Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Week 2

My second week on a polyphasic sleep schedule has been plagued by unplanned sleep-ins during the core sleep. In an attempt to avoid sleeping in I tried placing my phone (which is my alarm) at the foot of my bed to force me to get up to turn it off. This failed though, as the first time I woke up and turned the alarm off but then went to sleep again. The second time I apparently slept through all three alarms. So I reverted to having the phone under my pillow again but with an extra alarm. So there’s now four alarms as as follows: 1:58, 1:59, 2:00 and 2:05. The last one uses a more obnoxious tone as well.

On Mon I slept in 45mins and was extremely tired all day. The train trip into work was a total battle to stay awake and the general lack of sleep was having a negative effect on my mood. My chocolate experiment which involved having a small amount of chocolate on the train to help me stay awake didn’t work. On Monday night whilst waiting for my train I actually fell asleep for a brief second whilst reading on my phone. That’s a somewhat disconcerting feeling.

As a result of this I decided to tweak the schedule again so that I had a nap before getting the train to work instead of when I arrived at work. The adjusted schedule looks like this:

Note: I snuck in an extra 30 mins in the core sleep.

So far I’ve felt better on this schedule and have not had much trouble keeping awake and being able to work on my laptop on the train trips. However the first two days on the revised schedule saw cumulative sleep ins of almost 3 hours so most of the benefits may be attributed to that.

I definitely feel like my body is adapting to the regular naps. When I first began taking them I felt like a didn’t sleep or if I did it was quite shallow. Now when I take them I fall asleep quite quickly and feel like I’ve been quite deep when the 20 minutes is up. I have started dreaming in them too, which is a sign that its working. The initial problem of waking up around 15 minutes in has stopped as well.

The aim for the following week is to avoid the sleep-ins.