January was my fifth month of biphasic sleep. Here is my sleep chart for the entire month:

If you want to view this chart with all of the mouse over comments go here: JanuarySleep Chart.

A couple of interesting things happened this month. First of all as you can see, the month started off with a very strange night's sleep on New Year's Eve due to an extremely loud house party next door. I was worried this would mess up my sleeping pattern, but as you can see I got straight back into the next day.

The second thing that happened this month is that I got ill in the middle of the month and ended up taking 4 days off of work. It was nothing serious, and surprisingly I didn't need any extra sleep, but due to the fact that I'd taken so much time off work my sleeping pattern changed slightly and I ended up napping around midday for over a week. This wasn't really a problem (in fact it feels better to be able to nap around the middle of the day) but it did make it harder when I went back to work as my body was used to falling asleep in the middle of the day. I had quite a few days where I felt very tired in the afternoons at work and found it more difficult to sleep after work.

On Friday 25th I had to stay late at work for something so I took a 2 hour lunch break and tried to go for a nap then. In the end it didn't really work very well. Every day that week I had felt really tired at lunch time, but that day was different and I felt a lot more awake and in the end I didn't really sleep for my nap. I think it was a combination of not feeling as tired, and feeling stressed that I only had a limited amount of time to nap. There's something a little bit stressful about napping with an alarm that makes it harder to fall asleep: you keep thinking to yourself "I only have 1.5 hours left, so if I don't fall asleep soon I will not have enough sleep and I'll be really tired."

Due to missing my nap my sleeping pattern got a bit messed up and I ended up going to bed at 7:30pm and waking up at 11:30pm. I then slept twice for a couple of hours during the night and I was alright afterwards, but I felt very tired all morning until my second nap at 9:20am.

The final thing that happened this month is that I had a 4 day Oracle training course in Central London, and spent 4 nights staying in North London with my girlfriend's mum. Each day I would get home after 5:00pm which is about an hour later than when I am working, and this obviously had a bit of an effect on my sleeping pattern. I did manage to nap most nights but it took me a little longer to fall asleep than usual, and also meant that I woke up from my nap, had a cup of tea, ate dinner, chatted for a while and then went back to bed for the night. I only had about 3 hours awake between my nap and my night's sleep.

One night I really couldn't sleep for my nap but I laid in bed for almost an hour before giving up. In the end I went to bed a little early (at 9:30pm) and only had 6.5 hours sleep which worked well as I was only slightly more tired than usual the next day and easily got back into my routine.

Overall I slept a total of 216:42 hours in January, which works out to 6:59 every day. Interestingly this is half an hour less per day than in December, and I'm not really sure why I need less sleep now.