One New Habit a Month Challenge #2: Polyphasic Sleep

Hi all! I'm back. :-) This is my monthly One New Habit a Month Challenge report.

Month #1

From January 19th to February 19th I implemented five new daily habits: dancing for at least 15 minutes a day, walking for at least 30 minutes a day, meditating for at least 5 minutes a day, cleansing and opening my chakras once a day and what I called "spiritual connection", which basically consisted in saying some kind of "prayer".

I'm very, very happy that I started dancing daily! It didn't feel like discipline at all. On the contrary, it felt like giving myself permission to do it, at last. I'm having the time of my life jumping around in underwear, making faces and performing the most insane looking moves in front of the living room mirror. (No, I will not post a picture! :p) Sometimes I dance tango with an imaginary partner, too, and then I feel deeply happy.

At first it was fifteen minutes, then I ignored the timer and kept dancing for thirty minutes. Now it's more like thirty minutes two or three times a day. I just love it. In the morning I want to dance, in the afternoon I want to dance, in the evening I want to dance... I need it. This new habit is an extremely empowering one!

Walking feels more like giving myself permission to go out and walk as well. I usually spend way more than half an hour a day walking. in average about two hours. I've always loved walking. I think I need some more intensive exercise, or else at some point I'll end up spending my entire day walking (and dancing). But until I find an appropriate activity I'll keep walking daily.

The meditation, chakra stuff and spiritual connection habits went fine, but I will skip them this month. Not that I don't like them - I do. But this month I'll be trying out a polyphasic sleep schedule. I suspect this is going to be really difficult (I'm very sleepy right now, for example) and I'm afraid that if I sit down to do quiet things like those three, I'd fall asleep!

Month #2

The time between February 20th and March 19th will be devoted to polyphasic sleep. That's something I've wanted to try out for a long time now.

I seem to gain energy rapidly by sleeping, but also to spend it rapidly when I'm awake. I often sleep only for short times, three or four hours, then I wake up perfectly awake and fit. But then that's not enough for the entire day, so I need to sleep again after a few hours. I naturally tend to sleep two or three times a day. So polyphasic sleep seems appropriate for me.

Now Víkþórr is going polyphasic and I'm spontaneously using this great opportunity to do it too. :-)

I'll sleep max. 30 minutes at a time, and wait 90 minutes between the end of one nap and the beginning of the next one. That's the only rules I want to follow. I'm allergic to schedules and such, so I don't want to have fixed nap times or a fixed number of naps a day. I'll keep it as flexible as possible.

I sleep on the carpet in the living room. I want to avoid the temptation of staying in bed! But sleeping on the floor also is one of my long-term health goals anyway (the other one being washing myself only with cold water) so I'm quite happy about that. I've been sleeping without a pillow for a very long time now and I absolutely love lying on the floor. :-)

So far I've had two naps last night. The first one was very confusing. After the second one, I felt like dying. The only reason I managed to get up was that Víkþórr was counting on me. I'm afraid not to wake up without him. And I dream weird stuff. I'm extremely tired of course.

Wish me luck. :-)