#polyphasic sleep

Would you call this 8 hours of sleep?

This is a list of things I've been telling myself that I commented on a friend's post asking for help. I hope this helps!

- Your health is so important. That means eating right and enough food.

- 5 minutes of exercise is better than no minutes of exercise. Same goes for meditating.

- Naps. Basically mandatory if you're not getting 6 hours a night minimum. I spent years obsessing over polyphasic sleep (look it up but PLEASE do NOT try Uberman you'll be worse for it, you need long sleep periods) and am thinking about pulling it again at least until I'm caught up on my work

- Know your limits and be blunt as fuck in enforcing them. You don't have time to humor every conversation. Don't. It's not offensive.

- Find the people who get this. They're going to be your lifeline and the most stable source of social interaction bc they respect your time needs. If you want to study with friends, only study with people who can respect your need to focus and have similar goals.

- I posted this as a status bc personal turmoil but: If completing some task requires you to sacrifice an important aspect of your humanity (e.g. relationships, sanity, health, reasonable pursuit of interests), that task is not worthy of completion.

- Break, or break down. You HAVE to take breaks and you CAN do them productively. I've been giving myself intentional 20-minute video game breaks and it saves my sanity and speed the rest of the day.

- Be very very mindful of your use of caffeine and other substances. Take breaks from it when you can, like weekends.

- You're going to have to make uncomfortable decisions when prioritizing your time. Unfortunately, the grade comes first, holistic learning second. It fucking sucks but we can go back and read the supplemental materials when we're not drowning.

- Really really nitpick your time. I've been trying to change so that in every moment where I'd check social media, I instead read a little bit of my ebook or check my email or do something productive. Again, we're still gonna take breaks in the day, but intentionally. Save social media for wind down and maybe wake up time only. (Seriously this is tough but HYPER STREAMLINE YOUR USE OF TIME)

- Again like.... Your humanity is the most important thing. Maintain your social relationships. Just chunk and truncate your time as efficiently as possible.

- That being said, get really good at excuses to get out of conversations.

- NAPS. 10-40 MINUTE NAPS.

- Love. Find why you love what you're doing and let that help fuel you. I know this might not happen but it's worth mentioning.

Okay, so, yesterday ended up somewhat weird. I unintentionally ended up sleeping 2 hours at night (making me late to work), then about another fifteen minutes later in the day, probably around 4:30 pm. Both times, I woke up energetic after falling asleep very drowsy.

I think I accidentally did a polyphasic cycle.

Polyphasic sleep is something I've been wanting to implement in my own life ever since I heard of it, but given that I'm a heavy sleeper (I don't wake up to alarms easily) I've had trouble getting my body to engage in a polyphasic sleep cycle.

Now, by luck, I have been given a golden opportunity. My sleep has lightened enough that I can wake to alarms. I know for certain because I have just woken from a 2 hour sleep phase to my alarm :3

I am drowsy, but I am waking up by the minute. I think I can pull this off. I plan to sleep another hour phase after my 7-3 shift today. I've never really been good at recalling my dreams, so I can't clearly identify how much REM sleep I'm getting out of my 2 hours, but going by how much I have sweat in my sleep, I'd say the ratio is much more REM than NREM.

I don't know why it happens, but I know for certain that every time I have dreamt and recalled it, I have woken up very sweaty. I believe that is enough correlation for me to track REM, but I would definitely be open to other sleep tracking methods.

Anyway, personal updates out of the way, I actually haven't done much more work on the song. Yesterday I had an issue for the first little bit where Audacity just would not play audio. The problem persisted through a re-install of the program. It was very frustrating, especially considering the solution ended up just being to restart my laptop. I tried everything else I could think of for an hour and a half before that. It's infuriating.

Anyway, it's working now, and I plan to work on it now in the few hours before my shift. Gods, I'm going to be so insufferable about finally being able to pull off polyphasic sleeping, like:

I no longer have any concept of the "day" as you know it, I have simply transcended such trivial metrics.

I am just so ecstatic I finally managed it.

Anyway, one of the things I did manage last night was getting an outline for lyrics made. I need to review and revise it, but having something is incredible.

i accidentally began a polyphasic sleep schedule that is not one of the normal options and i can't undo

i'm sleeping for four hours at night, 3-4 in the morning, and 3 in the evening

i want to sleep 8 hours but i keep waking up after 4

the depression has increased since starting this routine

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