Übermensch

Everything’s still going absolutely flawlessly. I take about 8 naps a day, they’re not 100% as good as Uberman naps- I take a little bit longer to fall asleep, roughly 4-5 minutes, and the quality isn’t as great as some naps on Uberman can be, but I get REM, and taking 2 extra naps is enough to sustain an alertness level that is comparable to either adapted Ubermen (I guess, I never adapted successfully to that) or monophasic sleeping.

I’m fine with 2:40 sleep time a day, I don’t need more time than I have right now. Being completely functional for more than 21 hours a day, I get way more done and have a lot more effective time than during an Uberman adaption. I rarely need to nap during the day, usually I nap just before I go to school and then right after I get back home.

It’s interesting how the feeling for time changes. Monophasic sleepers think in days, which are naturally divided by nights full of sleep. Uberman sleepers- at least I, when I adapted- tend to think either in 4 hour periods, or in activities.
For me, following an irregular nap schedule, time is just an ongoing stream with one activity following the other. I need to get a watch at some point that shows me what day it is, because I tend to be unsure about that.

On the other hand, while for Ubermen that are either adapted or in the late stages of adaption there probably is no big difference between night and day- after all, the distance between naps is the same all the time. For me there is a big difference, as I take a lot more naps during the night than during the day- of the 8 naps I usually take, at least 5, more often 6 are during the period from 7 PM to 7 AM.

That leads to me being awake pretty much all the time during the day and getting almost as much out of it as a monophasic sleeper, while the night includes more resting time and less activity than for an Uberman- as I sleep pretty much every 2 hours during the night, I rarely go out for long walks or 3 AM coffees. I’m not really into partying, but I suspect that if I took a lot of naps the day before and after, I could probably last a whole night with just one nap without any ‘punishment’ later.

I also can get drunk without oversleeping, I didn’t even have to take many additional naps while sobering out.

I don’t know what should still go wrong at this point. Every activity that usually leads to the collapse of an adaption- long periods without naps, bad eating habits (good old pasta…), alcohol, stress…- can be easily absorbed by circling it with naps. If the next 1-2 weeks go over as well as the last two, I’m ready to consider myself an adapted polyphaser.

Either tonight or tomorrow- I’m not sure- I’ll have completed my second week on SPAMAYL, and it’s going great. I had just one oversleep so far, 5 days ago, when I got finally too well used to my usual wake-up music. Now I allow the alarm to shuffle the piece of music I’m waking up to, and I’ve had no problems ever since. And- when I overslept I wasn’t tired when I was going to bed and neither when I got up, so I don’t consider it a problem at all.

Apart from that one little oversleep, I’ve been on-schedule without a problem (as far as you can speak of a real schedule). I’m averaging a little bit less than three hours of sleep a day, that’s roughly 8-9 naps.

I usually take one right before I go to school, in the 6:30-8:30 range, depending on the day. The next one is at some time in the afternoon, at about 15:00-17:00. That’s 8-9 hours without a nap, and I don’t have the slightest problem with it. If that time was pretty exhausting, say when I had P.E in school or something like that, I might take another nap 20 minutes after the first one, depending on how much rest the first one gives me.

The next nap after that will usually be in the late evening, at 22:00-23:00, roughly. After that, the frequency of naps increases, and on a typical night I might nap at 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30– and then again at 6:30-8:30.

I’m pretty confident that it would be possible to work a 9-5 job without a nap as well after adaption, maybe not if the job involves a lot of physical efforts, then I’d recommend a nap at 1 pm, maybe.

Usually devastating eating habits- like eating pasta- so far haven’t caused me to oversleep either, but they CAN force one to throw in 1-2 extra naps– if you make pasta at 2:00, you might wake up from your 2:30 nap so tired that you have to nap at 3:10 and 3:50 before you get back on track with your 4:30 nap. It’s still a pay-off, because while you get to eat pasta, you can’t really work on contiguous projects for the 2:30-4:30 period, but hey, sometimes it’s just worth it.

Anyway, I’m glad I’m trying this. It allows for way more flexibility than either Uberman or Dymaxion or even most Everyman schedules, at least during the day (not so much at night, to be honest, you’re pretty limited as to what you’re doing during the night)- the adaption is pretty straightforward and easy, because it doesn’t involve much, if any, sleep deprivation (*caveat- if you never slept polyphasically it might be necessary to give Uberman a try first to learn instant napping by being sleep deprived. But actually it should work with SPAMAYL as well- I mean, if you don’t fall asleep during your SPAMAYL naps, you’ll be just as tired as with any other schedule, which causes you to start falling asleep quickly- problem solved).

I hope that someone else tries this in the future as well, to be able to check if I just found a schedule that suits my personal needs or if it is really one of the best ways to become a nap-only polyphaser.

Well, I haven’t posted in quite some time. What happened?
The last time I posted, I was 4 days into an Uberman attempt that went quite well… until Day 6 or 7. Then, everything broke together. I have no idea why, but from one day to the other, I started oversleeping every night for roughly three hours, and nothing I did changed that.

So I decided to forget Uberman for now and changed to E3- the thought behind that was that if I overslept three hours a night, a three hour core should be perfect for now.

I’m on E3 for a little more than two weeks now, and it works fine. I don’t get tired except for maybe the last 30 minutes before my core, I haven’t overslept in I think 10 days, and I’m generally alert and awake always.

But as you polyphasers know, we’re in it not only for being successful, but also for experimenting. That’s why I want to try some really novel thing in the two weeks of holidays that I have right now.

Let me develop my new SPAMAYL plan below.
SPAMAYL, obviously, is an acronym, for ‘Sleep polyphasically as much as you like’.

How does it work?

You nap in blocks of 20 minutes, just like with Uberman. The difference is that you have neither a fixed amount of naps, nor a fixed time for naps. You’re napping, basically, as much and when you like. There’s just one limitation: There needs to be a 20-minutes waking period in between naps. And you need to stand or sit during that period, don’t simply stay in bed/on the couch/at your sleeping place.

After those 20 minutes, you decide if you’re still so tired that you need another nap. If you do, you go back to bed. If you don’t, you stay awake as long as possible, but if you’re back to almost falling asleep again, you go back to bed.

What are the main differences to other polyphasic schedules?

SPAMAYL is not equidistant, and, more importantly, unlike every other schedule it’s not bound to a 24-hour day. It’s pretty unlikely that our body could go exactly 4 or 6 hours with the energy it gets from a 20-30 minute nap, but the 24-hour day limits the time between naps to factors of 24. With SPAMAYL, you could have 4 hours and 37 minutes in between naps, and that might work better than 4:00 or 6:00 hours.

Doesn’t that interfere with my work/life schedule?

That sounds as if it was not realistic. One of the advantages of Uberman/Dymaxion is that you can plan to nap at the same time every day. If you have a school break at 10:25, for example, you can schedule a nap for that time every day. If you napped every 5 hours for example, that wouldn’t be possible.

But with SPAMAYL, you don’t settle for fixed nap times. You could nap, for example, at 0:00, 1:30, 4:10, 5:55, 7:50, 10:25, 17:30, 18:00, 22:20 on a random day. In fact, my theory is that when adapted, a SPAMAYL sleeper would probably settle for 8-9 20 minute naps a day, but concentrated at night- maybe 7 naps at night and 2 during the day. And as everyone here knows, daylight waking time is more valuable than waking time at night.

Your body gets used to pushing naps around, you could get a positive energy budget by taking 10 naps during the night and then none the day afterwards. It doesn’t interfere as much with social life as Uberman and Dymaxion, because, well, if you have to stay awake for 6-7 hours for a social event, you simply do it and nap more before and afterwards.

What about the adaption?
Well, I’m going to try that now, that I have free time for two weeks. The big advantage is that you can, if necessary, sleep 5-6 hours a day during adaption and push the number of naps down over time. In a natural way, because when your body gets more energy from your naps, it will stay awake for longer.
At the same time, you’ll (at least in the beginning) not have as much time as with Uberman, Dymaxion and even E4.
And it’s a *really* weird feeling to sleep for 20 minutes, be awake for 20 minutes, sleep for 20 minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.

Any disadvantages?
One that I can think of: Your naps will probably be not as good as on Uberman or Dymaxion because your body can’t prepare for them as well. You’ll need more naps than on those schedules, even when you’re adapted. But I gladly trade 2-3 extra-naps for strongly increased flexibility and waking-time during the day.

What do you all think?

Now, my day went really fine. I had no problems staying awake, I had no problems sleeping, everything was golden. I think during the day I’m at about 85% of my pre-Uberman mental alertness, so I can’t concentrate on work for the whole day as I used to, but it’s okay, I mean, I’m just on day 4 as of this writing.

The moment when everything went off-rail was at 10:20 PM, when I either broke or heavily sprained my little toe. It hurt pretty much, and I had a hard time walking, so I started thinking about sleeping that night to give my feet some rest and start the healing process.

Well, I didn’t. I would have liked to, but I introduced a golden rule not to make decisions between 10:00 PM and 10:00 AM the day before, and well, it was 10:30 PM or so, so I *couldn’t* decide to go to bed. I made it through the night pretty easily in terms of alertness, which surprised me- after all, I couldn’t resort to the good old trick of standing while being tired, that night. But until 5:00, everything was easy on that front, while my toe still hurt. I didn’t eat too heavily, just some left-overs of a ground-beef cake from the day before.

After 5:00, I got a little bit more tired- but nothing too bad. I even managed to lie in bed from 6:00-8:00 AM resting my feet without falling asleep or even being close to it (by the way, I don’t have school today, in case you’re wondering)!

At 10:00 AM my foot still wasn’t very well, so I decided that going to sleep was the most rational decision even when it was bright outside and I was not tired.

I expected to not wake up until the late afternoon at the very earliest- during my first Uberman attempt, my uncontrolled oversleeps had usually lasted at least 6-8 hours, with the longest being 21 hours straight!

But I woke up at 1:00 PM feeling better- not in terms of being awake, I wasn’t tired when I went to bed, and I wasn’t when I woke up, despite having a light headache- but my toe doesn’t hurt that much, and I can walk with a little limp already when I don’t put weight onto that toe.

The three hours might put me back a day in adapting- but hey, if I’m as well this upcoming night as I was last night, minus the aching toe, I’m quite optimistic that I can make it through adaption.

Edit– and it looks like my grammar is slowly going down the drain, but I think that’s not permanent– I’m just not catching mistakes I would quickly correct otherwise.