Days 9-14:The past week

So I completely fell off the face of the earth this past week. I'm almost 100% certain that I am a workaholic. Quick Recap:

Tues. : 4 hours of sleep. Good sleep schedule.
Wed. : 4.5 hours of sleep leading into wednesday. took some good naps.
Thurs: 4 hours of sleep followed by an interview at 8:30am Thursday. I'm at this point completely into a sleep schedule of 3am-~7am.
Thurs. night: hard crash. I've done so much work the past 2 weeks that I think I'm burning out really hard. Napped at 11:20, but my naps have become shortened, to the point where this one was only 10 minutes long. Not enough to recharge. But I just keep waking up early or being interrupted by a phone call or something. Had ONE beer because my stress level varied inversely to my sleep levels. Needed to calm down, and instead ended up mentally breaking down. Came back to my room at midnight and spent an hour mindlessly emptying out my email inbox (it's accumulated over the past week...) Crashed around 1am to sleep and get ready for another interview.
Friday: woke up after 6 hours of sleep. Friday I felt hazy like my burnout on Thursday was still causing some residual meh-ness. Got a lot of work done, went into the shoeboxed office and worked more. Don't remember how Friday night went... ??
Saturday: woke up early (7:30am) after about 6 hours of sleep again. Felt absolutely GREAT that I got to sleep that much. I've been a bit too stressed out lately. I'm coming to the realization that I need more than 4-5 hours of sleep a night. It's fine for a couple days (with strategic naps), but overall it has some bad effects. One guy in the office pointed out that neuron ion channels replenish themselves when we are asleep and there is LITTLE TO NO electrical activity going on - ie: non-REM sleep. So maybe these have been damaged and depleted lately, making me really screwed up.

Ok well, I'm going to keep blogging now after this falling off of the map. My sleep schedule is changing more toward something that resembles normalcy. Probably 6 hours at night augmented by 2-3 naps during the day. I don't need to be pushing the early morning and late night as much as I am right now -- I just need to make my daytime hours more effective I think.

Tomorrow morning: interview at 8:30am. So I'll plan on sleeping from about 1am until 7am. Nap 1 set for ~12pm, nap 2 at ~6pm, and nap 3 at 10 or 11pm. Or something like this. I might try to do more naps closer together, but for 10-15 minutes instead of 30 minutes.

Night 8: CrAziNeSs & one down

Today was a bit rougher. I think it will take a couple days to get used to low core sleep. But 4 hours last night was promising. I think tonight I will shoot for 3.5. I'm set to sleep in 2 hours, at 2:00 until 5:30. I'll try to do this so that I can take a nap at 9:15 while keeping nap intervals semi-normal.

Today: nap from 9:30-10:00,nap from 14:00-14:30, nap from 20:20-20:40, nap from 22:50-23:10. Not bad, but the 4th nap was not planned. It was just needed. Might be because of how little sleep I got last night and that adjustment. Oh well. PureDoxyK said something about taking naps when you feel tired. I felt tired, and definitely needed another nap. It's looking like polyphasic straight would definitely drive you crazy for a while. As is, I think it'll take me a couple days if not a week or two to adjust and not feel like crashing here and there throughout the day.

New development in office friends' polyphasic sleeping: Justin B crashed hard this weekend. He had a major reboot of 8-10 hours after being on a straight polyphasic schedule for a week. I think he's decided it's just not worth it. This was his second time trying it out. I'll have a bigger update when I talk to him next; due to my crazy schedule of work and sleep and the fact that I'm in the shoeboxed.com office from about 19:00-00:00 on the nights I am here, it might be until the weekend before i get to talk to him. I'm looking forward to interviewing Justin!

Ok time to leave the office and go back to my dorm for work on other projects.

Day 8

WOW it's 47 degrees (F) outside! It's starting to get chilly in Durham in the mornings! This is the first time I've majorly noticed this for 2 reasons: 1) I don't have air-conditioning this year in the dorm I'm in, so I've been using the window-open, fan on trick to pull in cold air from the commons room across the hall. 2) I'm up at 6am on schedule!!!!

I think that sleeping up in the loft and having to climb my ass out to turn off the alarm was a perfect pro wake-up procedure. I made one other key change. Instead of making my initial alarm a blaring beeping, I turned on the radio alarm feature of my clock for the first time ever. With NPR talking about the Blackwater controversy right now, I certainly realized that something was going on and I woke up. BUT there was no voice inside my head saying, "YEEEARRRGH GHGHHGASDLASDKLA FFHDAKJFJL AKF"PAW:LS THAT NEEDS TO BE TURNED OFF NOW!" Instead I listened for a second (long enough to realize what I had just done to myself) and then figured since it did hurt my ears a bit I should turn it off. Maybe a slightly lower volume will make me get up and will allow me to listen to the BBC world news and get smart in the mornings too!

Ok, so this could be the first semi-correct Everyman day for me. Last night I had 4 hours of core sleep and I'm a bit groggy for it. Maybe I should chop down quickly to 3 hours to correspond to REM cycles? Since I'm up I think I'll do some research on it ;)

Day 6

Last night was one of the MOST FUN TIMES of my life. Got to eat some Panang curry, which took me back to the summer trip in Thailand (we also had spicy coconut soup - amazing). Then went to the ZTA semiformal hosted at: Pizza Palace! I couldn't believe we chose that locale, but it ended up being a suprisingly fun and cost-effective location. Never would have guessed.

Alums are back in town since it's homecoming weekend. One of them began boxing with me and demanded to know why we never slept together last year... um, my "official" response was that I didn't want any STDs...

While last night was great, I also did not stay on sleep schedule. I was 100% accurate in predicting that my pitiful reboot Thursday night would segue into a weekend of old and bad sleeping habits. Last night I slept from about 2:00 to 8:00. 6 hours, and most pathetic is that I did a bad job of napping today. This was most likely due to the copious quantity of alcohol I consumed last night. Alcohol is better than cigarettes when trying to maintain a sleep schedule, but awful in bulk.

No nap from 10:00 (when I actually got to bed) until 16:40. Napped in my car in the parking lot of the mall from then until 17:00. BTW this afternoon the state fair was a lot of fun. crazy people, crazy carnival games that I did not play, and some fried milky way bars & frozen chocolate bananas on top of it all.

So now I am about 4 hours away from my last nap and debating whether to take a mini nap and try to get back on schedule or whether I should just screw it until tomorrow since I have more alumni friends in town that I kind of wanted to hang out with tonight. Tobacco, alcohol, food, and friends are the major factors involved with getting onto a good sleep schedule. None of them mix all that well with Everyman sleep. Boo hiss. I'll trim my lifestyle selectively.

Might nap, might not. I'll blog about the verdict when I wake up/go to sleep next.

Not Quite There, or More Excuses

I was planning on a 6am wake-up in order to get a shit-tonne done this morning. That didn't QUITE happen. But the good news is that I cut my core sleep from 5.5 to 5 hours! the 1.5 hour jump wasn't there, but this is a good indicator that consistency is a much better path to take.

Off to finish up a draft of my BME magazine article (engineers should NOT have to write like this... 2000 words coherently on a topic is more than I'm really capable of - in a week no less!) then maybe a bit of the photonics conference if there's time. Oh that thing on the left? That's a precancerous cell image as seen from the adjacent cell's perspective! Doesn't it look warm and friendly and inviting? Beware, it'll attack at any moment now...

Life is too busy all the time to be short! I really just need a weekend where I can clear my head and enjoy the everyman cycle while catching up on the things I want to do. Too bad I didn't stick with the last blog I had -- it had the very apt title of "overworked and underpaid".

Maybe I'll sneak in a nap in place of yoga this afternoon, I've got a couple absences I can burn in there.

Issues with Core Sleep

Over the past couple months, I've gotten used to a variation of 5-10 hours of sleep per night. I know this sounds like pretty extreme fluctuation. Usually it doesn't change that much from night-to-night though. I tend more to go through a week-long period where I sleep about 9-11 hours each night and then maybe a week where I sleep about 6-7 hours a night. This uncovers yet another motivation for everyman/polyphasic sleeping:
I want to be on a standard schedule where I know how much sleep I need and can count on filling the rest of the time with work.

I'm sick of needing to study the morning of a test and not being able to wake up before 11am! Anyway... The fact that my sleep schedule is fairly constant from day-to-day but varies over weeks/months suggests that little shifts by half an hour to an hour are really easy to deal with, but large shifts just don't pan out well.

Maybe this is why the past 2 nights I haven't been able to fall into a 3-hour core sleep cycle. I wake up just fine when my alarm goes off (drinking enough water before I go to sleep helps, because then I have to pee and that gives me a reason to get out of bed!). But with only 3 hours of sleep, I feel much different than I do when I get 8 hours of sleep. I'm much less conscious at first, I feel hazed, dizzy, headachey, physically jittery, etc.

As soon as I start thinking, my first thought has been: go back to bed! Second thought: Don't do it! Third thought: Ok, just set an alarm for a couple more hours or so. This will be a good compromise.

That last voice in my head has won out the past 2 nights. I've never been able to pull all-nighters effectively or get by on close to no sleep (this doesn't include party nights and recovery the next day...) in a way that allows me to work the next day. Maybe I just need to shift slowly.

The Everyman is supposed to be a great transition into the uberman polyphasic cycle; maybe a slow gradient of sleep changes will produce the best results as far as A) getting me into the cycle, B) making sure I can maintain it, C)keeping me mentally sane and not hating myself for screwing with my sleeping.

Last night's plan: 2:30-6
Actual sleep: 2:30-6 6-7 7-8
Each little increment there represents a time that I set and alarm, got up, rationalized, and crashed out on the futon again.

But I feel pretty good right now, and that was an aggregate of 5.5 hours last night. Not bad when I slept ~9 each night last week. From here, I'll trim about a half hour every 2 days for the next week or so. With luck, I'll be down to the core of 3 hours per night and solidly napping through the day!

Reboot

I've run into one of the biggest potential threats to this project's success: Laziness.

PureDoxyK warns about it in her post on reasons why NOT to be a polyphaser. Whoops. Looks like I'll have my work cut out for me.

Last night I turned off at 2:00 with the intention of waking up at 5:00. I've been a swimmer for the past 12 years or so, and for the past 8 at least did mornings at ~5-6 every weekday. So this isn't too big a problem. But I like sleep a lot. I've learned over the past two years that having a roommate awake and working when I need to get up for practice (6:00) means that at least one light will be on, and that REALLY helps with getting my lazy ass out of bed.

So my light was on when I went to sleep. Since it's fall break I was at home and mom thought that the light under the door meant I was still awake. She came on in to talk to me, and seeing me passed out decided it'd be the sweet thing to do to turn the light off! I really can't fault her for it -- she loves me a lot!

But this did mean that at 5AM when I woke up and went to the bathroom (on schedule!) without turning my lights on, everything was dark when I walked back in and so I rationalized to myself that there would be nothing wrong with just laying back down for another 3-hour cycle.

DAMN! I slept til 10am, giving myself a fresh 8 hours of sleep. Maybe this was needed after careless sleep deprivation the past week or so. I ran across a blog last night that described sleeping through an alarm or checkpoint as "rebooting", similar to a computer wiping out it's RAM and restarting.

So I guess last night will count as a reboot. It sets me back a bit, but I don't know what from....

I'm still looking for a good way to publish a journal log separate from my ramblings! any thoughts?