Super Sleepy Student

So it's been a little while since I've updated here. This week was not particularly stressful, but for some reason I had issues falling asleep, and as a result I'm very tired. More than half of my 20-minute naps involved no sleep, and twice I woke up after 2 hours in my core nap. On the other side, Tuesday was a bad day, and I missed my morning alarm and my alarm for my mid-afternoon nap, giving me a total of 9 hours of sleep.

It's fascinating how well people can function on very little sleep. I also find it interesting that sometimes we feel more tired after a long rest than a short one. But the purpose of my little self-experiment is to see if polyphasic sleep schedules are sustainable for normal people. There are people out there who do not need to sleep very much at all. This is a very brief article on people like this. Currently I have not found any accounts of normal people sustaining polyphasic sleep for more than a few months. There are several reasons for quitting the cycle. One is that it is simply too much work to keep up. The covers are so warm and cozy. Why would anyone want to leave them. Finding the time to nap can also get very tedious, especially when the rest of the world operates on monophasic cycles. This is especially true for people working. I've put in some thought about how I'll be able to work this in over the summer, and so far I don't have an answer. I guess I could sleep in the server room... So far at school I've managed to allocate time to nap every day (except this Thursday when physics lab went long).

Baseball, while giving me a schedule, does not provide me with much of a break. At this point I am just hoping to adjust. It's better than last week, but I'm worried about the sleep. I'm coming up on 7 weeks of polyphasic sleep here. It's been tough at times (Tuesday mornings are the worst), and even though I'm pretty tired I have settled into a rhythm. I know my tolerance for missing naps (not high) and I also know that if I just let myself sleep I will be asleep for a very long time (yes, 9 hours is a very, very long time). My goal right now is to finish the quarter like this, but we'll see how that works out.