After many years of thinking about it, today is the day I’m going to start a polyphasic sleep pattern.

If you haven?t heard of it before, it’s described on wikipedia as:

Polyphasic Sleep, a term coined by early 20th century psychologist J.S. Szymanski, refers to the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period?usually more than two.

The concept is this:

** Rather than sleeping for 8 hours a night, the body can be trained to sleep in small regular amounts

** These small naps are more efficient than sleeping for 8 hours, so the total time asleep in a day can be reduced.

After lots of research, the pattern I have decided to go for is the Everyman schedule which consists of a core 3hour sleep, followed by 3 equally spaced 20min power naps throughout the day. This should be workable around my normal life to a reasonable extent.

Specifically, I’m aiming for a core sleep from 11pm – 2am, with naps at 6am, 12 noon and 6pm.

I have taken a few days off work to try and get through the initial adaptation period, although whether I’ll make it through the initial few days in one piece or not is yet to be seen.

Right now, before it all starts, I am feeling very nervous about the whole thing. I know I don?t cope well with a lack of sleep under normal conditions, so this experiment will be pushing the limits somewhat.

I have no idea what I am going to learn out of this? but regardless of whether I succeed in getting through this first weekend I’m sure I’ll learn something about my own limits.

This could be an interesting weekend.