2.0 day 2

ugh. that didn't work out at all. Went to bed around 23:30 last night and woke up at 7am. No way is that anywhere near polyphasic. I need to take a look at my diet and water intake and try to readjust to get on a schedule i can manage.

I think one of the things that burned me out last time was the shear volume of work I did and it seemed like I wasn't doing anything fun for a week or two. I don't imagine I do much more fun when I have no sleep schedule, but sleeping is a nice release to the work of every day. Just time that you don't have to think or do, just relax and be. Maybe some more yoga, some more cooking, some new guitar strings, and some playlist mixing will be on-tap for my next round. As for timing, I'm still trying to prepare myself for this. Maybe tonight? Waking up before 7am is particularly rough, and staying up til 3am isn't my cup of tea either.

Ok well, at this point, I think I have enough mindless organization work to keep me busy tomorrow morning, so I'll shoot for 6am and down about 3 bottles of water tonight to try to wake me up tomorrow morning. Oh and I'll try to read some more of the Three Musketeers. If you haven't read it, go pick up a copy (by Alexandre Dumas) or let me know and I'll give you mine when I'm done. It's a great read and it goes quickly. Before you know it, you're sucked in and see things from D'Aragnan's POV. Lots of fighting, drinking, bravery, womanizing, etc.

Ok sleep time, my head hurts. Maybe after I get some dental work tomorrow and start drinking more water I'll feel better. I've got 2-3 cuts on the inside of my mouth that aren't healing well and I think they developed due to the stress of the past couple weeks. Got to find a way to control that.

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.

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 ;)

Night 7

Alright tonight I'm back on track with trying to get on a solid Everyman sleep schedule. It's been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I was being pretty optimistic to think that in the first week I'd be able to drop straight into it. The naps feel pretty comfortable now, I just need to work on consistency and discipline with core sleeping.

Last nap: 10:00-10:30. The naps have this event-horizony feel to them. I tend to lay there thinking about how I am not asleep and trying to drop into sleep. The longer I lay there, the more rationalize it as being ok since I'm at least getting some relaxation time, but I start to doubt pretty seriously that I'll actually fall asleep.

Then BOOM, I wake up when my nap is supposed to be over (sometimes before the alarm) and I feel great, like I've been sleeping for a while. Very much like time stretches out infinitely long only to then snap into normalness again.

"There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that provides the difficulties."

- Douglas Adams

That is exactly how to approach napping. If you don't get it, try polyphasic napping. You can't worry about whether you will hit the ground or not (read: whether or not you will fall asleep), you've just got to not worry about it and do it. Idk maybe I'm rambling again.

Tonight's projected sleep plan: 2:00-6:00 core sleep. This should provide sufficient sleep time. Further, since I am back to sleeping in the loft (absolutely awesome, though I think one of the shims is loose again...) it should be easy to toss myself down to turn off the alarm then stumble to my towel and jump into the shower. Hopefully this will wake me up!

Oh, as for the picture, that's me with a deep-fried Milky Way bar. Sounds gross, but somehow it tasted really good. and sent me into a food coma for about the next 3 hours. I *heart* the NC state fair. I must be sleep deprived to use the *s like that. uh oh.

Reboot 2

Bad, bad news. Last night I was planning on 2:30-7 core sleep. Upon waking up at 7, I promptly turned off both my alarms semi-subconsciously, then went back to sleep. Only by luck did I wake up at 10:00 just in time for my class. It may just be golf, but it's still a class.

I was hazy too. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep. But then again I also realized that by going back to sleep, I'd make it worse. Stuck in this catch-22, I thought the best option was probably to just lay there for a while. But a sense of responsibility got the better of me and I jumped up, tossed on a hat (for the first time in months), and ran to my car for golf. I do NOT like not showering in the morning, mainly because my hair sticks out in all directions and is pretty long.

Dammit. It's as if I slept through my entire first waking cycle of the day. I was planning on a nap right before golf, yeah I know it's only a couple hours into the day, but that would set me through ~4pm when I would have time to take one again.

Effects of sleeping so long: Right now (2 hours later) I'm just starting to feel not groggy and hazy. This sucks because not only did I waste an extra 3 hours on sleeping, but I also have spent the past 2 hours not being able to think. PureDoxyK had it completely right about messing with core sleep leaving you feeling weird all day. It hasn't completely worn off, but I have no choice but to get shit done. If missing naps is supposed to be worse, I am terrified to the point of overnapping now.

Causes of sleeping so long
Last night was a Thursday night. For people who don't remember college, this is an AWESOME night to go out on, mainly because no one really cares about Friday classes/work and there are a lot of good specials, like Big Beers at Satisfaction for 4 bucks. Every Thursday without fail. Brilliant. For weird sleep schedules, social habits are bad -- such as drinking and smoking. I hate to admit it, but I've been an on-and-off nicotine subscriber for the past 2-3 years. Not in large doses, but enough to make me wish I had a cigarette from time to time. Last night was one of those times. Since I've been reading about how Everyman is more forgiving than straight polyphasic or uberman, I figured what the heck, with 2-3 hours before core sleep, why not have a drink or have a cigarette?

I passed on the drink because I was working and realized that a Big Beer at 00:00 would knock me out. But I did have half of a cigarette. I'm pretty sure that my body processing that crap along with maybe not having quite enough water is what made me feel awful upon waking up this morning. That led to a total reboot of 7.5 hours of sleep. This is almost really embarrassing, enough to make me want to skip all of today's naps. But that's NOT a good plan.

This episode may facilitate kicking the habit. That's really what this experiment is all about -- being able to learn my bodily functioning to the point that I can predict it, make clear decisions, and stay in charge of what goes on in my day-to-day life. Getting rid of tobacco is very necessary. Beer, not so much. But tobacco is no good and I know that.

Ok time to pick up the pieces. More to come soon.

Night 4: Stupidman

Tee and Matt J have admitted to being a part of a polyphasic variation movement. This is new and very groundbreaking. They've coined their sleep patterns the "stupidman" sleep cycle.

The stupidman sleeper doesn't go to sleep until he is TOTALLY SATISFIED with what he's accomplished during the day. Maybe he falls asleep in the process of trying to accomplish this. Matt J says this happens pretty often. He's woken up several mornings with his laptop opened up on his bed. He gets depressed when he sees this; it's worse than normal waking up.

Tee usually wakes up 4-6 hours after falling asleep with a feeling of despair about not finishing what he's done. What do these guys think of polyphasic sleeping and the everyman cycle?

"It takes too much committment and thought, for a stupid man. It's pretty self explanatory: the stupidman sleeper says he'll begin the everyman cycle -- tomorrow." Tee and Matt J collaborated on that one. Brilliant.

Tee explains his most recent sleep cycle: "went to 4 oclock bed 9am." Obviously this is a very efficient method of retaining full mental capacities for extended periods of time.

Idiots. They'll be everyman converts soon.

As to my night schedule: nap from 22:00-22:30. Woke up a bit pissed that someone called me mid-nap and woke me briefly. But I got over it and now I'm being productive! Planning on a core sleep time of 2:30-7

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!