More experiments with sleep

This post is more like Part-2 of my experiments with polyphasic sleep. Checkout the older post here.

All I wanted to try this time was to improve the quality of sleep rather than squeezing out more time. This time it was Biphasic- Siesta (6 hrs and 30 mins). A nap of around two hours in the afternoon from 14:00 to 16:00. At night I’ll go to bed around 22:30 - 23:00 and wake up around 02:45. I didn’t stick to a very rigid routine. Instead, I allowed a variability of ~25mins.

This is how my Google fit data for a month looks like. Two dashes of purple to indicate the two different sleep times.

https://i.imgur.com/oXlmA6K.jpg

The missing data points are the result of not plugging in the phone before going to sleep or completely forgetting to use the sleep tracking feature.

Note: I use Sleep as Android app to track my sleep. I have a secondary phone (just another outdated android) to do the sleep tracking job. It is perfect for the job as I don’t want a device that is constantly sending out electromagnetic waves near me when I’m sleeping. We humans can’t do without our phones during the day, we should at least give ourselves a break at night.

Purchasing the full version of the app made it easy to track sleep everyday and upload all the data to the cloud. This also allows us to view how others are doing (no personal data, just statistics)

I also use the smart alarm to wake me up (on the Sleep as Android app), this ensures that I wake up from light sleep and it also wakes me up early if I’ve clocked the required 6hrs and 30 mins of total sleep time. Some days I even took it to 7 hours of total time.

https://i.imgur.com/OO0jeq3.jpg

Here’s a simple log of the data on Sleep Cloud :

https://i.imgur.com/BEv1gih.jpg

The sleep deficit is compared to the standard of 8 hours per day. I don’t think I need 8 hours of sleep a day. I can do with 6 or 7. So the deficit seems to be high in some cases. Deep sleep kept on varying but I did have much higher deep sleep levels than usual. The deep sleep % also depended on the neighbors dog, if at all it decided to make merry with it’s friends at night, my sleep quality would naturally go down.

Couple of weeks into this schedule it was so easy for me to wake up when the alarm rang. I use the QR challenge 😅to wake up. When the alarm goes off, I’ve to get up and turn on the lights, then take my phone and scan a QR code on my table with a very steady hand in order to turn the alarm off. There was no other way to bypass it. I had enabled administrator privileges for the app to stop me from seeking the easy way out.

One day, I decided to try and prove if polyphasic sleep was bringing about any change in my body. So, I decided to fall back to my normal schedule for a day. I loved to give myself a treat of 8+ hours of sleep. I didn’t set an alarm for 03:00, and turned off the smart alarm feature. I woke up normally at around 06:00. To my surprise I found this in the sleep tracking data:

https://i.imgur.com/ZwGg7JH.jpg

Right around the 02:45 to 03:15 time period, I naturally came out of deep sleep. This is the usual time my alarm should have gone off and my body was preparing to wake up at that time. Big enough proof that sleep cycles matter.

Now, after around 4 months of experimenting, I’ve no choice but to go back to the old routine. My classes during the day don’t give me the freedom to take an afternoon nap. 😐