Biphasic Sleep Journal

Hello,

Today, I will be starting my journey with Biphasic sleep. For those who don't know, normally you sleep monophasically, or once every 24 hours. This means, of course, that Biphasic sleepers sleep two times in a 24 hour period. The schedule I'm using is as follows:

2:00am - 6:30am - Core Sleep
7:00pm - 8:30pm OR 7:30pm - 9:00pm (not sure which) - Nap

This gives me a grand total of 6 hours. The benefits of this are numerous. Firstly, I normally got 7.5 hours, so this saves 1.5 hours per day. Also, even IF I did get 7.5, I was groggy. If I got 6 hours monophasically, forget it. After only one day of that I was definitely going to fall asleep at some point during the day. However, with Biphasic sleep, I expect to be totally alert and awake, which will save me tons of time, but will allow me to stay alert enough to do any task.

The reasons I chose Biphasic sleep are that I still go to high school, and I am 15. As far as high school, I simply cannot take a nap (even 20 minutes) during school, so everyman and uberman are out of the picture. Also, only 2 hours (or 3 hours) are not good for the body of a growing kid. :) Perhaps when I'm older I might switch to everyman, but for now I am content with the benefits of Biphasic Sleep.

I will keep a progress log of the first 30 days of Biphasic Sleep, and then will report a final analysis. I hope you guys enjoy, and if you have any questions, please feel free to let me know!

Also, I forgot to add, but for those who don't understand how it works, it goes a little something like this. When we sleep, we go through different cycles before reaching the major restorative sleep, or REM. When we use a Biphasic Sleep cycle, during the 1.5 hour nap, we fall directly into REM, giving us a full 90 minute cycle. Also, we enter it much more quickly in the core sleep. That being the case, we need less sleep since we do not have to go through all the other cycles.

Thanks for reading!
Brandon

5/26/08 - Day 1

Today I will start sleeping Biphasically. Tonight, I will go to sleep at 2:00am and wake up at 6:30am. This will, of course, leave me extremely tired during the day, but that is to be expected during the adaption phase. At 7:00pm tonight night I will take my first nap till 8:30pm.

I expect to have adapted to this new schedule in about 2 weeks, but only time will tell.

Update - 6:37am:
I just took my first core sleep of 4.5 hours. I'm pretty tired, but it's not unbearable. I most certainly woke up at the end of my cycle as I was able to jump out of bed before 6:31! I don't think I'll have a problem staying awake today, but I'll update during mid-day. I had no trouble getting to sleep or getting up, so that's a good sign. So far so good and I'm quite confident.

Update - 9:46am:
I thought I'd be feeling really tired right now, and would have crashed. I'd assumed I would be nodding off. On the contrary, however, I'm feeling great! I think waking up at the end of my cycle really helped because I'm not tired at all. My eyes aren't heavy either. We'll see if this holds up until my nap at 7:00pm.

Update - 1:01pm:
I just got out of the shower and I'm feeling great. Though I wasn't particularly tired before the shower, I feel even better now. I have no doubts that I will be able to stay up until my nap.

For some reason, I can't edit that post so I'll continue here.

Update - 9:15pm

I just woke up from my 1.5 hour nap about 15 minutes ago. I feel groggy, but I know that is because I just woke up. I still feel like I'll easily be powered until my core sleep at 2:00am. So far the schedule is looking great, and I'm certainly not as tired as I though I'd be.

Edit - It's now 9:50 and like I suspected, the grogginess feeling has all but totally gone away. I feel great, and I'm sure I'll last the rest of the night.

I practiced biphasic sleep during my track season at school, but I never really found it quite as satisfying as a full night's sleep. I would get 4.5 hours core, 1.5 hours nap. I also didn't find myself falling directly into REM sleep.

I don't believe you are supposed to get a full 90 minutes of REM sleep in the nap period. I thought the REM phase was only about 20 minutes, so what you're doing is just going through 1 full sleep cycle, which is typically 90 minutes.

What I noticed when I did biphasic sleep was that I would feel a lot better during the night time (after my nap), but during the day, especially the first few hours in the morning, I would still feel slightly drained.

I noticed what you did. (I continued on, but didn't post) but I have stopped now. I realized that 1, I wasn't always fully rested, and 2 it was so inconvenient for my schedule. Perhaps I will start it up again when my schedule will give me time, but I doubt it.