Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Everyman report 3

So far so good. Yesterday my mind was about 90% and I functioned fine at work. All the offices have windows but there is one room that is either a huge closet or a really small office that does not and is great for napping. No ambient light makes sleeping that much easier. The hard floor is uncomfortable, though; I might make a trip to wal-mart to get an air mattress. (We have a couch that the others sometimes nap on, but it is in a lighted area, so I think I'd rather go with the closet and the air mattress.)

The 11 PM to 4 AM block of time has been hard. Two nights ago I tried adding a second nap at 2 AM, which helped a little but I was still mostly a zombie. So I was thinking about switching back to an 11-3 core block of sleep, and last night when I woke up after my 11:00 nap feeling groggy again I decided yeah, that sounds pretty good, and went back to sleep. Right now [4:30 AM] my mind is probably around 70%; not great, but I've done a little programming successfully already, which is a lot more than I could have accomplished from 11-4 two nights running. I expect I'll be in better shape after my 7:00 nap.

My co-workers took my naps in stride yesterday. (We were one of a handful of companies that didn't get presidents' day off. The parking lot made it clear that we were in a very small minority.) It turns out Gary did something even weirder in his college days: he tried a sleep schedule that essentially put him on a 28-hour "day," so his sleep time shifted around constantly compared to everyone else. That makes my schedule sound normal.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This could conceivably be a very bad idea. Having worked in sleep research, I can tell you that sleep needs to run in a long cycle, and that most of your REM periods are near the end of it. If you're only getting 4-5 hours or naps in, you are never getting enough REM and probably not enough slow wave sleep either. Neither of these are good.

Please be careful.

-Taryn

Jonathan Ellis said...

Thanks for the note of caution.

This is actually less of a whim than you might think from this blog -- I've done a lot of reading about polyphasic sleep for the last five years. What little research is available shows at least a possibility that the body can adapt to this. (See http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript105.htm#5 for the only example I know of where there was a rigorous study -- although even there obviously the sample size is too small to draw any really useful conclusions.)

In the meantime, as I said in my first post on the subject, there's enough anecdotal evidence that it can work that I think it's worth trying. But I enjoy thinking clearly too much to give that up for a bizarre schedule, so if I can't adapt then hey, it was fun (or at least interesting) trying.

It's possible that my judgement could be so impaired that I wouldn't know I was impaired. If so Rachel will pull the plug. But so far I seem to be able to tell when I am not doing well.