Judith's language learning blog

These days I have been experimenting with Polyphasic Sleep, a life hack where you take multiple 20-minute naps during the day but don’t need to sleep long at night. Here’s my log, pretty unedited and really mostly for my own sake:

Monday August 10th, 2009: For over a week I haven’t been able to sleep normally, either falling asleep past 2am or waking up around 4:30am or both. I don’t know when I last felt completely rested; of course the stress at work contributes to that. I have dark rings under the eyes and in the past few days I often decided to take a nap during the day just to be able to keep on functioning. So even though it’s not generally recommended, I shall start my Uberman sleep experiment while tired. My naps shall be at 4, 8 and 12, both am and pm, as that’s easy to remember and fits my schedule decently well. I started today with the 8am nap after another night of waking up too early. I went to nap very punctually, even giving myself an extra five minutes to find a better frame of mind for one of the naps, but wasn’t able to sleep. I meditated and I think I reached that in-between stage, but I’m pretty sure I was not asleep and I did not feel particularly rested after the naps. On the bright side, I did not have to drag myself out of bed either, though I wouldn’t have minded staying.

Tuesday August 11th, 2009: Staying up all night with just the naps has been moderately difficult. The worst time was around 5:55am to 6:15am, because I had sat down comfortably on the couch in order to give my eyes some rest as I’d listen to some Greek Assimil dialogs. Not going to make that mistake again; the couch is too comfortable. Later, for the 8am nap, I actually managed to oversleep until 10:30 and apparently I switched off the alarm and fell right back asleep. I don’t remember any of it. For the rest of the day I’ve been feeling rather good, almost at a normal tiredness level. I managed to doze lightly in the 12pm and 4pm nap, but not in the 8pm and 12am ones, strangely enough. Oh well. Napping is strange in that it feels like a lot of time has passed, even though it’s just 20 minutes. Coming back from a nap, I always expect lots of new activity around my Cantr characters and my forums and I’m always astonished that nothing has changed.

Wednesday August 12th, 2009: I could not sleep in the 4am nap either, but I still don’t feel nearly as tired as I should be after going this long without much sleep; in fact I was even able to do mental tasks (preparing lessons and reading Chinese texts) for a large part of the night. I totally did not think it would be that easy; I had prepared easier things to do (making brownies, cleaning, watching Romance of the Three Kingdoms, playing games) and only wound up making those brownies in the morning because I felt like eating some. The worst time today was between 7:10am and 7:30am, plus immediately after the 8am nap. So it’s later than yesterday, but also possibly not as pronounced. I had breakfast, took a shower and felt a lot better.
BREAKTHROUGH no. 1: I slept soundly in the 12pm, 4pm and 8pm naps and when going out for lunch today I was 100% awake and in an inexplicably good mood. Now it’s back to somewhat-tired, approximately like what I’d experience staying up till midnight surfing the internet.