Polyphasic vs. Monophasic Deathmatch

Ok, I just added the “Deathmatch” to make this seem a little sexier. It’s been 4 nights or so on monophasic sleep and I feel like I have a good basis to compare them.

Overall, there are some pretty big surprises. The most significant is that I’m back to sleeping a full 8 hours. The first night I slept only 5 hours, but from there it ramped up. What? I was totally expecting raw food to pull through for me here. I also feel more tired during the day! It’s only been a few days, so maybe I need more time to adjust, but so far I feel like I’m less alert.

The best part about monophasic sleep, not surprisingly, is that my day is uninterrupted. This gives me a lot of freedom to do whatever I want during the day without worrying about a nap. I still occasionally think “Wait… when’s my next nap?”. Right now I live about 15-25 minutes North of most activities. If I want to take a nap at home and come back, that’s 1 hour to 1:40 of driving time I have to factor in. Because of this I would often have dinner with friends but then go home instead of going out. I would also schedule things at strange times to avoid messing up my naps. Occasionally I would throw caution to the wind and skip naps or push them around, which would inevitably mess up the schedule.

Another surprise is that I don’t have enough time anymore. The days seem to fly by and often times at night I get frustrated knowing I have to sleep and stop whatever I’m doing. When I was polyphasic I felt like I had too much time, but if the alternative is too little time, I’ll take too much.

The quality of my sleep is also far inferior to polyphasic sleep. My naps felt like several hours at a time, involved detailed dreams, and just felt like really deep sleep. Now I feel like I’m bumbling through the night.

Overall, I like polyphasic sleep a lot better. I think I’m going to make plans to move downtown so that it is always convenient for me to leave to take my naps. I also take naps in my car occasionally, but 30% of the time I can’t fall asleep or don’t sleep as much as I would have liked to.

I’m glad that I’ve given monophasic sleep another try, because my motivation to stay on poly was waning. However, now I am pretty convinced that polyphasic is far superior. I’m pretty sure that I can easily switch back to poly, although I wish I had someone to do it with me. It will be interesting to see how hard it is to transition back.