Sunday, August 25, 2013

Polyphasic Day 6

2013/8/20

Today I had my first missed nap. I was hoping that a 3 hour cycle instead of the 4 would allow more flexibility in case a nap had to be missed. It doesn't appear (at this time) that that's the case.

I hit my 6pm nap as normal, knowing that I was leaving shortly and would be in an environment where sleep was impossible at 9 (this is a weekly event). As usual, I was feeling pretty good about everything. At 9, I felt tired and like I should sleep, but nothing further than that.

At 11:30pm my body reminded me, politely, that it was significantly past the first nap's time and getting close, now, to its successor's time. At 12am I had just barely gotten home so I managed to crash into bed no later than 10 after. I woke up feeling a bit more tired than usual, but I figured 'what the hey' I just missed a whole nap a little tiredness should be normal. Given that I had missed a nap anyway and was feeling pretty tired, I figured I'd throw in an extra nap right away, so took it at 1:30am, half my normal time.

It's now 3:45. I took the 1:30 and the 3:00, and with each nap I'm feeling worse, not better. This is now one of the more difficult nights I've had. It appears that skipping a nap means (at least in feeling) restarting at least some portion of the adaptation schedule. That's very bad.

At this point, I'm planning to continue as normal. I may take yet another nap at 4:30, but either way I figure that next week's skipped nap will be far more informative about how bad a missed nap is.

Later edit: This was the worst night in all of my testing. At 7am my wife woke up, saw what shape I was in, and ordered me to bed. I was too groggy to resist. I slept for 2 hours.

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