Tom Holowka . com

This post details how I randomly started polyphasic sleeping. Polyphasic sleeping is sleeping at short intervals throughout the entire 24 hour day as opposed to sleeping all in one big chunk at night.

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On Tuesday night I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I got into bed, and I laid awake for about 2.5 hours or so trying to get comfortable and clear my thoughts so I could get some rest, but I wasn’t really tired. I took my phone off my night stand and started reading some articles on the internet while in bed. After reading a few and still not feeling tired I got up and went on my computer. I stayed up until 5am or so reading articles, and watching youtube videos. I ended up sleeping from about 5am to 10am. I woke up and went about my day deciding I would try to stay awake so I could normalize my schedule and not be up all night again. What followed was the most massive failure to be normal in the history of humanity.

Tuesday Night / Wednesday Morning

I stayed up all night again not being able to fall asleep. This time I was up until about 6:30am. I slept until about 11am still not very much sleep for me, but the peculiar thing is that I wasn’t feeling exhausted and needing to get more sleep. I was feeling a little tired but I didn’t have this overwhelming compulsion to dart into bed like I typically do when I’m tired. This is the moment I considered giving polyphasic a serious go. What happened to being normal? I took a 30 minute nap later that day around 3pm and still felt pretty good. I took another one at around 11:00pm and still felt alright.

A big mystery for me is wondering why I became an insomniac all of a sudden. I have no idea why I had so much trouble falling asleep on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Thursday

I had penciled in another nap for 3am to 3:30am. I set my wristwatch countdown timer for 30 minutes and an internet alarm for 31 minutes to wake me up. I woke up at 7:22am, almost 4.5 hours later. I was a little miffed when I woke up because I didn’t really get why I had slept that long, but still I wasn’t feeling that exhausted feeling. I was feeling relatively ok. I realized later that windows on my PC had installed an automatic update and restarted itself during the time period that I set the internet timer. The wristwatch probably just wasn’t loud enough to wake me up. So anyway I overslept, but wasn’t discouraged. I finished out the rest of the day according to schedule.

Friday

Despite the previous day’s failure I decided just to keep plugging along. Friday morning I overslept again on my planned nap for 11:00a – 11:30a. I woke up and it was 12:16p. This one was a little funny because I remembered waking up at 11:30a when my cell phone alarm went off. I can remember standing next to the desk looking at my cell phone. I have no idea how I got in bed and started sleeping after that, but it was only another 45 minutes.

The rest of Friday went according to schedule and I slept a total of 3 hours and 45 minutes on Friday.

Here are my sleep totals for the week so far. Wednesday afternoon was when I decided that I was going to give polyphasic a try.

Tuesday: 5.5 Hours
Wednesday: 5.5 hours
Thursday: 6.5 Hours
Friday: 3.75 hours

Over four days I would normally get between 32 and 36 hours of sleep. Over the past four days I’ve gotten 21:45. I’m still functioning at a pretty high level despite the missing sleep hours. I exercised yesterday, got 2.5 hours of writing and editing in. I had a couple periods where I felt like I was just spacing too though. When I woke from my morning nap and my 2nd nap I felt like a total zombie just trying to keep my eyes open. My energy was pretty consistent for the rest of the day after those two struggling incidents.

Outlook

From what I’ve read from other people’s accounts of polyphasic sleep there’s an adaptation period where your body has to get used to the new pattern. This period is said to be the toughest part and if you can make it through the 1st week your success rate improves dramatically. Once I get passed that initial period I’m expecting the spacing out zombie like feelings to go away.

The structure I’m using is the 6×30 nap strategy where I take six 30 minute naps spaced evenly throughout the day. I’m allowing leeway and not being super strict, but I’m also not trying to go too long without skipping a nap. Right now I’m aiming for my naps at 3am, 7am, 11am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm. Isn’t that cool how it works out like that? I’ll just sleep on the 3’s 7s and 11’s.

Saturday will be interesting because Friday was really the first day that I had this working. Under 4 hours of sleep is new territory for me. I feel okay though. I’m feeling like I want to try to get the nap schedule down pat and not have any slip ups like I did yesterday, when for whatever reason I went back to sleep once. I have no problem with adding an extra nap in there somewhere if I’m feeling tired in between a nap. I don’t have a general feeling of tiredness or lethargy or anything like that. Tiredness seems to come and go. I was by far most tired yesterday after I woke up from the extra unscheduled 45 min nap I took. Good thing I had to take the garbage out and do the dishes and not do anything where I had to think too hard because I was in zombie mode. Zombie Tom subsided after I was finished with the dishes.

Previous Sleep Experimentation

Polyphasic sleep is something I’ve always wanted to try ever since learning about it in 2006. It always seemed to me like it was odd that humans needed to sleep as long as we do. I thought you could game the system and sleep less. Resting for 9 hours seems like too big a percentage of total time spent alive. If you average 8 hours of sleep per day that’s 33% of your life sleeping. It just seems like a lot. Since your time in the physical world is limited it makes sense to me that you would want to spend as much time interacting with the physical world as possible.

I ended up giving polyphasic a try once and that’s all it was a TRY. I failed pretty miserably and just wrote off polyphasic sleep as prolonged long term sleep deprivation. After this I did try biphasic sleeping with moderate success in the summer of 2006. I stopped that because my schedule never seemed consistent enough to allow a 90 minute nap somewhere in the middle of the day with any regularity like biphasic required. That was really the end of my sleep experimentation.

Most recently I’ve just been letting myself sleep as long as I need to. Going to bed and then just letting myself wake up naturally whenever woke. Sometimes I’d sleep 7.5 hours. Sometimes 8 or sometimes 9 or 10. Usually not more or less than that.

Interesting Naps so Far

One of the odd things that happens to me when I go to take a nap is lying down and not feeling like sleeping at all, even if I’m feeling really tired before nap time. I can recall being conscious almost the whole time lying down. My alarm goes off and I’m surprised that I wasn’t able to fall asleep and then I get up. Only that I’m refreshed. I get up feeling rested and ready to tackle another few hours before my next nap even though I feel like I haven’t slept at all. This has happened about three times over the past couple days. I’m lying down, aware, not really sure if I’m sleeping because I’m able to direct my thoughts and even consciously move my body, yet I don’t think I’m awake. Sounds weird right? My eyes do this rapid fluttering almost like a twitching during this. Is that what REM sleep refers to? I know REM stands for rapid eye movement, and I could feel my closed eyes moving rapidly. I guess maybe I should study a little more about sleep and see what I can find on that.

From what I understand you can do polyphasic sleep because the middle stages of the sleep cycle aren’t as important as the first and last cycles. When you sleep deprive yourself you condition, or possibly recondition yourself to enter the last and most important stage (REM Stage) quickly. I say possibly recondition because I’ve seen evidence that newborns are not monophasic sleepers (Edit: although babies also sleep 18 hours a day so maybe that’s a moot point). I don’t know if you would consider them polyphasic or biphasic though.

Why Am I Doing This?

Don’t take the above in any way as scientific because I’m really not sure what I’m talking about here. I’ve read others accounts on polyphasic sleep and I’m just going by them. Since I’ve had some extra time lately I spent about 2 hours the other night reading all of Steve Pavlina’s Polyphasic sleep logs. They’re the most extensive posts I’ve seen from someone who seems to have gotten this to work long term. Steve did polyphasic sleep for about 5.5 months in 2005 and 2006. I Also too a look at Puredoxyk who has lots of info too. She’s been polyphasic for longer than Steve, although she practices a different type of polyphasic that’s different from what I’m doing right now. I’m not seeking to make this more scientific. I’m not really interested in the scientific knowledge behind it.

The personal experiential questions are what I’m interested in answering. The science doesn’t really matter to me. I just want to see if and how this works from the inside out. Others appeared to have gotten it to work, but there’s not many of those claims out there, and it’s tough to know what to believe on the internet sometimes. I imagine that if I get this working and am regular with the polyphasic schedule I might become more interested in the why and how it works. Right now though I’m just interested in the: Does it work?

I’m interested in getting it to work and seeing how I feel when I’m doing it. I can read accounts of what others say about polyphasic sleep, but there’s almost something phony about that, like I’m not really learning enough about it by just reading about it. I have too many questions that could only be answered from an experiential standpoint. Like can I really survive and not feel tired on 3 hours of sleep per day? How does this tie in with athletics? Will my recovery be slower? On a hard training day will more naps be required to keep awake and alert? How will this affect my productivity? I’ll have more time to do work but will the quality of my output be the same? Is polyphasic sleep just a quantity/quality tradeoff? Like am I just trading a few hours of sleep to have some lower quality hours in the day? Even if it is working and feels like I’m doing no harm, what is the long term affect on health?

Don’t Believe it’s Possible?

If you’re skeptical of this I can understand. I’m a little skeptical too, and I’m doing it. It’s like wow if this works why doesn’t everybody do this? And why does nobody really know about this?

I felt a similar way when I started eating all raw food for the first time in November 2007. When I started my stomach did not feel good at all. I was extremely bloated for the first seven to ten days. On the first day though I experienced a very high degree of focus. There was no other external event that would have explained that and I heard other accounts of people saying the same thing. It just felt like a fog had been lifted. Like it had been a perpetually cloudy day in my brain and all of a sudden the clouds opened up and the sun shined through for the first time. This caused me to stick with it initially even though physically I wasn’t feeling so great with the stomach bloating. Eventually that subsided and I felt better than ever. This is comparable to the adaptation phase of polyphasic sleep.

The fog lifting is analogous to the extra time I’m gaining. Even though I’m having my zombie episodes, I’m enjoying the benefits of having more awake time. Just like how I enjoyed the increased mental clarity eating raw food. I have to deal with feeling like a zombie at times, but in a week or so hopefully I’ll adjust and won’t be feeling that way anymore.

It would have been easy to write off these accounts without ever trying it and just call somebody crazy because they do something that isn’t normal. When you try it yourself though it’s much more difficult to deny your own experience.

It’s 2:40am Saturday morning right now as I’m working on this post and I’ve spent a total of about two hours writing today already and the day is only about 3 hours old. That makes me feel really good! It’s like wow I can focus all this extra time into my goals and that prospect is really exciting. If I slept only 3-3.5 hours per day over the course of year that would lead to me to 1825-1642.5 extra hours of awake time per year versus someone averaging eight hours of sleep per day. That’s like living an 76 more days per year than the average monophaser!!

I’ll continue to update on how this is going over the next few days so check back when you can.

I’d really like to know your opinions on this. I want to encourage you to ask any questions you have on what I’m doing. You can do this by leaving a comment or sending an email to Tom at TomHolowka dot Com.
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