Day 3: A new year, and a new experiment

Well, actually the experiment is essentially the same, but there are many different factors that are helping significantly.

• More conducive schedule
• It's sooo nice to be able to hit the sleeping times pretty accurately. Nothing is better than sleeping when your body is tired.
• More agreeable roommate
• Guess what? What I'm sleeping, he's quiet! Wow. Also, he's generally not in the room anyways.
• An SO
  
• Well, this is actually more of a problem than a good thing. She's pretty cool about everything, but this isn't the most SO friendly thing in the world. However, she does crash with me for my naps when I need them.
• Effective light use
• I love the people at Apollo Health. I have the GoLite P1, and it's been wonderful. Since I already have Seasonal Affective Disorder, and this time of year I'm the same with 4 hours or 10 hours of sleep, this is really useful. I'm planning on getting an M2 before the end of the year, but for now my P1 is good enough. I've been using it for 5-15 minutes after each nap, and it helped my body adjust more quickly.
• Lowering caffeine
• I love caffeine. I drink an average of 6 cups (liquid measure cups, actually 2 of my mugs full) of coffee and up to 6 cans of pop a day. To make the polyphasic sleep work better, I've lowered it to 3 cups of coffee (again, 1 mug) and 3 or so cans a day. I should lower it farther, but for now, I'll be happy with what I have. It's been helping me to sleep when I need to, and oddly enough, I'm more awake when I get up.
• More stuff to do
• I have more stuff that needs to get done. That helps. I have yet another research project, this one is going to be presented nationally at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in California. Weeee.

It's day three, and I've had my first REM cycle. Actually, I think I've had more, but this is the first one that I could feel. I slept at midnight, and couldn't tell if I had or not, so I reset my timer (STUPID), and laid there for a couple minutes and decided I needed to get up. Upon getting up, I felt like it was noon (it was after midnight). This is awesome. Three days, and I'm on it. I've learned that, in fact, once you've done it your body figures it out faster.

Tricks to readjusting:

• Find a schedule and stick to it.
• If you schedule doesn't support it, sorry. Better luck next year.
• Set the timer for 20 minutes. Get up when it goes off. Even if you haven't slept.
• If you do this faithfully (you'll be tired), your body figures out that when it can sleep, it should sleep. So, you sleep. Again, it never really felt like I slept. I'm not as sensitive to it as I was last year. However, I've been feeling more rested getting up than when I go back to sleep and get up. This is consistent with last year.
• Light is good.
• If you don't have an awesome SAD light from Apollo Health (I promise I make no commission and don't work there), just blast yourself with light for the first half hour (at least) after you get up. Once you've done this for a few days, your body gets the idea.
• Darkness is good.
• When you are going to sleep, have it be dark. This gives your body cues as to when it should be sleeping. Also, this is consistent with how you are supposed to sleep. Sleep when it's dark, awake when it's light.
• Keep it quiet
• As I said earlier, people give you weird looks and treat you differently. I haven't told anyone, and I don't expect the people who used to read this to think to look back to it. It's been a year since I posted, they don't remember. This is the opposite of my advice if you're starting. You need someone to help you stick to it when you're first starting, but when you're restarting after a long break, just keep it to yourself until you're on it successfully.

Otherwise, have fun!

Well, I spend way too much time blogging when I'm on this sleep, so I'm gonna head out. I'll update every couple of days as I think of it.