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Polyphasic Sleep

Polyphasic quittin’ time

By Sarah Lewis ⋅ November 29, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

I quit last night. (Yes, even after suggesting that I’m more disciplined than that in my last post. I think God probably laughs and laughs when I make such arrogant comments.)

It’s kind of sad to find out that I’m a quitter (especially after this year’s NaNoWriMo) but apparently it’s true. There were a number of factors; I had been mildly sick the first night, and last night I was worse (upset stomach, hot-and-cold, racing heart). The heart thing worried me more than just being sick. The other main factor is that I am a social creature who is mostly alone for my waking hours; it eventually occured to me that perhaps adding more waking hours to be alone in front of my computer doesn’t really accomplish a lot—it mostly just makes me lonely. Couple that with the fact that I don’t even get to sleep with my husband, and it’s a lot less appealing.

So there you have it. Will I try it again? Possibly, when Daniel can do it at the same time. More time with him would be a serious benefit. More time by myself is just more of the same. I think that I also don’t really have a need to make it work, so I’m not as motivated as, say, an overloaded college student. So I guess either serious need or serious benefits would spur me on to do it (but even then, only if my health stays stable).

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Discussion

9 comments for “Polyphasic quittin’ time”

  1. You’re a baby ;-).

    Posted by Evan | November 29, 2005, 10:30 am

  2. Sad but true. I’m also a whiner. :)

    Posted by Sarah | November 29, 2005, 10:33 am

  3. i don’t think you are a quitter. the heart racing thing is scarey. you tried it, which is more than i would have done!

    Posted by jennifer | November 29, 2005, 10:45 am

  4. Sweet. I just ran across Pavlina’s site and I thought “this concept is way cool - I wonder how many folks can pull it off?” A few clicks later I found your post (love it when that happens). Sorry to hear you gave it up but at least you tried!

    I’ve heard smoking cat nip can really improve your mood? Try that one and let us know how it works.

    Posted by Ned | November 29, 2005, 7:47 pm

  5. I was looking forward to hearing if you had weird dreams… I under stand the feeling of why have extra time if you just have to spend it with yourself.

    Posted by Janell | December 5, 2005, 9:20 pm

  6. Well, I just dreamed about buying burritos… does that count for anything? :)

    Posted by Sarah | December 6, 2005, 5:41 am

  7. Sure! That is rather amusing.

    Posted by Janell | December 7, 2005, 6:38 pm

  8. Blast–every time I hear about this, it’s always about how people _aren’t_ doing it. I want to try it, but I can tell it would be immensely difficult.

    Posted by Phil | January 25, 2006, 4:31 pm

  9. Ooh boy. After reading Christiane Northrup’s book on Menopause, and hearing first hand about some of the sleep research hinted at there, I took the opposite tack. Bedding down each night for 8 solid hours.
    Here’s the hypothosis on which medical researchers are working, in my own very non-scientific terms. They suspect that the body does “light housekeeping” chores during the first few hours of sleep. You know, the kind of dishwashing and wiping down the counters kind of cleaning. However, in the second 4 hours, if the body comes to know it will have the time to finish, it breaks out the heavy tools and gets to work on some heavy chore like our washing windows or strip waxing the floor. In the bodies case, this would be repairing a tear in the liver or taking out that metastic growth that has started up on one lung. If we don’t regularly provide this rest, the body skips the heavy chores until later. The problem is, if we have short sleep cycles and interrupted sleep from illness or upset, the heavy cleaning never gets done. We all know what happens to a house without repairs.
    I enjoyed visiting! I’m from LinkedIn Bloggers.

    Posted by Laura | March 2, 2006, 5:50 am

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