Would you?

I think the true test of whether or not someone honestly believes something is good is to ask whether they would encourage their children to do it. This is the question I would pose to other people experimenting with sleep: would you let your kids do it?

I don't know what my answer would be. I would encourage other adults I know to at least try it, particularly if they are having problems with insomnia. With children? I'd be inclined to encourage them to get as much sleep as they want, no more and no less. I don't think I'd actively encourage them to adopt a certain sleep schedule; I would just encourage the healthy habit of sleeping when tired, and getting up and doing something when you wake up. Although I've read claims that oversleeping is a problem, I don't know how much of a problem it is, so I don't know if I'd be concerned about that in children. I would be concerned that undersleeping or not sleeping at night would be bad for one's hormones, but I don't know that polyphasic sleep or getting less than 8 hours sleep at night constitutes undersleeping. In short, I suppose I would trust that their bodies would tell them what was right to do, particularly if they had not been socialized to sleep a certain way or had not experienced insomina-producing anxiety. I would probably encourage sleeping on a schedule, but I don't know that this is necessary or healthy, although most people believe it is. I try to make myself stick to a schedule to combat insomnia and to assure that I get at least some rest.

Would I want to practice polyphasic sleep long-term? I don't know about that either. I think it has its advantages, and it may feel better and better as I get more into it. At the same time, I sometimes wonder if I'll miss the long sleeps that I sometimes have when I have nothing more pressing to do. I think occasional sleeping-in is good, but I don't know that I could do it and still stick with something as strict as most polyphasic schedules. All I can say is that, right now, I'm having a good time experimenting with polyphasic, and the regular napping is better than insomnia or not having enough time to do anything. I'm looking forward to giving it a good trial, and will try to objectively measure its effects after I feel that I've really adapted.

Insomniacal

I still have trouble making myself just go to sleep at night.

What's happened for the last few days is that I will delay going for my core sleep, and end up combining it with the pre-dawn nap. As a result, I'm not getting evenly-spaced rest, and I'm still not learning good napping habits. I'm just having my typical "fail at monophasic" type sleep. What's even odder is that, even with going to bed so late and so tired, I could not fall asleep for more than a half hour. Maybe this is attributable to the bad mood I was in earlier over the amount of work that I have to finish this month. I was gung-ho to get something done, as well, but I came to the point where I was too tired to continue and just needed to rest.

I suppose it's a result of old habits. I want to stay up late and work. Part of the reason for trying polyphasic was so that I could both enjoy staying up late and getting up early, and refresh myself and get some needed breaks during the day, rather than fighting constant tiredness.

If I can make myself stick to any sort of schedule, things will be much better for me. The consistency of rest is something that I need to make long periods of work easier and more productive. So what is my aversion to schedules?

Basically, although I'm feeling tired during the day, I'm not feeling tired at night, not until well after midnight. That's about when I'd feel tired when I was doing monophasic. So, I'm still not over that yet. I don't know whether the solution to resetting my schedule is to stay up and make myself tired and then start taking naps (a way that some choose for adjusting) or start out forcing myself to sleep and wake at the scheduled times until I begin to fall asleep at those times. I had hoped to do the latter, and I'm going to keep trying until I can conclusively say whether or not my schedule will work for me.

It looks like it's going to be a nice, rainy day today, so I'm going to try taking a mid-day nap in my car to take advantage of the cool weather. I've yet to find a spot that's both secluded and comfortable for sleeping indoors.

Nights & Days

One thing that those adhereing to polyphasic sleep often mention is that days seem to blend together when there is no void of sleep to separate one night from the next day. This does seem to be a real -- and interesting -- effect. So, this brought up a question for me: if I became polyphasic, would I still stick to my system of defining nights and days?

My system isn't really revolutionary, it merely addresses what I see as a flaw in our current technical definition of when a day begins. I think this flaw results from the fact that most people aren't awake in the hours after midnight, so they don't give much thought to what they're called.

To me, it simply doesn't feel right that days begin in the middle of the night. It seems to me that mornings, and days, begin at the time that a new day dawns. This might seem like I'm just playing with semantics, but semantics are important. People live and die by semantics. I know basically why it is said that days begin at midnight. This is the time that is typically used to symbolize when the Sun is at the nadir, with noon being the zenith. So, the idea is that a new day begins at the darkest point of the night, just as a new year begins in winter. I can understand that, but this way of thinking has issues.

In addition to this midnight transition just not feeling right, it brings up problems of description. Basically, my gripe is this: if a day begins at midnight, then are those hours after midnight morning or night, and of what day? It just doesn't seem right to call them morning, because morning is associated with dawn and daylight. But if I call them night, this is problematic as well. For example, let's say I told a friend that I had a dream Saturday night. Technically, if Saturday begins at 12 AM, then if I had a dream at 3 AM on Saturday, this would be Saturday night. Yet, in natural language, we would typically describe that as Friday night, and if I said I had a dream Saturday night, someone would be more likely to think it occured at 11 PM Saturday or even 3 AM Sunday. With our current system of defining things, unless the hours between 12 AM and dawn on Saturday would be called Saturday morning, then Saturday night is split in two parts, the hours before dawn and after sunset on that day.

My proposed solution to this problem was that, just as noon and midnight represent the approximate zenith and nadir of the sun, we set the times of 6 PM and 6 AM to represent the average time of sunset and sunrise, and say that one night begins at 6 PM and the following day begins at 6 AM. I have support for this way of thinking: days begin at 6 AM in Groundhog's Day and Majora's Mask. Do you need more evidence than that?

Anyway, I've been pondering if I feel any different about the feeling of when days begin now that I'm regularly awake during those questionable post-midnight hours that seem to be in time limbo. I'm definitely feeling how days seem to be less distinct from each other, and not having any problem with that. I feel like there's less of a disruption and void in the flow of time, although I wouldn't say that days seem to blend together. However, it wasn't just waking up at or after dawn that made me feel like the day begins then. I still stand by my conviction that it's not natural to begin a day in the middle of the night.

Background Continued

As I attempted to research sleep patterns that night, I came across the first mention of Uberman and Everyman that I'd seen. These were mentioned on a website (that shall not be named to protect the guilty) where someone attempts to refute the possibility of polyphasic sleep without really giving any scientific evidence explaining why it's not possible, and also by using some ad hominem attacks against other bloggers who wrote about their failed experiments to transition to a new sleep pattern.

The lack of scientific evidence given in defense of the 8-hour nightly sleep model is common. Those who make these laxidasical arguments often don't directly argue against polyphasic sleep models and don't even seem to realize what they're doing. Instead, what they commonly argue is that sleep deprivation is bad. Well, of course, but no one is proposing that one follow Uberman in order to become sleep deprived; the idea is that one can get by with less sleep if that sleep is taken in little snacks instead of as one big meal. Although the metaphor may not hold here, this is the best way I have come up with for describing the difference between monophasic and polyphasic sleep. I think of sleep as being like eating. It is possible to comfortably live on one large meal a day, provided that this meal is large enough; however, it is not necessary, and one can get by with eating less if one eats more frequently and only when one is hungry. If you try to eat just one meal and make it last the entire day for you, you may end up eating more than you need.

Back to common arguments I've found against polyphasic sleep: they seem to make the assumption that one is choosing between two alternatives, either getting 8+ hours of sleep at night, or being sleep deprived. These arguments don't seem to consider whether it's possible to survive on naps, and indeed, this could be because there is so little research on this subject. Most sleep studies I've read about set about proving that one cannot live without sleep or that sleep deprivation is bad or that one will suffer the effects of sleep deprivation if one sleeps monophasically for less than 6 hours a night. The subject of alternative sleep patterns is hardly broached at all, and most seem to assume that there is no viable alternative.

In fact, one report aired on Sixty Minutes that I've seen referenced a lot, and which I just recently re-watched, starts out making the logical fallacy that 8-hour monophasic sleep is necessary because we do it. I'm not kidding; a sleep researcher went on national television and said that something is necessary because we did it. Now, a statement like that might be acceptable if one were talking about the philosophy of Fatalism, but this sort of argument is not something that one wants to be making in the field of empirical science. Of course, he's not alone. My biggest gripe with contemporary evolutionary theory is that it often seems to rely upon such arguments, in short saying that because we can use X for Y purpose, then X necessarily evolved to serve this purpose. One can talk about something serving a function in evolutionary theory, but unless one is arguing for some kind of deist evolution, where one believes that we evolved according to some sort of plan, there shouldn't be any talk of purpose or necessarily evolving one way or another in evolutionary theory. Belief in atheistic evolution is predicated upon the idea that we evolved from chaos and without design or purpose, so anything that we evolved could just as well be incidental and indifferent or even dysfunctional as it could be functional. To assume that something evolved in the best possible way or to serve a certain purpose is a very wrong-headed way to approach evolution, but this is what many people seem to do. They work backwards by looking at what function something serves in our lives, and then speculating about what factors could have caused it to evolve to serve this function. The assumption is that this function is necessary or good and that we must have evolved to be just this way, when a more plausible truth would be that X evolved incidentally and we adapted it to function Y, or created function Y in order to use X. Humans walk because they have feet; they don't have feet because they walk. This is a distinction which I think is important and which I often see others failing to make. This is purely speculation on my part, but I believe many people are adapting the idea of evolution to the framework which creationism used, and failing to notice that they are doing so. Basically, they are replacing the role of God in creationism with the word evolution. Creationism makes statements like, "We were created with feet so that we could walk;" some evolutionists say things like, "We evolved with feet so that we could walk," not realizing that they are just taking the old framework and inserting a new word.

Anyway, I am critiquing the application of evolutionary theory here, and not the theory itself. I don't really believe one theory is better than another, as any theory about the origin of life seems to be impossible to prove or disprove under our current understanding of the universe. It is just as well to me to say that we were created by a being we can't possess knowledge of as to say we appeared by way of a process we don't possess knowledge of. In the olden days, people kind of explained things they didn't understand by attributing it to the gods anyway. I'm only pointing out that there is a logical fallacy in saying that we appeared incidentally and without design while at the same time saying that we evolved a certain way for a certain purpose. Besides, any speculation on how we evolved and why is merely speculation.

Back to sleep research: The report which I watched starts out with a very encouraging twist of logic in which some scientist (I assume he's a scientist, but evolution help us if he is), says that 8-hour periods of nightly sleep must serve some important purpose, because being unconscious for that period of time at night puts us in a very vulnerable position. Well, this is true that it does makes us very vulnerable, but saying that we do it does not prove that is necessary, nor does it explain why we do it. And the question of the necessity of this sleep pattern is not addressed. He goes on to simply say that, 1) sleep is necessary, 2) sleep deprivation is bad, 3) we function better on adequate sleep, as opposed to undersleeping, and 4) sleeping for 8-hours nightly works. The report does not delve into whether this sleep pattern is instinctual or necessary. It doesn't even appear to consider the question of whether frequent, short periods of sleep are better than long, monophasic periods of sleep. But such reports of this seem to be held up as proper proof that polyphasic sleep is wrong, when the matter isn't even directly addressed.

As far as I know, the 8-hour monophasic sleep is simply a cultural convention. Although I've not yet found anything academic on this matter, I've heard people say that the conventional way we sleep is nothing more than convention, and there have existed cultures that did things differently. The gist of the theory is that it became ingrained in our culture to sleep 8 hours during the darkest period of the night in order to make the most of daylight work hours and to be able to work long shifts without a nap break. In short, it's like eating a huge breakfast so that you don't have to eat the rest of the day. Because we are trained from infants to adapt to monophasic sleep, and our whole culture functions on this style of sleeping, it's something that is ingrained in us -- but not necessary.

Even if we evolved to sleep a certain way and it's instinctual, this does not mean that it must be so. I can imagine reasons why we might incidentally evolve to sleep this way. In the days before electric light and 24-hour stores, there was really little advantage to staying up and working during the night. It was a time to socialize and rest, because you couldn't really do anything else. And, when your alternatives are trying to work by candle-light or rest, it makes sense to aggregate all of your resting time into one monophasic period that fills the darkest hours of night. Again, this would allow you to wake at dawn and take the best advantage of daylight hours, working through them without any sleep. But this does not mean we must be this way today, unless there's just some mechanism in humans which causes them to suffer and die if they deviate from the schedule sleeping 8 hours in the dark of night, sort of like how a Vulcan will die if he doesn't return home on a regular basis. And claims that we have to sleep a certain way or else seem just as odd as that. I've been looking for research that proves this, and I'm not finding it. All I'm finding is that sleep deprivation is bad for you -- but proponents of alternative sleep patterns claim that they aren't sleep deprived, and that there are ways to function well, perhaps better, without one long chunk of sleep.

For the reasons outlined above, I'm willing to believe that their claim is plausible, unless I see evidence otherwise. I will continue to search for it, but right now, I'm willing to conduct my own experiments in sleep, because I'm convinced that there's at least a strong possibility that I can change my schedule without suffering serious consequences. Because sleep seems to be an individual and subjective thing, this may be the only way to find out what works for me and what doesn't. So, here is the frame of mind I'm in as I've been conducting my experiment. Next time, I'll write more about the beginnings of my experiment, and my current schedule.

First Post, Wherein Xialuote Gives Some Background to the Blog

I've been experimenting with sleep patterns for a few days now.

Last Thursday (or would you say the Thursday before last? I'm always confused by these terms), after yet another night of attempting to stay up to complete an assignment, followed by a day of sleep deprived haze, I was attempting to find some amusements before bed, because I was basically too tired to sleep. This is a state I've found myself in many times before. After a day of fighting to stay alert, fueled by the adrenaline rush of meeting a deadline at the last minute, I was feeling wired that night. When I'm sleep deprived, it's like being high and hyper. I get to a point where I know I'm dead-tired, but I feel great anyway. I don't want to sleep.

I was hunting on YouTube for something to watch to try to calm down before sleep. I'd lately been looking for episodes of Pete & Pete (one of the best shows ever), and I came across the "Nightcrawlers" episode, which is about younger Pete's attempt to stay up for 11 days straight. Fun episode. Anyway, while watching it, I glanced through the comments, and came across a thread wherein a few folks were discussing sleep habits. One mentioned something about the famous rumors that Einstein had an odd sleeping pattern wherein he worked for a few hours and slept for a few, rather than being monophasic. Now, this wasn't my first time hearing something like this. Occasionally, such rumors crop up, but they never seem to be substantiated. I vaguely remember the episode of Seinfeld wherein Kramer attempts to follow a plan of taking short naps every few hours, because some historical figure was said to do it. And he failed. Such claims that someone actually did this always seem to be unsubstantiated, and short attempts to duplicate them fail when someone gets tired and gives up after a day or two, declaring that there's no benefit to this sleep pattern, because they were tired after trying it for a while. Obviously, it goes against everything that's natural, right?

At this mention of the idea this night, however, my curiosity was engaged. I began pondering the possibility of alternate sleep patterns with more than passing interest. I thought about the implications for my own life, should such a pattern be possible. I suppose it took considering this idea in the frame of mind I was in to really catch my attention. Throughout my teenage years, I had done a very loose and inconsistent free-running sleep. I slept when I felt like it and for as long as I liked. Sleep was a nice pastime when I was tired and had nothing else to do, and I often looked forward to it. I slept all night if I felt like it, I slept from morning to night if I felt like it, I napped when I was tired. I slept on my bed, on my couch, on my closet floor, on the floor in front of the TV. I just basically did whatever felt right at the time, and got up when I either had something to do or no longer felt tired. The idea that I could get more out of sleep or have a more practical application of it wasn't a concern.

However, when I began a busy schedule at college, sleep deprivation was no longer a novelty. It was a real concern for my health. I began having fits of depression as a result of both being sleep deprived and not having time to do the non-school-work activities that I wanted to do. Nothing sucks like trying to be monophasic and either not having the time or failing to fall asleep due to stress. And I never got used to having to quit what I was doing for the night and go sleep for 9-10 hours (about the time I have to sleep in order to feel well-rested with monophasic sleep, especially when I'm sleep-deprived and not on a regular schedule). I often couldn't make myself do it, and ended up staying up too late trying to cram in a few hours of Stuff I Wanted To Do and then getting a short and crappy sleep that left me feeling tired and depressed. It was really irritating to think about how I'd have to stop in the middle of what I was doing and go sleep for 9 hours and then wake up in a totally different state of mind.

I had gone through whole months where I was very sleep-deprived and extremely unhappy about it. It hadn't occurred to me during that time that there was some alternative to sleeping at night that could work, and as a result, I had many days where I stayed up most of the night and day while trying to complete some project. It left me feeling horrible about everything, especially my failure to have a regular, healthy sleep schedule. I felt like I was killing myself because I was either too stressed or too busy to get in a solid 8 hours of sleep. I tried different things to try to do it, but even if I cut out extra-curricular activities, I still could barely finish what I wanted to in a day and then have time to relax and hibernate for 8-9 hours. I felt like a miserable failure and didn't understand why others could do it but I couldn't.

There are a myriad of reasons why, at that moment and ever since, something -- anything -- other than trying to be monophasic and failing looked appealing. And I finally decided to investigate and try to get some conclusive information on whether or not anyone had successfully slept polyphasically (a term I'd soon learn) for any period of time and whether it could work for me. My journey began here.

To be continued in tomorrow's post.