This whole experiment of sleeping sitting up got me sick. Five or six nights into it, I started feeling it in my throat. At the one week point, I’d reached my weak point.
Not only did my throat feel scratchy, my nose began to clog up as well. And when that happens, the rest of me deteriorates soon afterward.
I’m going to blame this on how I leaned my head. I leaned my head too far back, which caused my mouth to open slightly in my sleep. That opening let air in and tore up my throat. I think the rest just followed from that.
For future reference, I’m trying to make sure my head either slumps forward a bit or to one side. That kind of breaks some of the rules I originally set for the experiment. Although I never published them here, I intended to sleep with my head completely straight. At this point, though, if I don’t modify the original plans, I’m going to quit altogether.
The trouble with this experiment now is that it’s tough to tell whether I’m actually modifying anything anymore. I knew before I started that I could sleep in a chair, in a sort of seated position. As long as my head slumps, like I said, I can sleep. So how is this experiment experimenting?
This wasn’t the idea at first, but now I’m more interested in just how long or how frequently I can keep this up. It’s easy, for me at least, to sleep in a seated position while I’m flying or taking a long ride on a road. What I’m not so sure about, though, is whether or not I can count any of that as quality sleep time, like sleep time I could use day to day.
So far, the past few nights haven’t been full nights of sitting up. I’ve started out seated, slept that way for a few hours, and then switched to fully horizontal. I need to practice more to make it all the way through the night. Once I can do that, I’d like to see if I can do it for a week straight.
That might take some time, but that’s the goal for now. I’m trying to take it easy, though – I don’t like getting sick.
