Saturday, June 16, 2007

"Rebooting" Your Sleep

A number of polyphasic sleepers beleive it's good to have a "reboot" sleep once a month or so on a polyphasic sleep pattern. So, having been on Everyman a little over a month now, and being a little frustrated with the final patch of morning tiredness we've been unable to get rid of, we decided to have a planned reboot this Saturday morning.

My understanding is that a reboot is a little different to a "crash", which many people experience during adaptation to a polyphasic schedule. A "crash" is unplanned and basically involves falling asleep by accident and then waking up many hours later (even up to 9 or 10) wondering what happened and feeling deeply demoralised. A reboot is planned and forms a regular part of your long-term schedule. The supposed benefits are based mostly on the fact that test subjects on Uberman actually exceeded their pre-polyphasic alertness and reasoning scores for some time after a reboot (after merely matching them previously), and that many successful polynappers have monthly reboots built into their schedule.

In any case, we took our regular core sleep (1-4am) and added on our first "block" of awake time to the end (4-8am), giving us 7 hours overall. 7 hours, of course, is actually still less than a standard monophasic nightly sleep for most people, but compared to the polyphasic schedule it felt like heaps. The extra hours were very nice (as sleeping in always is), and we obviously felt more awake getting up at 8am rather than 4am, but we'll have to wait and see what effect it has over the next day or two. We'll still be having our usual naps today, and we got up and about the time we'd usually finish our 8am nap, so we're hoping to get the benefits without seriously disrupting our schedule.

Will update at the end of the day :)

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