Essay:

durmiendo polifásico, by Mitch, 30 May

About a month ago we decided to experiment with Polyphasic Sleeping. Lots of sites on the web have explained this process pretty well, and I would highly suggest you read those sites if you're interested in trying this process yourself. This review will be much more personal and much less practical than those other write-ups, and will likely wax on some of the less common observations and side-effects that arose while we were Polyphasing.

Setup and Overview

Most people sleep Monophasically, that is, in one phase per day. Usually this phase lasts 6 - 10 hours and starts sometime in the late evening or madrugada, lasting through until morning. Polyphasic sleeping is different in that a sleeper chooses to take evenly spaced naps throughout the day, for short, rigorously maintained periods of time. These naps usually last from 15 - 45 minutes, and occur once every few hours. People have experimented with many different schedules, but we will only be focusing here on the one we tried. The ultimate goal of Polyphasic sleeping is not complicated: you gain time. Where most Monophasers get around 16 waking hours a day (with 8 hours of sleep), our Polyphase schedule afforded us 21 total hours of waking time per day, for a gain of 5 sweet hours.

Our schedule

We took 6 naps per day, each lasting exactly 30 minutes, at 2, 6, and 10, am and pm. This totals to 3 hours of sleep per day with 21 waking hours. Looking at the numbers now, it probably makes no sense how this could possibly be enough sleep for an active person, so here's a brief explanation of why Polyphasic sleeping works.

There are a few different chemical and weirdly harmonic processes your brain goes through when you're sleeping. The most important ones seem to happen during REM sleep, and if you're not getting any REM sleep for some reason, you'll probably die directly. Your brain doesn't drop into this essential part of sleep until a little while into your regularly scheduled Monophase. Polyphasic sleeping capitalizes on the body's desire to not die, by forcing the brain to realize it's only getting 30 minutes of sleep at a shot, so if it wants REM, it had better get it while it's hot.

Every three and a half hours, we went to bed, no matter what. We set alarms, put in earplugs, and laid down whether we were tired or not. Sometimes, in the beginning, we didn't sleep at all during those naps. After a while, our bodies started adjusting and we would drop right off. We even sewed ourselves sleep masks for the daylight naps to make falling asleep a bit easier.

The First Week

Was really hard. Every report we'd read said it would be, so we weren't surprised, but we had a really difficult time not oversleeping and keeping our schedule rigid. We weren't tired all the time like a lot of people reported being, and it helped that we had nothing pressing to do, and instead were able to spend our time working on this website and knitting. The hardest hours were (and would continue to be) those within which we were never awake normally -- between 7am and 10am. During these hours, we drank coffee, debated taking brisk walks, opted not to, tried watching TV or movies but couldn't stay interested, argued about napping just a little more, and mostly sat quietly, trying not to fall asleep. Eventually we fell into semi-productive routines, and after the second week or so, this sort of early-morning ennui became less painful.

Week Two

Was a little better, but still not great. We started oversleeping more, which is not a big deal once your body is completely adjusted to the system (statistics say this takes anywhere from 10 to 21 days for most people), but it was obvious we were not fully adjusted, and were still struggling to get enough REM during each nap to carry us through the next waking cycle. Oversleeping during this period of adjustment really hurt us. We just stayed tired and were cranky and couldn't get as much done. We might have delayed a nap or two during this period for social engagements or language classes, which is also a bad idea during the adjustment phase, but we were getting annoyed having to structure our lives in 3 and a half hour waking chunks. More on that below. We talked about quitting a few times during this week but were still enamored with the idea of all the extra time we were gaining (even though we weren't using it all that productively yet), so we kept on.

Week Three

Was frustrating as hell. We'd miss our alarms, sleep for four hours in a row, and hate ourselves for it. We felt weak-willed when we couldn't go more than a day or two without slipping up, and were feeling the burning shame of having made fun of the people we'd read about who'd had their own oversleeping problems. We made promises about our performance, saying we'd give it a few more days, but in the end we were worrying that our mistakes were not simply stalling our bodies' full-on aclimitization, but were instead sending us back to square one. We couldn't be sure, but we didn't feel significantly closer to full-on Polyphase living. The extra 5 hours awake per day was also starting to seem like a silly reward, and not worth the self-flagellation we were putting ourselves through. We stopped right around the end of the third week, on a Friday, and slept for 30 hours of that weekend. (Glorious.)

Observations: Physical

We had a lot of the same physical responses to this experiment as most people we'd read about. While we were awake for the majority of our hours, we were mentally alert, happy, and clear-headed. Early on I had some hilarious fogginess and I think I walked to a few cafes without really paying any attention to where I was going. I did some writing during this period too which came out completely bonkers. After the first week we were going for night runs through the streets of Once and Barrio Norte, feeling energized and normal for most every hour besides the always difficult 7-10am shift.

We didn't crave any particular foods, as some people have reported, but we were drinking an awful lot of water, and I ate a hell of a lot of dried apricots. I think the apricots may have been unrelated, though. Drank lots of mate and coffee, but relatively little alcohol, as both stimulants and depressants can mess with your naps if you don't time them right. Besides that, I woke up from more than one nap still drunk from 30 minutes before, which was both pleasant and not.

The one other consideration I'll mention here is that, while it's probably obvious, we commonly sleep for 8 hours at a time for a bunch of good reasons besides the necessary REM bit. If you get 1 hour of essential sleep as a monophaser, those other 7 hours are for plain old rest, allowing your body to fix wounds, get you undrunk, and maybe generate handy antibodies. I can't be sure, but I do believe that this experiment was one factor leading to a crippling viral infection I suffered a few weeks later, and am just now getting over. Lara also reports feeling a little sick towards the end of the third week, which also contributed to our decision to quit.

Observations: Time

It takes longer than 3 and a half hours to do a lot of things. Dinner and drinks with friends is one of them, and what's worse, is the sort of thing that I dislike doing for less than 3 and a half hours at a shot. While we were polyphasing, we would often feel rushed and stupid for having to duck out early of social engagements. We also suddenly went from being the easiest people to hang out with, to people with "special needs" who needed to be scheduled around, which is ridiculous, considering the purported time gains this plan is supposed to afford.

And about those time gains: we didn't think a lot about it at first, as everyone who talks about this plan goes on about the extra time like you could spend it all at amusement parks or snorkeling, but the time you're gaining is in the middle of the night. Everyone else is asleep. Stores are closed. It is cold (it is Autumn, in Argentina). We had plenty of things to do in our house, but that's where we spent out extra time, and we started going a little stir-crazy.

After a while I started thinking about it like this: Say I gave you a raise at your job (in order for this to work you will also have to imagine that I am your boss, which is a real stretch, but it could happen!), of an extra $5000 a year, except you're only allowed to spend that money on office supplies, which have to be kept at the office. Also, your payday comes every 3 and a half hours, so you should get one of those rubber stamps of your signature made; You will be endorsing a lot of checks.

One of the most fun things I found about living in 6 distinct chunks of time per day was how quickly those chunks became relatively indistinct. We fall into patterns based around our Monophasing; we take a shower and change our clothes in the morning after we wake up, brush our teeth, etc. Most people do these things at the same time so that when they leave the house to face other people, there will be a common degree of nice smelling breath and unwrinkly clothing amongst their friends and coworkers. But then there's me, here. I have no coworkers and no standing daily social engagements. I don't have to look particularly presentable at any particular time of the day, so the pattern of morning showers and nightly 3 hour skin care regimen (exfoliant scrubs, moisturizing masks, skin tightening/lightening, full-body depilation, etc) is easily mutable. I can perform my daily habits whenever I feel like it: shower at 4pm, eat dinner at 9am, drink small amounts of poison to increase my body's natural resistance around midnight. Freedom!

Wrap-up

There's a lady who sells things on Corrientes, right up the block from us. She used to sit near the curb, further up towards Azcuenaga, but has since moved closer to our corner, and sits near the entrance to restaurante El Clavel. She sells necklaces, backscratchers, cell-phone holsters, electrical adaptors, and alarm clocks. Her table is full of this stuff, all colorful and nicely laid out. What makes her table more noticeable than all of the others you see up and down that busy street is the sound of the thing. At all times, no fewer than two alarm clocks are going off, so you can hear her sitting there before you see her, watching you walk by. The noise is incessant and piercing and is my idea of hell.

At the end of our experiment we were simply feeling haggard and overalarmed. We were tired of setting egg timers, tired of hearing them go off, tired of being tired. We never made it over that hump, into the comfortable alertness and total body-clock domination you read about in the success stories. We're glad we tried it now, as it would have been about a hundred times harder to pull off at almost any other time in our lives. Even more than that, though, we're glad to be sleeping 10 hours a night again, waking up when we damn well feel like it.