Reblog

Everyman Report

For the past two weeks I tried one of the polyphasic schedules called Everyman. I enjoyed the experiment, especially the first 10 days but I had gave up at the end. Here’s how things went.

• I first did a preparation period where I tried to consistently stay up late at night but without constraining the core sleep to 3 hours, i.e. without waking up at 5am.
• I then moved to the following schedule: core (2am-5am), nap-1 (10am), nap-2 (4pm), nap-3 (9pm)
• I initially decided to compensate for the decreased sleeping time adding deep relaxation 5 minutes micro-naps between pomodoros. I thought that throwing this into the mix was a good integration strategy.
• Micro-naps turned out to be a bad move. You don’t want to interfere with the 20’ naps where you want to enter REM as soon as possible. In other words, you have to feel really tired to achieve that kind of intense sleep and micro-napping was preventing this.
• The adaptation phase end was on day 6: I fell asleep immediately and dream vividly during the nap while before I was mostly awake. The day before I was not able to follow the schedule and that I think triggered the sleep compression during the 20’ nap the next day.
• On the second week I started having problems waking up after the core sleep. Yes I was awake but unable to anything than mechanical things until 7-8am. I started questioning the benefits after 3 mornings in that condition.
• I decided to add an additional nap to the mix changing the schedule to: core (2am-5am), nap-1 (10am), nap-2 (2pm), nap-3 (8pm), nap-4 (10pm) but the problem after the core was still there and I also experienced sleepiness after 1 hour from the 20’ nap

The last move didn’t help and maybe worsened the situation. I browsed the polyphasic forum in search for help to see if I was doing something wrong. It turns out that is not enough to just follow the schedule and pretend that everything is ok. The next step after the adaptation is to search for the optimal core positioning during the night and the other naps during the day so that they are more consistent with the new body sleep requests. Since it was already demanding for me the fact to follow a sleep schedule, I finally gave up.

Wow, what an experience! I enjoyed having a couple of 8-days weeks and the boost of productivity especially at the beginning. But the initial boost went back to normal for the above problems at the end of the second week. So I had to make a decision: if I’m not going to use those additional 4 hours a day for things that I like to do because I’m too sleepy to do them well, what’s the point? If I have to spend time reading forums and experimenting on tweaking the schedule, what’s the point? I will definitely give polyphasic a second try as soon as my life allows me again to experiment a little more, but for now I have to concentrate on other things.

The strategy that worked really well for me until now that I’m going to resume is to have relatively short nights of around 6 hours sleep and micro-napping between pomodoros.