Day 1: the beginning of a sleep less journey

Sleep is great. I've always loved it, and until just six months ago I had time for plenty of it.

Unfortunately you can't be a student forever: or, at least, you can't be paid to be a student for more than a couple years without actually trying. So, six months ago, I started work at job about which one of my interviewers said: "60 hours is a good week." I was aware, of course, that this would be a big lifestyle change, but I had no idea how difficult sleep-deprivation would be because I had never experienced it for more than a couple days.

As I found out the hard way, 6 hours of sleep wasn't enough for me. Neither was 7, and even 8 hours was pushing it - it turned out there was a reason I had been sleeping 9 hours a day in my student days. Sure, I could survive for a week on 6, 7 hours of sleep a night, but then I would spend most of the weekend asleep. Even on good weeks when I could get more sleep I would be tired at work, especially in the afternoons, when most of my willpower would be devoted to staying awake and I would get almost no work done. I listened to my colleagues with envy: "I was really sleep-deprived this week but I feel great today because I slept 8 hours last night!", or worse, "Oh, you sleep a lot, huh. Yeah, me too. Sometimes I sleep way too much on the weekends. Sometimes, even, like 8 hours.", and wished that I, like they, could live on less sleep and have more time for work and play.

I did know of one method, rumored to have been practiced by Leonardo da Vinci: six 20-minute naps, spaced equally throughout the day, adding up to a mere 2 hours of sleep per day. I would have loved having 22 waking hours every day, but the difficulty of adjusting to such a schedule aside, the logistics of such a schedule rendered it completely infeasible for me. Still, the fantasy of transcending sleep, and thereby time, to reach a higher level of productivity persisted.

Those who read a lot on the web will be familiar with the kind of serendipity with which I found the polyphasic sleep community, an entire online community of people who sleep multiple times in the day. Having read Merlin Mann's Patching your personal suck the morning before a particularly drowsy afternoon, I resolved to find a solution to my drowsiness issues. The next day, a national holiday, I searched online for ways to live on less sleep, and an Ask MetaFilter question led me to a Wikipedia article on polyphasic sleep, with pie-chart pictures of an entire spectrum of sleep schedules ranging from the regular one sleep per day to the aforementioned six. I was intrigued by these new hybrid schedules, which offered a compromise between the two unfeasible extremes of eight hours of sleep a day and six naps a day.

Luckily the schedules all had names, and I googled the name of the most promising: the Everyman, with one moderately large pie slice of sleep at night and three little slivers throughout the day. I found the seminal article by PureDoxyk, who had previously lived by the 6-nap/day schedule (and christened it the Uberman for the feeling it gave her of transcending sleep and even time) and developed the Everyman to better accomodate for a non-student lifestyle.

After that it was a matter of voraciously reading up on the Everyman, in particular an excellent start-up guide detailing the entire spectrum of schedules and how to choose when your sleep times will be spread throughout the day. I decided on a 3-hour core sleep at 4am, and 3 naps throughout the day, around 11am, 5pm, and 11pm.

I even found a site with MP3 files designed to mask background noise and help you sleep, then wake you up after 20 minutes. Once I bought an eyemask to cut out light when I have to nap in bright places, I was set.

That was all yesterday.

So here I am, 10am on the first day on the schedule. Yesterday I tried to nap twice, unsuccessfully, and then stayed up until 4am and woke up at 7 as planned. I actually feel much more alert than I usually do, although I'm sure the drowsiness will kick in soon, if not today then certainly tomorrow.

But this is actually good: compared to other schedules, like the less-intense Everyman with a 4.5-hour core sleep and two naps, the greater initial sleep deprivation of the 3-hour Everyman is supposed to make the adaptation quicker: although not as much as the Uberman. The reason for this is that the body needs to be trained to immediately go on REM sleep so that you can get REM sleep in a 20-minute nap, and this can only happen in a state of significant sleep deprivation. With my naps yesterday I didn't even fall asleep, let alone go into REM sleep, so it looks like my body has a lot of learning to do.

About an hour and a half until my first nap of the day now. Hopefully the first of many naps I'll take in an office bathroom stall.