After The Second Nap - Thoughts on Sleep Deprivation

Alright, napped second time now. I actually didn't sleep much more than 20 minutes. But that's okay since I overslept the first one.

I actually feel pretty good. I'm refreshed despite I felt at the moment I awoke that I hardly had put my eyes close.

So it's Day 1.2 now for me using the normal formatting for polyphasic sleep.

My main point of this point is to reflect on some of my earlier experiences on sleep deprivation. I'd guess I have more experience on it than average person. Starting around 7th grade I really didn't like sleeping. On schoolday's I might have gone nights with three hours of sleep and at the end of the week the accumulated sleep could've been something like 30 hours - half of that on the weekend. It's not that I naturally sleep little, since now that I've slept as much as I want I've been sleeping around 9-10 hours every night. People thought that I'm insane and I were. The point of this is that I handled it pretty well - I got good grades etc.

When I got older, I started to appreciate sleeping more, but after school I still had to handle army before starting to sleep as much as I please. In the army there was many camps where we had to handle sleep deprivation. I remember one week when I slept all together about 10 hours. Everyone was pretty zombified after that, including myself.

After army and after failed attempt to get into university, I had finally time to sleep all the time. Like I said, I usually sleep 9-10 hours a night. So no chance of sleep deprivation? Wrong answer. I have huge problems in mantaining a regular sleeping pattern when I have no reason to get up early in the morning. I might start waking up eight in the morning, but sure and steady my sleep will drift and in the end I'm sleeping the time between 6-16. That's messed up. When I reach that point, I'll usually reset my cycle by staying awake for straight 24 hours and going to sleep after 16 or something. Return to the start point and repeat. What this means is that I'll stay awake for straight 24 hours at least once a month. It's a piece of cake for me now, I'm so used to it.

We had LAN party last fall, and I happened to go through the end point of the cycle once again. We usually stay up 'til after midnight playing, so I couldn't go to sleep on my usual time, somewhere between 18-21. I ended up staying awake straight 28 hours and then slept 6 hours. Then on the last two days we decided not to bother going to sleep last night. So we all played the last 25 hours straight! If I remember correctly, my sleep the night prior the LAN Party had been inadequate too. So that's pretty intense sleep deprivation there! When I got home I obviosly passed out pretty quickly.

What the point of this post is basicly that I should have the means and experience to handle the sleep deprivation I get in adaptation phase. I know that this will test my willpower, but staying awake 6 hours straight doesn't seem that hard. We'll see. I think that the bigger challenge for me is not to oversleep (my phone's alarm has let me down many times.. Perhaps I should have backup plan).