Polyphasic Adventures - Week #3
I know I’m a little late with this post, but it’s for good reason. If you haven’t read, last week I posted two code snippets and they’re great for learning some basic concepts in CSS which are essential to front-end design. I am working on a few other snippets which cover some important concepts as well and might even start a series on some of the important things to understand when designing for the web. Anyway, let’s get back on topic.
The past week has been a little hard on me because of school and other things getting in the way of my polyphasic schedule. In fact, the past few days I completely came out of the sleep schedule and went full monophasic but had an interesting experience which I will cover below.
First few days…
The beginning half of the week started with school and made it difficult to keep up with the naps. One day in particular in the week I have 6 hours of lectures straight and if you include commute time, that makes it about 8 hours in total. In that time it’s really difficult to find the time – though little – to get into a quiet place and sleep for 20 minutes. I also find it really difficult to nap in public places because of the distractions. Due to all these things, I sometimes skipped my naps and added time to my core nap. Knowing how polyphasic sleep works, this didn’t help and resulted in making me feel tired throughout the day and even sleep past my alarms.
Now looking back to my objective in polyphasic sleep, I want to be more productive with my time to allow me to do the things I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise whilst being tired. If I still feel tired and don’t feel like doing the things I’d like to, how does that fulfill my objective? I decided to change it up a little bit and try a few other things that work better for me.
Next couple of days…
The next couple of days I tried a biphasic schedule and had a 3-4 hour core nap and another 1-2 hour nap during the middle of the day. This did help for the next couple of days and allowed me the extra time I desired and made me feel less tired, but the second nap got in the way of my day quite a bit and it was even harder to find that time to sleep. Back to the drawing board?
Say what!? Monophasic?!
Lastly and for the past couple of days, I went back to a monophasic sleep schedule. Earlier I said this was quite interesting, well what made it so cool was that I slept much better than I had ever before. If I decide to quit the polyphasic sleep right now – which I haven’t – it would be completely worth it. The things I learned about myself the past few weeks have been incredible and have truly made my life a lot better. I can sleep much easier, I actually remember my dreams much better now, and have been more productive because this taught me to modulate my day and complete the tasks I assigned for myself.
Going forward
Going forward, I don’t think I have found the schedule that works best for me yet which is why I want to keep exploring the realm of sleep. Before starting this experiment, I had no idea it would impact me this much. The past few weeks have been surreal in that I learned so much with my extra time. I learned more on Rails, Angular, React, SASS, Jekyll, Jade, and mostly brushed up on the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And all that is just programming, I also learned a lot from the sleep experiment itself which I have talked about in the past blog posts. Now will I go biphasic, polyphasic? To be honest I really don’t know and it will all depend on the day. I will keep exploring different schedules and record my observations to see what works and what doesn’t. I hope you guys also learned something from my journey to this point and can integrate this into your own lives. It’s truly an incredible experience and something that everyone should try for at least a week or two.
That’s it for me today, how’ve you guys been lately? Let me know in the comments.
Signing out,
Hussain