Click here to learn about becoming a Project Sleepy sponsor for as little as $25...

ProjectProjectProjectProjectProjectProjectProjectProject Project SleepySleepySleepySleepySleepySleepySleepySleepy Sleepy

It's late, or early, depending on how you look at it.

I thought maybe I would write something since it's been a while without an update on my part, but I'm finding my brain is rather clouded right now. I'd say I feel about like the second day or third day into the sleep schedule adjustment - probably due to some oversleeping. Let's see if I can't think about what we've discovered so far.

I guess first and foremost is that oversleeping is the worst thing you can do and the thing you want to do most. I do not think there is a single more powerful force that I've experienced in my entire life than the urge to hit snooze when waking up from a nap. Through trial and error we discovered that it's more than just the twenty minute nap length that helps adaptation.

In order to try and alleviate exhaustion, both Mike and myself ended up trying to take a cluster of naps, each twenty minutes in length, within a few hours. More like a cluster fuck of naps. While it felt good to get the extra sleep, it eventually ended with both of us oversleeping by several hours, since it's hard to focus long enough to set an alarm for twenty minutes in the future when you're super groggy, much less do it several times successfully.

I'm starting to think that the extreme exhaustion that comes with holding strictly to only six (maybe seven) twenty minute naps is not just an unwanted side effect of adapting to the sleep schedule but in fact the very device that makes adaptation possible. It definitely makes the switch a very potent test of will power and resiliency in the face of failures and mistakes, usually in the form of oversleeping or say, getting blam-hammered at tailgating.

To that end, it would seem that each time I oversleep I'm only extending the period of exhaustion and delaying the adaptation to the uberman schedule. It's strange that I've been aware of this idea for some time, but writing it out definitely reinforces the soundness of the concept and as I type I feel a strong need to redouble my efforts to hold a strict schedule in order to more quick break through the exhaustive adaptation.

Both of us have also discovered that naps can be readily characterized along two polar opposites in terms of effectiveness, restfulness and rejuvenation.

On one end is a nap that feels like it didn't happen at all. It seems in nature as if I lie down in bed and instantly am awoken again. Sometimes it just seems like I'm awoken without having laid down or slept at all. Invariably when this happens I wake up confused and disoriented, of foul temper and extremely tired.

The opposite end is much rarer: a nap that when awaking feels like I've overslept by quite some time, but often is in fact shorter than the twenty to twenty five minutes we've been giving ourselves before the alarm. I awake alert and energetic, and it seems like I've slept a matter of hours rather than minutes. In my recollection these naps are always accompanied by vivid dreaming, and if I do remember correctly, waking not from slumber but as a natural transition from an active dream state.

There is then two archetypal naps: one which felt like it didn't happen and which leaves you exhausted, often worse than you felt when you laid down, and one which felt as though it lasted for a long time and gives a tremendous rebound in energy and mood. Naturally, there are naps which fall somewhere in between.

It's my nap time now, since Merps just got up. We've been sleeping in shifts to try and minimize the oversleeping, since the times where we've overslept by hours and hours has always been when we both went down for naps.

I'll finish with a little speculation: it seems to me that polyphasic sleep works as an edge condition. It may be required that you are pushed to the limit of exhaustion where staying awake seems no longer possible and there find yourself on a plateau. This edge plateau requires rigidity in sleeping since to push any further into fatigue would result in completely involuntary collapse as per regular extended sleep deprivation, and to relax away from the strictness of the sleep schedule results in constant torpor, such as when one goes for a long period when getting little sleep on a monophasic schedule. The key seems to be that with the disciplined sleep patterns you can walk the edge between weariness, fatigue and a necessitated large period of recovery sleep while avoiding all the ill effects that would normally beleaguer someone only receiving two or three hours of sleep per day.

To be geeky, it's like many strange edge conditions that exist in physics: Bose-Einstein condensates, super fluids, super conductivity or other weird things which I could think of a second ago while writing the previous paragraph but now escape me.

To wit: It's nap time! Huzzah!