Day's Data - Part 16

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0800: Breakfast time! Fried mushrooms on toast, with tea.

Have you noticed, the term "Breakfast of champions" is only ever used ironically?

I read that one of the techniques used to "soften people up" for interrogation is to confuse their sense of time by, among other things, making every meal breakfast. Exactly why losing your sense of which day it is - or indeed eating quite a lot of cornflakes - should make you less resistant to questioning, I'm not sure. But then, I like cornflakes and don't particularly care what day it is.

Probably the main reason we have breakfast at all is the traditional sleeping pattern of a single block of 6-9 hours at night. A pattern, you may have noticed, I don't feel bound by. As far as I'm concerned, the most sensible time to sleep is when you feel like sleep, and the most sensible time to wake up is when you don't need any more sleep - but other people seem to have a different notion of "sensible", whereby the best time to sleep is whenever everybody else thinks they should sleep.

But it is possible to break your sleep up into smaller segments, spaced fairly regularly throughout the day. And the advantages are...that you wind up needing less sleep, and you're fully awake for much longer. Sounds like a good deal to me.

If I'd have heard about this "polyphasic sleep" months ago, I'd have given it a go, and might be doing it now. As it is, trying to start a new job is not the best occasion to experiment with your sleep patterns.

Oh yes, the connection with breakfast is that, when you sleep polyphasically, your meal patterns also change - you tend to eat a larger number of small meals. As a snacker, that appeals to me too.

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