I have now been sleeping like this for 6 months! Back when I first started I felt that this was a nice sleeping pattern, but you never know if you are really going to keep something up for a long time. Now that 6 months have passed I am still just as enthusiastic about my sleeping pattern and have no intention of going back.

Here is my sleep chart for February:

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

This month was the first month in the past 6 months where I have missed a lot of naps. The main time where this happened was the week starting 11th February:

On the Monday I was meeting someone for a language exchange in town at 7:30pm, so I knew that I had to fit in my nap before then if I didn't want to feel tired. Although I had plenty of time, for some reason I always feel a little bit stressed when I have to go somewhere afterwards and I think this made it a little bit more difficult to sleep. I ended up laying in bed for a long time and only dozing for a while. Despite not having my nap I actually felt fine in the evening so in the end it wasn't a problem.

That night I had a little bit more sleep than usual to make up for the poor nap, but looking back on it that was probably the wrong thing to do as it resulted in another bad nap the following day. Then the next night I was tired so I had a longer sleep at night, then the next day I didn't sleep at all for my nap so I was even more tired, so then I slept even longer ...I think you can see what was happening here!

The problem was that I didn't want to revert back to sleeping monophasically but that is basically what was happening, but I wasn't getting quite enough sleep to go without my nap so I felt a little tired. In order to get back into my sleeping pattern I decided to make sure I didn't sleep for more than 6 hours on the Thursday night as I am sure I cannot survive on just 6 hours of monophasic sleep, and it seemed to do the trick as I managed to have a nap the next day!

I think the main reason that I was naturally going back into a monophasic sleeping pattern is that the optimal time to nap seems to be around 1:00pm when I am working. Each day I felt tired enough to sleep at that time, but by the time I came home I was feeling more awake again and couldn't sleep. 4:00pm is actually an unnatural time to take a nap but it just about works for me under normal conditions, but as I was getting more sleep at night I was not able to nap at that time.

That weekend was also a new experience for me as we went to London to visit Yu Lee's family, and I decided that it was about time I stopped planning my life around my naps and started planning my naps around my life! I had a driving lesson on the Saturday, and then we had to leave to go to London so in the end I just slept for 45 minutes in the car. This worked well enough, and the next day I went without my nap at the normal time, but I felt tired at 7:00pm so I took it then. I was surprised how easy it was to stay awake for so long without having my usual naps and I think this is something I will be more willing to do in the future.

The next week I did actually manage to sleep every day except Friday, but the quality of my sleep was very poor and I struggled to tell if I'd actually been asleep or not! The only way I knew that I was sleeping is that it felt like I was laying there for 10 - 15 minutes, but when I looked at the clock 45 minutes had passed. This happened throughout the week and then on Friday I didn't sleep at all.

Over the course of the second week of poor napping, I think I realised that my body just wasn't needing as much sleep as usual, so I started sleeping a bit less at night and after that things just sorted themselves out. The following is a graph of my hours of sleep each day for the entire month:

The grey dots in this graph represent the total number of hours that I slept each day, and the blue line shows the same data averaged over a 7 day period. As you can see I slept an average of just over 7.5 hours per day in the first half of the month and just under 6.5 hours per day in the second half. I have no idea why this happened! Looking back over the data for the whole 6 months (you can see the whole graph here: Hours Slept per Day) I have noticed that my total amount of sleep seems tooscillate between 6.5 and 8 hours per day, and in general I have no clue as to why this happens. I seems that this month it went down a little and as I had got into a routine of sleeping at set hours each night it stopped me from napping.

This week things got back to normal again and I have been enjoying some good quality naps. The amount of sleep I've been having has averaged around 6.5 hours in the last week, but I'm sure it will start going back up again soon.

Overall, I feel that I have learnt how to deal with missing naps, and in the future I will find it easier to fit my naps in around my life.

In total I slept for196:36 hours in February which is an average of 7:01 hours per night.