I want to make a couple of observation about oversleeping when adapting to polyphasic sleep. One of them is mainly for other people who may be trying this or thinking about it and the other is a note-to-self.
First, the observation for other people is that I see people who try this beating themselves up when they oversleep. Putting pressure on themselves to keep to the schedule and feeling bad when they don’t. This is not conducive to success in any endeavour - if you send your brain the message that what you are doing causes bad feelings and you’re basically fighting against yourself. Let every part of you be in alignment that you want to give polyphasic sleep a try, have a good reason for doing it so you can easily get all your energy behind your intention, then let it go. If you oversleep that may be part of the process for you - I know when I adapted to uberman before I overslept a lot at first, and I still got adapted in the end. That’s why I don’t get unduly upset when I have an oversleeping incident - sure, I am less than pleased with the last couple of days, and I would prefer to have strictly kept to the schedule, but I have learned (and re-learned) some lessons about factors that are important in making this work. I’m not thinking “man, I’ve overslept again, that sucks, it’ll make it harder for me to adapt” - I’m thinking “wow, I overslept. I’ve learned some lessons about double-checking when I’ve set my alarm for, not drinking coffee and always using my loudest alarm, that’s good because now I know these things it’ll make it easier for me to adapt”.
The second observation is that if I’m not asleep within a few minutes of going for a nap the obvious conclusion is that I’m not sufficiently tired. If this happened when sleeping monophasically it would make sense to delay sleeping by an hour or two, but, for me at least, when sleeping polyphasically it is a bad idea to try and move the naps around. Another possible solution would be to take as much time as needed to get to sleep, then sleep for the scheduled 30 minutes - this is what I have been doing, but since it also leads to napping off-schedule I’m starting to think it’s not a good idea.
The other downside to the approach I have been using is that if it takes a long time, say 30+ minutes to get to sleep, it can lead to spending over an hour in bed, which leads to more tiredness and fatigue when you eventually get up in my experience, since even if I haven’t slept for more than 30 minutes spending that long laying down leaves me drained and unable to immediately get back into a waking, alert frame of mind.
With this in mind I have decided to do the following: I will always set my alarm for 45 minutes from the time that I go to bed for a nap, and I will never set it back further even if I’m having trouble getting to sleep.
My rationale for this is that it ensures I am only in bed for a maximum of 45 minutes and this will make it much easier to re-orient myself to waking awareness quickly when the alarm goes off, secondly that it sends a clear message to my brain that I had better get to sleep quickly or I’m not sleeping and thirdly it means if I am genuinely not tired I won’t sleep, or at least not much, ensuring I am properly tired when the next nap time comes.
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