Heidiphasic Sleep: Six Months Later

It has now been about six months after I started my heidiphasic sleep schedule, and I am in the process of getting back on to a monophasic schedule once again.

Obviously, as I have been sleeping heidiphasically for six months, the schedule worked for me. I was able to operate normally on an average of six hours of sleep a day. The primary reason I switched to heidiphasic sleep was because of school. I don't like to go to bed early, and getting up at 6 wasn't conducive to staying up late. Enter, heidiphasic sleep. The schedule allowed me to stay up until 1 every day and still operate as I normally would. Albeit with two naps in the middle of the day.

I am getting back to a monophasic schedule now because school is over. I don't need to wake up at 6 in the morning anymore, and so don't need to be on a different sleep schedule. I can just go to bed late and get up late, as my body actually likes to do. Now, after six months of the schedule, I am tired of it. I hate feeling tired when I get up all the time. The feeling goes away after a few minutes, but it's still very hard to actually get up in the morning. Also, the 4 o'clock nap has more than once gotten in the way of things that need to be done, which resulted in the nap being skipped, or the jobs getting put off.

As has been said before in articles about non-monophasic sleep schedules, polyphasic sleep schedules have a very hard time meshing with normal society. We are a monophasic society. Everyone goes to bed at night and gets up in the morning. If you don't then you're either weird, or have a sleep disorder. I do think that humans would get a lot more done if we were polyphasic, but a culture-wide change like that will never happen, so it's a moot point.

Concluding, heidiphasic sleep is quite possible for humans to do--some people argue on the possibility of polyphasic sleep working for people--it increases free time, and allows a person to sleep less in a day and still operate at full power. It also can be hard to fit into your schedule, it is easy to miss naps and feel very tired and be hard to be around, and the human body isn't designed to have that little sleep, so waking up is always a chore. If the pros outweigh the cons for you, then I would indeed recommend heidiphaic sleep to anyone.

With that, I conclude my longest and most successful sleep experiment.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Wrapping Up

It has been a month since Molly and I started with heidiphasic sleep, and thankfully I can finally label it a success. Not that because I mostly stuck with it for a month means that it's a success, but that I feel that a month was long enough to give the sleep schedule a good test run, and I can say that it works for me. My criteria at the start of the experiment was to be able to maintain the same level of work and operation during the day as with a monophasic sleep schedule, and--with a few exceptions--this has been the case recently. The exceptions being when I messed up the schedule and overslept or wasn't able to take the naps or suchlike. Other than that most of the week has gone fairly according to schedule, although I do believe that I slept through my nap at 10 once.

I've learned a lot about myself and how I sleep with this experiment. Namely that when taking a nap, it helps a lot to leave lights on at night, because for me, when I wake up and my room is dark it makes me want to go back to sleep. Having lights on makes it that much easier to get myself out of bed.

Now, I've decided to continue with the schedule until I can't any more for whatever reason that comes up. I like having the extra hours in the day to program, or do homework or what have you without distractions. I won't be posting about it on here anymore, but if anyone wants to know how I'm doing whenever, feel free to post a comment or send me a message and I'll let you know.

Here is my ending schedule:
4PM-4:20PM Nap
10PM-10:20PM Nap
1AM-6AM - Core Sleep

Not much different from the starting schedule with the exception of getting up at 6 instead of 5:30.

I'm going to post the links to my posts after the break, as an easy reference.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Week 3 Overview

The biggest development in the past week was my deciding to change my wakeup time from 5:30 AM to 6 AM. My reasoning behind this was that for like three days at the beginning of this week, I would have the hardest time waking up. I would get out of bed, but sit at my computer and pretty much fall asleep in my chair. So I'd get back in bed and sleep for an hour and get up at 6:30 or 7. It didn't make me late to school but it was a lot longer than I meant to sleep. After this happened for a few days I decided to give myself a bit more sleep, hence the 6 AM.

Other than that, since this week's schedule has been crazy (Thanksgiving break on Thursday and Friday, etc) I actually skipped both of my naps on Thanksgiving, but it turned out okay because I had a Monster, so that's something. Then today (Saturday) I forgot to take my 4PM nap because I think I was helping dad hang Christmas lights at the time. Took my 10PM one though, and that was fine.
I'm working on getting back into the schedule correctly, but sometimes real life doesn't allow it. Fortunately the schedule seems to be flexible and forgiving enough to allow for missed naps and oversleeping in the mornings and all sorts of nonsense.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Week 2 Overview

I decided not to post every day since not much has happened this last week, and that makes for quite boring reading. Instead, if the weeks go as planned I'll just be posting a overview at the end of the week detailing what happened, which should be just as fine I hope.

The majority of the week has gone pretty well, since in the mornings I have had to wake up early for school, oversleeping wasn't really an issue. Although I was having the problem where I would get up at 5:30 but be so tired I couldn't even keep my eyes open, so I'd go back to bed for 10 minutes, which turned into 30 minutes, and then I'd be fine.

Here's a picture of a dog riding a bike to keep you entertained.

To fix this I set the alarm on my phone (I use two alarms, one of my phone next to me and one across the room.) to 10 minutes earlier, so 5:20. Not to get me out of bed, but to wake me up so I'm sleeping less deeply when my alarm at 5:30 rings. It also gives the feeling of being able to get back in bed which for some reason feels really good.

As for oversleeping, I don't believe I've overslept more than once or twice this week, although I can't remember exactly. The longest time I've overslept was this morning, went to bed at 10:30 for the nap then and woke up at 7. Don't even remember turning off my alarm, so whoops.

I know that most people need something to do later at night to keep them awake, and I'm no different. I usually play video games, mainly League of Legends with my friends, to keep me awake. It's not a game where you can just turn off your brain, so it's perfect for keeping someone awake. Of course you don't play as well when you're tired, but that's inevitable. But staying awake after my 10PM nap hasn't been that much of a problem lately, to be honest. I know one time I had to go to bed at 12:40 because my eyes were about to close on me no matter where I was, so I got a little bit more sleep that day, but not enough to matter, I believe.

Overall, the second week has gone better than the first week. I only overslept once or twice as opposed to last week's quite a few times, and hopefully next week will go even better.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 11: Whoops

I slept in today like I said I would, till 8. I have a feeling that sleeping in that much isn't actually helpful, but harmful to the schedule. I'll probably try and get up at 7 next weekend, but for the rest of the week it's back to the normal schedule.

Well then. I don't think sleeping in was such a good idea. It just kinda sorta completely messed up my schedule. I went to bed at 10 for my nap and woke up at 5:30..That's not cool. So, obviously that much sleeping in completely threw my body off. Sigh.
Now we have the week, so let's try and get back on the schedule correctly.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 10: Oversleeping and a Schedule Change

I overslept this morning, kind of on purpose. I got up successfully at 5:30, but I was so dead tired I legitimately couldn't keep my eyes open in my chair, much less actually do anything. So I went back to bed for a 30 minute nap, which I think ended up being more like an hour and a half nap, but whatever. This lead me to think about being able to sleep in on the weekends if I can. It would make sense, since normal people don't get up at early times unless they have to, and my wakeup time on weekdays is only a half hour before I would get up for school anyway. So I believe I will try sleeping in on the weekends, but still taking my naps in the afternoon as normal.

Hopefully it'll work fine. If not, I'll change back.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 9

Oddly, failure is easy to define but success isn't. Let me explain. In order to fail, I have to repeatedly oversleep and be tired most of the time. That's a pretty definite goal, but success in this endeavor is simply the absence of failure, which isn't as simple as you'd think, given that you can simply invert the failure constraints.
I suppose success would be simply not failing for a fairly long period of time.

Speaking of time, given everything that I've read, I think it takes about two weeks to change your sleeping habits/Circadian Rhythm. So I would guess that if I continue to do well for another week or so, I'll be mostly adjusted to the schedule. This is simply postulation, of course.

I've been very tired most of today, spent most of the day being lethargic and feeling bad. After my 4 nap I felt a lot better.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 7-8

Waking up this morning was annoyingly hard, but I buckled down and got up. Molly was having more problems, though. I texted her when I got up to see if she was up. She didn't respond. So I texted her again, still no response. It was about 5:40 by this time, so I called her. Turns out she was about to hit the snooze button for the second time. Accountability is good, and it's easier to do things in pairs!

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I woke up this morning and my eyes were very bloodshot which was really random. Mom gave me some of the eye drops stoners use to get rid of their red eyes and I was fine. Was just quite annoying. (No, my mom isn't a stoner.)

I've also noticed that, unlike the polyphasic schedules, I am retaining my sense of time. I don't forget what day it is all the time, and I presume this is because I do in fact sleep through the night in a larger chunk, which is what makes this schedule so much easier than polyphasic.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 6: One Point to Heidiphasic Sleep

Today wasn't all the eventful until the evening. Had school as usual in the morning, but then I had to take the bus home, which put me home at around 4, so I took my nap after getting settled and woke up at around 4:50 (which was on time.) Then I had to go outside quickly and clean because it gets dark really quickly now. After that I had to come in and eat dinner. Of course, following that dad and I went to a men's group at church which was from 8:15 to 9:30. We left the house around 7:45 or so. We got back from church at close to 10, so it was then time to take another nap. Now, I had homework for pre-calc I needed to do, and I don't prefer to do homework after my 10PM nap, as I'm still not used to the schedule and I'm more tired then than I am during the afternoon/evening, but today I didn't have much of a choice. I did my homework and played games.
In conclusion, without the new sleep schedule I probably would have gotten to be around 11 or 11:30, which would have decreased my performance tomorrow. One point to heidiphasic sleep.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 4-5

Today was Monday, the first day of school on the schedule. Everything went fine. I was tired for the latter part of school, but I blame that on it being a Monday, which always suck.

My 10PM nap went fine, I fell asleep for the latter portion of it. I hate the bad taste in my mouth I get when I wake up, though. Very annoying.

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Tuesday morning. Waking up this morning wasn't hard, but I am quite tired. Now the real work begins with school and all.
School wasn't that bad today, had plenty of energy to focus enough, so that's a success.

No oversleeping yet. I'm glad of that, obviously this schedule is wayy easier to adapt to than a polyphasic one. For whatever reason I haven't been actually going to sleep at 1, it's been later, and I need to work on that because I need all the sleep I can get.

Moar Kerbal Space Program (KSP). And it is awesome, still. I finally landed on the second moon of Kerbin, which was kinda challenging, as it has next to no gravity.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 2-3

So we had a large Halloween party all of yesterday and I wasn't able to take my 10PM nap, so dad recommended that I just sleep in and continue tomorrow. I was really tired, 'cause being at parties makes me tired, being and introvert and all. So that is what I did. Slept in till..I think it was 8, given that DST was today I'm not entirely sure.

From this point on I'm going to try and keep to the schedule closer, this weekend was crazy.

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So not that much has happened. I've been getting up on time and stuff. I've been playing a lot of the Kerbal Space Program, and it is amazingly fun. Soo yeah. You can blame that for me not posting enough.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Day 1

Well, I'm off to such an excellent start. I took my 10 o'clock nap at 11, and then I overslept a little bit. Slept through two alarms, and dad woke me up.. But I'm awake now and stuff.

I was playing Terraria for a while, and I've almost gotten the set of Adamantite armor, then there's Hallowed armor and stuff, which is a huge jump.

I hate this part, your body really wants sleep, and you haven't started getting used to the schedule yet, so I'm just damn tired. Must push through all the tiredness!

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Just got up from my core sleep. Didn't oversleep at all, which is good. I feel quite rested, which is way more than I got with the polyphasic sleep at any point in the whole thing. I imagine that I'm going to be tired later in the day, but we shall see.

Today is my sister's Halloween party, and I'm probably going to miss the 4 o'clock nap, so I might take one earlier but I don't know how that will work.

I'm ending Day 1 at Saturday morning, although it technically probably doesn't end 'till the 10PM nap of today.

Heidiphasic Sleep - Intro

Here I thought I wasn't going to try a crazy sleep schedule again any time soon. It has been almost a year since I tried last time, and I'm back to try and not fail at getting no sleep once again! Except there are some large differences from last time.

Firstly, my girlfriend Molly is going to be trying it with me!
Secondly, we're trying a different schedule than what I've done before. It's called a heidiphasic schedule. The schedule is as follows:

1-5:30AM Sleep
4-4:20PM Nap
10-10:30PM Nap

Obviously there's a large difference between this and standard polyphasic sleep. It actually has a lot more in common with the Everyman schedule than anything else. It has the core block of sleep during the night, although it is shorter than most people would be comfortable with. I would imagine that you could also shorten it and perhaps add a nap sometime at night, but that's something to think about if it actually works and I can't achieve my normal performance or greater. Otherwise it's useless.

I'm actually starting tonight, I'll take the 10 nap and get into the schedule.

We shall see how it goes.

Polyphasic Sleep Take II - Wrapping Up

Well, I believe it's time to turn the page on polyphasic sleeping for me. It is a really cool concept and it's awesome to have more hours in the day to do stuff with, but my biggest problem is that the rest of the world is monophasic, and I have to make a lot of exceptions to be polyphasic. I do wish that I could sleep polyphasically, that would be awesome and I wouldn't feel like I was wasting the night, but the sacrifices I have to make for it aren't worth it for me.

I have learned a lot about myself and sleeping through this process (both this time and last time.) For example, I do believe that if I ever need to stay up all night for more than one night, I could slip into a more polyphasic sleeping schedule for how ever long I needed to do that. Having options and variability is an awesome thing.

I've had fun with this, I hope it was entertaining or at least informative reading, thanks for sticking with me.

Polyphasic Sleep Take II - Day 5 - 6

Not much has happened today, I haven't had any screwups or much of anything. I played Skyrim most of last night, did some chores and stuff too.
I think I'm going to start keeping track of when I take each of my naps, I have a feeling it'll tell me some interesting stuff.

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I think this is day 6, although I'm not 100% sure.
I finally started working out again. I'm doing P90X and I was on the 'break' week last week, so this week it's getting back into the muscle and cardio training. Hopefully I'll be able to manage my naps even while sore, because if I can't then I'll have to give up on polyphasic sleep. But for now everything seems to be going well. I'm also keeping track of all the times when I take naps, hopefully it'll give me some useful data.

Unfortunately I overslept because of working out. It was the weirdest thing, after my workout I came in and took a nap, I think. But when I woke up I simply couldn't figure out if I had actually slept as much as I needed to, none of the numbers matched what I was seeing. Obviously I was incredibly tired to not be able to think straight..
I'm not quite sure what to do. I have to be able to work out, so if this won't work if I've worked out that night, I'll have to quit.

Polyphasic Sleep Take II - Day 4: Oversleeping

I just had the first dream I remembered while on the polyphasic schedule. This is good news, it means that I am achieving REM sleep when I sleep at least some of the time. Then again, I did already know that because I hadn't gone insane from lack of sleep.

Well, I'm back from a day of being incredibly busy. We went to a set build at the local theatre for a few hours, then came home and rested for about two hours, after which we went to a cast party for...five hours? So I'm pretty tired. We'll see how tonight goes, hopefully it'll be okay.

Well. It wasn't okay. I overslept until 7:30. That's not exactly surprising, considering how much sleep I didn't get yesterday. Apparently I slept through both my alarms, which hasn't happened since the Uberman, and I think it's because I was just so tired they couldn't wake me up. The obvious solution to this is not to get so tired that I sleep through my alarms, which shouldn't be a problem since last night was the last really big thing we had to do, so far as I know, for now.
But in future if I have something large happening the next day I plan to 'stock up' on sleep, as it were. Meaning that I would take more naps the previous night than needed to I would have more energy the next day.

Polyphasic Sleep Take II: Day 3

I have decided how I'm dividing up my days for writing them up on here. The day lasts from around 06:00-07:00 from one day to the next. So my last post ended around 7, which would be the end of day 2. This post is going to take up from there until tomorrow (the 7th) around 6 or 7. It seems like a fairly good way to do it. I was having problems figuring out when to post the stuff I had written, and this makes it easier.

Anyway, after I woke up from my nap around 7 I watched some more Merlin, which is what I was watching last night to stave off the sleepiness, and it did a pretty awesome job. To be honest, I don't remember what I did this morning, exactly. I do remember that I took a nap around 9 and accidentally slept 40 minutes too long, but I don't count that as a huge failure. The reason is that it was during the day, and I get less sleep during the day anyway, so I can view that as taking some extra naps. And I don't think it screwed with my schedule that much, or it doesn't feel like it.

At the moment I'm waiting for my lunch to settle so I can take another nap (it's 13:12.) Oh yeah, I've decided to switch my times to military time because it just makes more sense..and my Rainmeter clock is in military time.

An odd thing is happening, or I think it's happening. My sense of time, at least while I'm asleep, is getting thrown off. I feel as though I've slept for much longer than the 15-20 minutes I actually slept, which is odd. Because of this, I have to figure out before I go to bed when I need to wake up, so I know that I haven't actually overslept, which is almost always my reaction when I wake up.

Polyphasic Sleep Take II: Day 2

The first night and day of my new polyphasic sleep schedule went well. Now I'm into the second night, which was always the place I could never get past with the Uberman, but I'm feeling more confident about this schedule.

I've decided to start learning about music theory again. I'll probably also do some reading eventually, but reading is very active, whereas watching TV is quite passive, and easy to do when you're tired.

At this point in time it is 1:21 AM and I've just recently woken up from my first nap, which went pretty well, and I had no trouble getting out of bed for, which is a nice change. I have made a few changes to my room for this experiment. One of the biggest problems I had with the Uberman was oversleeping. I would set my alarms, they would go off, and I would get up, turn them off and then get back into bed. Now obviously this isn't exactly what you want when you're trying to start a new sleeping schedule. A huge part of wanting to get back into bed was that the bed was warm and outside of the bed was cold. So this time around I've made sure my window is closed before I get into bed, and my fan at my window is pointed towards the ceiling, so it's not blowing on me when I get out of my bed to make me colder.

Some pie graphs of how much sleep you get with some of the more common polyphasic sleep schedules.

Polyphasic Sleep - Take II: Day 1

So. Here I am once again trying to get polyphasic sleep to work for me. Luckily I'm not completely stupid and I'm not trying the Uberman schedule again.

If you're unfamiliar with how polyphasic sleep works, and missed my previous posts on the subject when I was trying it before school started, here's a basic rundown. The theory is that the only part of sleep you really need is the REM (random eye movement) sleep. It's where your brain does its resting and reprogramming thing. But the thing is that you only get about 30 minutes of REM sleep in a normal monophasic sleep schedule. The idea behind polyphasic sleep is that you train your body to drop immediately into REM sleep when you go to bed, skipping all of the other 'useless' stages of sleep and going to the one you really need.

The schedule that I'm trying this time isn't the Uberman. The Uberman schedule is you take 20-30 minute naps about every 4 hours, which is a little like jumping into the deep end without learning to swim first, it's really hard. But the schedule I'm trying this time is much more friendly to your poor, abused body. It's that you take 20 minute naps as often as you want, but you have to have at least 20 minutes between the naps. It's actually a pretty simple schedule, and infinitely more flexible than the very rigid Uberman.

I know there are many other polyphasic sleep schedules, but I read about this one somewhere and it seemed like the easiest schedule to adopt, and integrate into normal life. So we'll see how it goes.

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Uberman: Finishing Up

I overslept again last night, obviously working out didn't help keep me awake. As I said before, I'm now finished with the Uberman sleep schedule, or any of my changes to it. It was fun while it lasted, and I learned a lot about sleeping and how my body reacts to the lack of it. I also learned a lot about Blogger while blogging about it, and I really like my blog now, so I think I'll keep posting stuff. :D
Thanks for sticking with me, and I hope my logs are an interesting read. Maybe they'll help someone else be able to switch, that'd be nice.
Here's a list of my posts, I'm also going to edit it into my first post as well.

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Uberman Sleep Schedule
Uberman: Day 1
Uberman: Day 2
Uberman: Day 3
Uberman: Day 4
Uberman: Day 5
Uberman: Day 6
Uberman: Day 8: I lied
Uberman: Day 10: I fail at Uberman
Uberman: Day 11: Mixing it up