Biphasic Sleep: Day 2

I just finished the second day of my biphasic sleep experiment.  I am still in high spirits.  One thing to note though, when my alarm clock went off this morning I really didn’t want to get out of bed (as if I ever do).  I actually considered calling in to work, until my mind really woke up and I realized that regardless of my work schedule I wouldn’t allow myself to go back to sleep.  This experiment is bigger than me now.  Too many people want to see biphasic fail.  Well I wont let that happen.

Yesterday evening was great.  I felt energetic right up until about 20 minutes until my evening nap (around 8 pm).  At that point I started to really want to sleep.  At 8 I laid down and fell right asleep. 90 minutes later I was ready to get up and start part 2 of my day.  Another thing to note is that the abstract thinking part of my brain seems to work much more efficiently on biphasic sleep.  My thoughts are more creative and my ideas are much more intuitive than usual.

I also noticed that my eating pattern is already changing.  I’m not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing.  Instead of wanting to eat when I wake up (7 am) I feel like skipping breakfast and starting with a meal around 11 am.  I make up for it though, because I also get hungry around midnight which seems to be just like a normal person (3 meals a day) except with the times skewed a few hours.  We’ll see if this becomes an issue as I progress.

Yesterday evening, right before bed time (long session), I got to read for about an hour.  I started a new book I picked up, which seems pretty promising.  It was a great feeling, since school has been keeping me from getting to read leasurely since about 2 weeks before finals (that was about 5 weeks ago).

I’ve decided that in order to keep these logs fairly uniform I should have some categorical status updates.  So here goes.

Emotional State: excited

Mental State: alert

Physical State: normal

Feelings about Biphasic: high hopes

Productivity: through the roof

Diet: different than usual, but good so far

Fitness: not sure yet (took the first 2 days off to adjust, will be hitting the gym this evening)

Also after talking with a friend, I figured maybe I should explain how I derived my schedule.  It may not be terribly scientific (which is pretty bad considering I hold a degree in biology), but I think it will work, and it seems make logical sense, based on all accounts I’ve considered.

I wanted a sleep pattern that would give me more time each day, obviously.  I knew that for it to work I’d have to break up my sleep times.  I couldn’t commit to patterns like uberman and everyman, the schedules would be too difficult for my regular schedule.  But I decided that 4.5 hours should be enough sleep to function (with an extra 1.5 hour nap when I deemed necessary).  So I broke my day up into a large sleep and a smaller sleep, each followed by their proportionate awake period.  4.5 hours of sleep split into 3 hours and 1.5 hours.  Their proportionate awake periods would be 13 hours and 6.5 hours.

So I go in that order: 4.5 hours of sleep followed by 13 hours awake.  Then 1.5 hours of sleep followed by 6.5 hours of awake time.   If I need more sleep, I will increase the 3 hour sleep session by 1.5 hours (by going to sleep 1.5 hours earlier), making my total sleep for that day 6 hours (which still gives me 1-2 more hours than the average person).

I haven’t come up with a genius name for my pattern yet (and apparently all of the successful patterns have awesome names (ex. uberman, everyman, dymaxion…).  I’ll come up with a genius name for my pattern, then it will live on in eternity.