A little while ago I was out to dinner (referred to as "point B" in a previous post) and the conversation turned to polyphasic sleeping - sleeping in regular short naps rather than one chunk each night.
I remembered trying this before, and rejecting it because
- it was hard
- I got tired
- I thought it was basically a myth, and that you would never really "come out on the other side"
- I thought it would mess up my athletic training
I don't have any athletic training to mess up, though, and have a pretty free schedule, and no particular need for my mental faculties, so I decided to give it another shot. I'm now in my eighth night, and my report is that it's going surprisingly well. I feel alert and fresh during the day. I still normally have some bad patches at night, especially around 3am. But I haven't crashed for twelve straight hours, or even hit a snooze alarm yet.
I don't have some insane need of extra time, but I've enjoyed the polyphasic sleeping because it's given me that same sense of focus that training does. Staying awake the full two hours until the next nap, at times, felt similar to staying focused through the remainder of an interval workout. I can't do interval workouts now, but I can do this. And the extra hours are nice to have. Overall, I think I'm averaging about three hours of sleep a night. Normally, I do terribly with low sleep. If I go more than two days without an eight hour night of sleep I degenerate very quickly. It seems absurd to be sleeping about a third of normal and still feeling good. I don't know whether it will persist, though.
I hadn't been running at first, but I've run twice now, and felt good each time. I'm still worried about my hamstring, of course.
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