Abort

January 26th, 2010 by Paulan

I have more or less decided that I do not want to be sleep deprived the coming weeks. I have not really attempted to go polyphasic the last few weeks, but I don’t know why.
Instead of trying to become polyphasic and get a good structure in my life that way, I am first going to create a schedule with 7-10 hours sleep per day (how many I need) and do a lot of stuff within the waking hours.
My life is a chaos and I know I can do a lot more than I do now. When I feel better I will re-decide on going polyphasic or not. I don’t like it but I think that is the best I can do.

I hope I will keep practicing naps, but I have said that before and in practice I don’t do them a lot.

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Failing to start

January 21st, 2010 by Paulan

Hi,

I have been trying to start adapting, but I keep failing.
I re-considered the unevenly distributed schedule and I think my original schedule of 4-12-16-20-0-4 does not interfere that much with my other activities. So I changed to that a couple of days ago.

The only problem is, whenever I try to nap I encounter one of these 3 situations:
1. I don’t sleep at all (75%)
2. I fall asleep after 15-20 minutes to sleep for a few minutes, and I remember dreaming (happened only a few times) (10%)
3. I fall asleep pretty fast but I do not wake up from my alarm. I wake up after 1.5 or 3 hours (15%)

I do take all the naps, but I am not so strict yet about ‘oversleeping’, because I haven’t considered myself starting really. I don’t yet want to take more precautions to assure I wake up from every nap, like the 150W light, more alarms or duck taping my phone to my cheek (that way I will need to be more consciousness to put off my alarm). Also I’m not using the placebo sleep tracks, mostly because I can’t remember anyone adapted using these.

Maybe my body remembered my first (or second, but I didn’t push myself really far) attempt and is telling me strongly to NOT try again lol. Another explanation could be that I try to nap on my side and not on my back. Also I don’t have the luxury of napping in another room at the moment, so I nap in my bed, mostly with my clothes on and mostly without blankets. I think whenever I do use the blankets I tend to fall asleep more often but I also don’t wake up, so I’m not sure whether I should do that or not. Currently I use blankets whenever I feel cold.

I will probably find a new alarm sound and program myself to immediately go out of bed whenever I hear that sound. I also may use more alarms, now I’m only using my mobile phone (vibrating+sound) anywhere on my body (neck, cheeck, chest).

I am also considering to try and nap every 2 hours for a few days just to practice some more.

Anyway, I’ll let you know how things go.

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New plan

January 11th, 2010 by Paulan

Short update again – I have an exam tomorrow.
After that I will have more time available again and that means I will start sleeping polyphasically again.
My plan now is to not evenly space all naps by 4 hours.
I probably could, but it’s more convenient otherwise.
Here’s my current plan to sleep:
2,5,9,14,20,23
During the day I will get (more) sunlight, there are more people around me, so I will have more energy. Therefore I take more naps during the evening/night. I will try to nap at 18 if/when I feel like I need it. My timer will be set at 22 minutes, and I haven’t decided yet on where to sleep.
If I feel the need to stop again, I will convert to temporary Everyman:
23-2 Core, 9,14,20 naps (same times waking up and going to bed as the uberman). Once I feel (more) comfortable I will shorten the core and add the nap at 5 or 23, whichever feels better.

The schedule should not interfere much with any of my jobs, lectures at university (the ones I go to), hobbies and spending time with friends and family.
I plan to start wednesday or next monday, depending on varoous factors. I am already taking naps sometimes at the determined times

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Short update

January 3rd, 2010 by Paulan

Currently I’m not really polyphasically sleeping. I sleep mono- or biphasic most of the days, and I will continue this for at least 2 weeks. During the holidays I spent a lot of time with family and such so it was more convenient to sleep like this, and the next 2 weeks I have a lot of exams so it’s better not to deprive myself of sleep. I may update a little more later, I’m not sure. I will definitely write another post when I start again – probably in 2 weeks.

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Update

November 17th, 2009 by Paulan

Sorry for not posting for 2 weeks.

The last 2 weeks I haven’t been on a strict schedule. Instead, I sleep anywhere from 3 to 8 hours per day.
Most nights I sleep some time on the couch and when I feel at least a little tired I take a nap at the usual times (1,5,9,13,17,21). The good thing is I am way more productive compared to earlier on monophasic. This is why I am not motivated enough to keep strict to the uberman schedule, since ‘being more productive’ was essentially the goal of this whole experiment.

I don’t keep track of stuff anymore, I used to write down how much I slept, ate, drank, how I felt, what I did and more. Now I am normally fully functional during the day, in the evenings I watch tv and around 01.00 I fall asleep. I wake up naturally after 0.5 hours to 8 hours and then I get up feeling pretty good. Normally I don’t need to nap during the day but I do take some when it’s easy to take them (when I am at home and I have the time).

So basically I often sleep monophasically but I used to sleep an average of 9-10 hours per day, and now it’s more like 6 AND I feel better overall. As long as I feel happy with the current situation I will probably not change anything. I will try to update here every now and then, especially when I make changes.

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Day 18 – 24

November 4th, 2009 by Paulan

It’s been some time since I posted here.

There are interesting developments going on.
Unfortunately I am not really near full adaption.

Day 18-19 were good. I overslept twice, 10 minutes and 30 minutes, so not bad at all.
Day 20 I messed up. I had a busy schedule, I was thinking about my life and couldn’t sleep for a few naps even though I was tired. I fell asleep by accident and slept for 3 hours.
Day 21 In the beginning I felt very very good. It was about 12 hours after the 3-hour sleep.
This feeling faded away after 2 naps, so it lasted for nearly 8 hours (it was fading away gradually). The rest of the day every nap as planned
Day 22 I felt tired in the beginning, I fell asleep a whole lot times for 1 to 3 minutes, after which I overslept by a little more than 1 hour. Then I was fine for about 12 hours to be tired again in the evening.
Day 23 started not so good. I don’t know when I slept or not, constantly not feeling very tired but drifting to sleep nonetheless. I guess I slept for 3 to 5 hours that night.. The holiday is now over and I went to my student room again so again I am all on my own. The oversleeps of the night did not do me good, I couldn’t concentrate and eventually was forced to oversleep at the 17:00 nap, I slept 1.6 hours.
After that I felt really calm and satisfied.
Day 24 started pretty good. I remained calm and satisfied until I decided to do some more active things. All went well until late night, I still felt good and I watched some tv. I fell asleep for almost an hour. After that I did some more activities and I fell asleep for 4.5 hours… The rest of the day I had no oversleeps but I didn’t feel good. I had a little conflict with myself.
Day 25 I crashed again and slept a total of 8 hours. I allowed myself to do this because the napping was not going well last couple of days, and I didn’t know what I wanted. I decided it was probably best to get well rested and then decide what to do. As of now I am not fully rested but much better than before. I haven’t yet decided what to do next. Some things I am considering:
- get more fully rested and then decide
- Continue with 27-minute naps every 4 hours
- another polyphasic schedule with a core
- free running sleep
- biphasic sleep: 3 hours and 1.5 hours or something like that.
- 4 20-30 minute naps and two 1.5 hour naps totaling 4 to 5 hours of sleep
- uberman but with another duration of the naps.
- One of the above but with improvements. For example I can be tougher to myself staying awake.

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Day 14 – Day 17

October 28th, 2009 by Paulan

This week I have no lectures and I spend my days with my family, I also sleep (nap) at my parent’s house.

I have a great feeling about my adaption process now.

Day 14:
Perfect except for nap 01:00, overslept by 30-35 minutes. No special experiences, I felt okay but somewhat tired.

Day 15:
Perfect except for nap 01:00, overslept by 45 minutes, feeling very good afterwards. The rest of the day very much like day 14.

Day 16:
In the afternoon I decided to look at the things I wrote (how I felt, duration of naps, what I ate).
I saw no clear correlation between anything, therefore I decided to try and sleep short naps for 24 hours or more, to see what the effect was. The effect was clear after 2 naps already: I felt much more tired. The third nap I accidently napped 27 minutes and felt much better. I saw this as a sign to stop the short naps early and to start experiment with the long naps. The last hours of the day I felt good :)

Day 17:
This day started not very good. Even though I did not feel (really) tired, I somehow managed my brain to think it was a good idea to nap once again after the first 05:00 nap. After the 28-minute nap I was awake for 5 to 10 minutes after which I decided to nap again – Really strange because I felt very good and refreshed.
I woke up after about 40 minutes, in which I snoozed one my computer alarms twice and then shut it off.
After the 40 minutes I still felt great and I was a little confused about why I napped again.

The rest of the day went by great untill my family had dinner. I ate too much, causing my next nap to be difficult. When I woke up I instantly wanted to sleep more (not nap again, like before), I felt energetic and warm/cold for the whole 3.5 hours. Luckily, when I woke up from my 21:00 nap I felt much better again.

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Day 13

October 25th, 2009 by Paulan

This was a surprising day, until 5 am I had little difficulties to stay awake (my brother stayed with me all night), after which I felt great.

But today I played checkers from 12:00 to +- 16:00. I really can’t neep in between then, it’s an official game.

For multiple reasons I decided to take my naps as the following:
1:00, 5:00 (already done), 11:00,17:00,21:00
So instead of just skipping that 13:00 nap, I decided to switch my 9:00 nap to 11:00 so I would have 2 periods of 6 hours without sleep instead of just 1 period with 8 hours no sleep.

During the game I felt really tired, almost falling asleep. I didn’t expect this and I had a very strong opponent. Perfect ingredients to lose, but somehow I managed to win! The last couple of games I underperformed, I lost to people I ‘should’ win to, but now with the tiredness I did the opposite lol.

The other naps went fine but were not refreshing, in fact I became more and more tired.
The last nap didn’t go exactly as planned. I had a back-up alarm on my laptop (notebook), but I forgot to charge it so it shut itself down before I wanted to wake up. Eventually I slept for almost exactly 1 hour, a little odd because all other (over)sleeps were in periods of 1.5 hours. I did not refresh from this nap either, so I am really tired as I type this blog-entry.

I am actually feeling more tired than before, The first 1.5 weeks I haven’t felt nearly as tired as I am right now lol.
It will be a fun challenge to stay awake between naps and to wake up from the naps.

Another fun thing: The time just changed 1 hour, summer time is over, I haven’t yet decided what to do with this.

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Review: Crash

October 24th, 2009 by Paulan

Hey there

Not much news to tell you: I am feeling good now.

Since the crash I haven’t overslept yet, but it has only been +- 36 hours ago, so it is not much shocking.

Just had probably the first nap in which I slept for more than 5 minutes since the crash and as I said feeling good :)
I think I said it before but it is useful to me to repeat it: Maybe this is a very smooth way for me to adapt to Uberman. While some others get real problems within a week of not sleeping or only napping, I can function for about 80% throughout the whole first week. After the first week this percentage drops a little, but if I practice enough to increase the quality of my naps, I might get to a level in which the percentage never drops and ultimately increases back to 100%.

This will be the plan untill I have more flexibility and less time pressure on other projects.

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Crash

October 22nd, 2009 by Paulan

As pointed out yesterday, I had a really bad day.

The 3 reasons were:
1. I got too much behind on my university work, that the probability that I will be allowed to take the exam drops to almost zero. Of course I will try to convince the teacher to let me catch up on the work
2. My tv stopped working
3. After the list I had made of changes to stay awake at night, I did not do any of them and fell asleep again.

After that I posted the ‘Day 10′ update, after which I couldn’t care much and didn’t do any effort to stay awake. Not too long after that I fell asleep again for another 1.5 hours. When I woke up from that I decided to go to bed for the first time in 10-11 days, in which I slept for another 9 hours. In total I slept 13.5 hours, all without alarms.

I don’t feel much at all – I’m not tired, not refreshed, not awake, I don’t know how I feel.

The plan is to take +- 2 naps of 25 minutes next night, then stay awake untill friday evening (I have a busy schedule tomorrow). By then I will probably be somewhat tired again, and then I will go to my parents for the weekend and maybe for a week holiday also, to restart napping every 4 hours.

I will not give up this time, that is one thing I am sure of. The fun part is I had this crash while not having felt really sleep deprived at all. No (near-)hallucinations, zombie-mode, tired muscles, tired eyes (just a little) or whatsoever.

One thought I am having right now is to plan everything I will do next, but I don’t know if I can trust my thinking at the moment.

That’s all for now, I’ll update again when there’s more to tell

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