The Dark Lord lives in my Snooze Button
Okay, time for that sleep update.
The last week has been miserable. For various reasons, mostly psychological (waaay too much crap going on lately) but some having to do, again, with my inadequate living arrangements (sooo hard to wake up when you don’t wanna and don’t have any room to exercise or be loud or turn lights on), I started using a back-up alarm and falling prey to the Snooze Demon again.
It’s SUCH a nasty cycle when that happens. I sleep more than 3 hours but can’t sleep six (due to work and whatnot), so I’m low-level tired (yawning, thinking occasionally about sleep) all damn day, which then makes me want to oversleep even more the next time..augh. Icky icky icky.
For those who don’t know, I feel great if I have a three-hour core nap at night. If I sleep any more than that, however, I feel like a bag of wet socks. The next time I can wake, if I miss the three-hour mark, and feel vaguely human, is after six hours (and yes, I still want my naps then). Oversleeping a little bit, even half an hour, can totally wreck my day.
Polyphasic sleep schedules are awesome, but don’t ever let anybody tell you they’re low-maintenance!
So. The war is on, again, to Banish the Snooze Demon. Last night I unplugged my snoozeable alarm and put it away, but this morning I *still* tried to use a timer to snag a few more minutes (and slept right through it, oversleeping 45 minutes total, so yeah, now I get to feel like a teenager after a rough night all day again). I’ll need a good routine to get through this expeditiously, I think. I’m trying to find a bicycle I can afford, and which works, and maybe I’ll institute a morning bike-ride. I would enjoy that, and I’m sure it’s wake-worthy. (Walking doesn’t have much attraction in the mornings, I hate jogging, and nobody wants to wrestle on rollerblades at 4 a.m. Hence the bike idea.)
Still, I’m trying to look on the bright side: Experimentally, this kind of thing is valuable. This is the second time I’ve fallen into Snooze Hell, and the results have always been the same: Oversleeping sucks. The restrictiveness of the polyphasic schedules is there for a reason, and it works. You will feel better on three hour’s sleep (and naps) then you will on four, five or even six. (I feel okay on six for one day, but only for one day. If I continue to get six hours at night, I start to feel waterlogged, full and squishy with sleep — not very fun either.) Three hours at night plus three 20-minute naps has worked for, what — jeez, ten months now. w00t!
Oh, and a note about the Snooze Demon and napping, too: If night possessions by the SD are occurring, he will probably try to cross-pollinate with your naps. The effects are devastating. After one day of letting him push my naps by five minutes here and there, I put the clamps on that, for serious. You find your ideal nap time on this schedule — mine really is 20 minutes, 21 at the outside. I set my alarm for 21 or 22, depending on how fast I feel likely to fall asleep. (Sometimes I use Placebo’s 23-minute white-noise soundtrack, but I always wake up before it’s over.) Messing with the core-times is bad, in that it will make you feel generally unrested all day. But messing with a nap is a big no-no, because it makes you feel like somebody drove a bus into your frontal lobe, parked it there and had a clambake. *gag*
So, that’s me. I won’t say it’s a constant struggle to keep this schedule — if it was, I sure as hell would have given up by now — but every once in a while it comes back out of the comfy background to challenge me anew.
When I do finally vanquish the Snooze Demon once and for all, I really want to get a Boy Scout patch for it…I wonder if they have one that would do? Or if they’re makeable?
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(1) Because I’m about to go back home and I’m too lazy to google, what’s a clambake?
(2) A few weeks ago I bought my bike at a garage sale, so I recommend hitting those :)
(3) Last night I crashed at 8pm and got up at about 6am. One of my counsellors (which started this month) recommended last week that I get on a regular sleep schedule and eat 3 meals a day and all that jazz - I’m trying for getting a regular around 10pm to around 6:30am schedule before I attempt polyphasic again. Two earlier attempts lasted each about 2 days; during December ‘06. I hesitate to attempt it a third time just yet because I don’t know how exhausted I’ll be and if it’ll make me mess up at work as a result of tiredness (I work 8:30-4:30, an hour for lunch unpaid). Do you recommend the schedule with the few core hours + naps or the equally-long equally-spaced naps? (I previously tried the 30 minutes every 6 hours).
(1) smoking pot in a car with the windows rolled up. ;)
(2) totally, I’m all over that this weekend.
(3) Getting regular before going polyphasic is a good idea, since you need to be used to “maintaining a schedule” like all get-out to have a prayer in hell. If your work schedule stays where it’s at, I think you need an Everyman (core nap) schedule. You can’t nap every four hours on that schedule, and that’s the ony way that Uberman has ever worked to my knowledge. The core nap gives you the ability to stay awake a little longer between naps (usually 5-6 hours, maybe 7 once a day) and be able to move the naps by a little if needed. Most people with full-time jobs have to go with Everyman, including me. ;)
Well, I can’t seem to find an email for your, puredoxyk, so I will ask my question here. Do you know of any objective way to test “awakeness”? I and possible a few friends are going to attempt to do a polyphasic schedule this summer (modified everyman actually) and I/we would like a way to actually tell if we are actually better off/at least as good as before besides our own feelings. (Most of us are scientist-types, though still students [thats why its this summer as opposed to earlier]) I know your always looking for some actual scientific data, and this isn’t going to be anything like a double blind test or whatever, but it will be slightly more than anecdotal.
Anyways, your thoughts would be appreciated, you could contact me here or at
It’s so funny how many people can’t find my email, when it’s right on the front page, in the “about the author” blurb! Apparently it has mad obfuscation skillz. And so does your email, since your post ends with ” you could contact me at”. :P
Any repeatable thing that you can do, that you know how well you ought to do, should function to test “awakeness”. I did tests on myself using typing-tests, since I know exactly how well I type normally, as well as a simple reaction-time test (there are several online). I did several tests before starting this Everyman experiment, and then took them at various intervals throughout. They showed what you’d expect — a sharp dip for a couple days, followed by a pretty quick recovery, and have been at normal levels since. I wasn’t tracking the data for anything but personal use, though, and blogging; if you guys are more serious about data compilation, I’d come up with a few different tests and be more regular than I was about the intervals. Claudio Stampi used a certain battery of tests in his sleep experiments that might be useful to copy; or you could simply devise tests for (say) memory, reaction times, mental and physical agility, etc.
Luck luck luck!
-PD
I looked at that section probably half a dozen times, and I didn’t see it. I look again, and viola, its there. I also (tried to) put my email on the end of that post, but there must have been a problem there too.
Anyways, thanks for the info, it will be helpful. We aren’t really doing anything scientific, we are just the kind of people that like numbers to quantify things, or at least something more objective than “I’m asleep” and “I’m awake”.
Thanks again, its good to know this, since I’m starting the “experiment” tonight
mythmon (a) gmail (o) com
Hopefully the email shows up that time, if you want it. I don’t know why, but some people might.
Something else I probably should have told you about, Myth, is the Stanford Sleepiness Scale. You can find it online; it’s a good “on a scale of 1-10″ way of describing tiredness.
Luck and more luck to ya! Keep us posted! ;)
Lol, can’t say I’ve ever heard the term “clambake” before. I’ve only ever known it as hot-boxing, and believe me, I did more than my fair share in college ;)