the wall” where things start getting really hard. He said things started feeling good for him around day 14 or 16, so I’m going to try to stick it out for at least that long.

 

BLACKOUTS

The scariest thing that’s happened so far was blacking out. I’ve never blacked out before but I’ve heard stories from friends who have gotten far too drunk. I woke up at about 5 pm and couldn’t remember when I had fallen asleep… or how I’d gotten into my bed since I remembered curling up for the 7:30 am nap on the floor. Shortly thereafter, I remembered my friend had called me at about 9 am, but I still couldn’t remember when I went back to sleep. My tired mind soon forgot about the discontinuity and it wasn’t until nearly 9 pm when I found a post-it note with some phone numbers on it. Seeing the post it made me remember calling someone about an apartment somewhere and I remember that the person I spoke to gave me another number to call. That’s all I remember. However, in the call logs on my phone, it’s recorded that I had a four minutes conversation with this first person, a two and a half minute call with the second number that was given to me, and a three minute call with a friend. I have absolutely no recollection of making these last two calls… They were made around 10:50 in the morning, and I have absolutely no idea what I was doing between 9 am and then. I didn’t leave my room or anything, but that’s a large chunk of time to be missing… This whole blackout thing may be due to the fact that a couple of my naps got messed up the day before.