My attempt at polyphasic sleep, part 9 - "Task failed successfully, regrouping"

What a big break between updates!

So I have been busy trying a few things, failing most of them - busy with life in general from putting to use what time I have gained until I hit another streak of oversleeps this week. The oversleeps exacerbate with hot weather and dehydration, low electrolytes doing keto, consistent interruptions every time I have to sleep (the situation in my house really sucks at not interrupting me when I'm asleep these past few days) and so on. Mid-cycle wakes have become the norm - it was near impossible to wake after the night core today, took me half an hour and a few microsleeps to realise I'm still not up and out of bed. It's disappointing for sure and clearly a failure to adapt as I cannot seem to control the oversleeps well enough to make more progress. Then again compared to needing 10 hours (12 if interrupted, which is most nights) monophasic sleep to get far less done and feel like dirt, this is some progress at least. Though I feel just as bad as on mono currently, at least I have time to do something being my zombie self from splitting the sleeps.

On top of this trend, today I made the mistake of continuing to try to at least get some light sleep when interrupted by my daughter during my day sleep. It's too easy to oversleep like this - and oversleep I did. At least an hour against my planned time. That's a minimum of three days where every sleep was either an oversleep or an undersleep+oversleep by at least an hour outside of my schedule. No wonder I can barely function today. On the other hand, I am at the point where I can only do the most basic of tasks and even then I take forever from the brain fog and constant microsleeping so not sleeping after being interrupted does not really sound good either.

Since splitting the core sleep, naps are even harder to fall asleep for than on my failed attempt at everyman 3 (and I was ridiculously sleep deprived nearly instantly with E3). Over three quarters of naps mid-day have turned into 90+ minute oversleeps with the rest being no sleep at all - clearly a failure to adapt. I am still working out why exactly this happened - most likely it was all the interruptions, the few days spent doing heavy physical work, and attempting to cut down total sleep time concurrently made it so that I accumulated too much sleep debt too quickly. I stopped fasting and started exercising a little bit more, had a few high-carbohydrate days, all sleep need raisers.

The plan is to recover using a further extended variant and then continue following that, getting 1-7.5 hours of total sleep time across 3 cores or at least 3 naps. Yes, that is a variance of 6.5 hours, this is my life now haha. Minimizing sleep needs has become a question of survival as of today.

Tonight I will go to bed as soon as I finish teaching and not wake up until the kids wake me up in the morning which can be noon for all I care.

Starting tomorrow evening I will sleep segmented 21:00-00:30, 04:00-07:30 two core sleeps for 7 hours total sleep, I will go down for a 20-minute nap if I am interrupted and I feel sleepy, and it is still falls within my scheduled sleep time but will set the full array of alarms at my disposal to make sure I don't oversleep again. This will continue for a week and I will see how I feel. I would rather be fresh throughout my wake time and have less wake time - monophasic doesn't do that for me so a non-reducing poly may just be right.

I will go out of my way to reduce my sleep needs starting Monday:

1. A fortnightly 72 hour salt+water+tea/coffee fast.
2. 20:4 fasting the rest of the time.
3. Only eat my RDA in protein and eat enough fat to stay at maintenance / microdeficit:
• One clean keto-style protein meal per day to get the RDA and free-feed fat like salad with oil or tea with butter (try it, it's awesome), could get some pork belly, the good stuff that's all fat and skin.
• Measure myself at the end of each long fast and see if I need to start changing things to avoid fat gain or excessive weight loss (I can only lose up to 5 more kgs of fat before it turns unhealthy).
  
4. Only do light physical activity:
• Coordination, momentum, and timing over raw muscular strength.
• Work on posture through flexibility not building tons more strength.
• Walking and active sitting whenever not walking.
• "Yoga" (yoga-inspired physical therapy for flexibility and mobility) daily

After restoring my sleep debt I will reassess the situation. Right now the two cores are the most stable sleep times I can afford.