Day 2 - No nap!

Today I was unable to take a nap. I had planned to nap at my usual time of 11:30 to 13:00 but had forgotten about other plans I had made for this time and was unable to find time in the day for a nap.

I am disappointed that I have broken my biphasic sleeping schedule already, however on a positive note it is encouraging to see that I can move a nap or even miss it entirely without being a zombie all day.

Back to sleeping biphasically when my core sleep begins at 2am.

Day 2 - Core Sleep

I went to bed slightly late and didn't fall asleep straight away so I think that I slept from about 03:00 to 08:00, rather than 02:00 to 08:00 as intended. So once again I only got five hours sleep instead of six, however I did not feel too tired though getting out of bed was a bit of a struggle, which leads me to believe that 4.5 hours core sleep should be possible eventually.

The problem with waking at 08:00 is that it is only 3.5 hours away from my 11:30 nap, I might increase this gap by trying to take my nap later, or having my core sleep earlier. Hopefully this will not be too much of a problem though as I plan to change to a core sleep of 02:00 to 06:30 and a nap of 11:30 to 13:00 as soon as possible.

Although I was not incredibly tired, today was definitely more difficult than yesterday. I didn't get much work done between my core sleep and my nap whereas yesterday I felt up to working. Hopefully this will improve in a few days.

Day 1 - Waking from nap

I successfully napped from 11:30 until 13:00 after my core sleep of 
02:00 to 07:00 (which should have been 08:00 as mentioned in my 
previous post). I found it quite easy to fall asleep quickly and slept for 
the whole nap, except for waking up briefly and looking at the time 
approximately half way through. I slept on top of the bed rather than 
getting into bed as I would at night as this made it feel more like a nap rather than a sleep. I may experiment with this as I go.

The next challenge is to stay awake until 02:00, this shouldn't be too difficult as I am used to staying up that late on days when I last woke from sleep much earlier than 13:00! However I will be interested to see how awake I feel throughout the day.

So far I feel as alert and energetic as normal if not more so.

Some of you may be thinking that I am not gaining very much by doing this, after all I still slept for 6.5 hours today, I'm sure a lot of you do this or not much more in one monophasic sleep and feel perfectly refreshed. The main advantage for me though is control over the time I spend asleep, in a monophasic sleep schedule I always slip into sleeping for more than 8 hours and the amount of sleep I get varies each day. Biphasic sleeping will hopefully allow me to regularly sleep for 7.5 hours per 24 hour period, and then maybe even drop to 6 hours.

If I am unable to decrease my core sleep to 4.5 hours then I will either carry on with my current biphasic schedule, or change to a 7.5 hour monophasic schedule and try and be more strict about bed-time and waking-up time!

Day 1 - Waking from core sleep

I had been worried that I would be simply too tired and comfortable to get out of bed at 8am without a reason to do so other than the prospect of becoming biphasic, I thought I might oversleep...however I actually had the opposite problem! I underslept!

This is a bit embarassing but I will have to admit my mistake. I got back from a holiday abroad yesterday, a holiday to a country in a time-zone one hour ahead of England...and forgot to update the time on my phone...which I used as an alarm. Meaning that I got out of bed at 8am as planned, got ready, then realised it was actually 7am! I decided to just stay up rather than risk going back to bed for a short sleep and end up oversleeping, though of course this meant that I got 5 hours sleep instead of 6, not a multiple of 90 minutes as planned.

I'm now very curious to see what happens when I attempt a nap this afternoon. I doubt that getting just five hours sleep in one night will have a massive effect on me, especially not on the first day, I have no idea whether I will be able to fall asleep for my nap but I will try.

I'm still not sure when to take my nap. I want it to be reasonably far apart from my core sleep in order to give me a sensible amount of waking time between sleeps, however my schedule varies depending on the day of the week so there is no 1.5 hour block in which I am always available. I will therefore need to adjust my nap time slightly each day, I would be able to most closely stick to a nap time of 11:30 to 13:00 with an hour or so adjustment either way depending on the day, however I'm worried that this is too close to my 8am waking up time.

I guess an 11:30 to 13:00 nap wouldn't be so bad if I achieve my goal of changing from 6 to 4.5 hours of core sleep. I could then sleep from 02:00 to 06:30 and 11:30 to 13:00. Giving me 5 hours of waking time between core sleep and my nap and 13 hours between my nap and core sleep. Although 13 hours may be a bit too long, we'll see.

For now I will just see how it goes and take a nap at some point each day even if the time varies quite a bit from day to day.

Biphasic Sleeping - Day 1

Hello and welcome to my blog.

The purpose of this blog is to track my progress in converting from long lie-ins to biphasic sleeping.

What is biphasic sleeping? Most of you have probably heard by now as there are many similar blogs about this subject on the web, and also several websites which explain the concept reasonably well. I'll put up some links to some of the better ones soon. However, for those of you that don't know, biphasic sleeping consists of sleeping in two sessions, one "core" sleep (usually at night) and one "nap" (usually during the day).

I hope that biphasic sleep will allow me to get up earlier and control the amount of sleep I have whilst still maintaining a healthy number of hours rest. I plan to achieve this by sleeping for 6 hours at night (between 2am and 8am) and 1.5 hours during the day, I'm not sure where to place the nap yet and it may have to vary slightly around my schedule, I'll see how it goes.

This schedule would result in 7.5 hours sleep per 24 hours. Not an amazingly low amount, but less than I currently get and I want to start off gently. If this goes well then I may attempt to reduce the core sleep to 4.5 hours, resulting in a total of 6 hours sleep per 24 hours.

I should point out the reasoning behind the lengths of the sleeping sessions, several sources suggest that sleeping in multiples of 90 minutes, ie. naps of 90 minutes or 1.5 hours or 3 hours or 4.5 hours...etc, best suits our natural rythm, meaning that waking at the end of a 90 minute period may be easier than waking half way through a 90 minute period.

I am beginning the schedule tonight, in half an hour in fact when I will take my first core sleep between 2am and 8am. I will update this blog each day in order to record my progress.