Sleep

I have been wondering a lot about sleep recently. After a couple of days training and using far less willpower than I was expecting, I now jump out of bed as soon as my alarm goes off. At the moment I’m letting it wake me up at 7 or 7.30 and, provided I have a short sleep around 2pm, I feel alert all day and can even stay up just as late as before. It seems quantity of sleep is not hugely important (within reasonable boundaries) and this means

1. Sleeping later in the morning is not going to make me feel less tired during the day, I am just putting off the inevitable difficulty.
2. There isn’t really any need to go to bed early in order to wake up early.

Bearing these in mind, I have been considering switching to a polyphasic pattern of sleep. It’s one of these things I would love to try at some point in my life, and there is no better time than university during which to do it. As a student my day is very flexible, as long as I attend the compulsory lab sessions and tutorials, the rest of the time is my own. I am meant to do a certain amount of reading and preparation work, but I can do that whenever I want. At present the hardest day to get through on polyphasic sleep would be Tuesday, since I have a 1 hour tutorial, 3 hours of labs, a 1 hour break, another 1 hour tutorial and then 2 hours of lectures. That means that on those mornings I need to be awake and alert between 9am and 1pm, plus time for walking, and in that one hour break I would have to get to college, have a sleep, have lunch and get back to the department in 1 hour.

That being the most difficult period of the week, I do think this is possible and so I am going to work towards switching to it over the course of the rest of this term. I’ll keep you informed.

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