Getting up early and polyphasic sleep.

As whoever read my new year's post knows, I want to readjust my sleep cycle this year.

Last night I was chatting with one of my best friends (at a shameful hour, I admit) and he sent me a link to a blog talking about polyphasic sleep.

I read through most of the posts and found them very interesting.

For those of you who don't know what it is, it's deciding to sleep 20 minutes every 4-5 hours during the day instead of all night. The "important" phase of sleep only lasts like 20 minutes, and you go through several cycles during the night, including unimportant ones, so a lot of the sleep is "wasted".
If you do polyphasic sleep though, apparantly there are no health issues (check the blog out for yourself).

Only problem with it is that it just sounds so abnormal! Being awake while everybody else is sleeping. And don't even think of having a job in an office (this guy works at home).
But as a college student it might be interesting to try.

I don't think I will though.

There was also a post about how to become an early riser.

That's more interesting for me, because it's more "normal" and I do want to be able to be an early riser, especially since this semester my 8:00 classes are actually important.

The method is simple, or so it seems. The idea is to go to bed when you feel tired (you need to jauge this by reading a book- I can already tell that it's impossible when on a computer) and wake up at a fixed hour, and get out of bed exactly when you hear the alarm, avoid the snooze button.

His idea is to "practice" obeying your alarm when you're conscious, that is during the day, to get in the habit of it.
I guess it's worth a shot. If it worked for him, might work for me.

An word of caution though : the other posts on the blog are really weird, almost occult. But the ones about sleep are common sense, so I found them interesting.