Vino Insistently Neglects Oversleeping

1. It sucks having to split your day into 4 hour segments. Want to do something for two hours or four hours? Too bad you’ll be interrupted by a nap. It’s pretty tough to say “hey everybody can we take a 20 minute break so I can take a nap?”

2. I get less done during Uberman than during regular sleeping. With only four hours to work with, I have trouble organizing my time properly, so I end up getting essentially nothing done. I work better when I can get in “the zone” and work for ten hours at a time. By the time I get into the zone I can only get an hour of work done.

3. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said, “What day is it?” a question I would never have asked before.

4. A good time to exercise during Uberman is never. I’ve either just gotten up or am just going to bed, and I dislike exercising at either time.

5. While it did help with insomnia in the sense that I no longer had to be afraid of not being awake early enough in the morning to deal with my clients, it didn’t help in that my brain was in more or less the same state of tiredness even during the day.

6. It doesn’t make sense that I’m a slave to my sleeping schedule.

If I hadn’t done my fair share of oversleep (see Ed’s post today) I would probably have quit Uberman soon anyway. I think I’m going to try Everyman later, but I’m going to take a break for now. I can only hope that I keep the 20 minute REM nap habit, so that adaptation will be easier, but I think I may have lost it already.

I think I’m comfortable in saying that Ed and I have this thing in the bag. I accidentally overslept yesterday, (I broke rule number 2!) but only for an hour before getting up again without an alarm. When I first started, that would have been a six hour oversleep and it would have ruined my attempt. The fact that it was only one hour and I got up on my own signals to me that my body has adjusted to the new sleep cycle and has gotten used to the shorter sleep periods. I’m not getting cocky yet, I still get groggy at night and still don’t have the ability to wake up after 20 minutes without an alarm, so the danger of lapsing back into mono is omnipresent, but the worst of it is over and I’m raising the victory flag.

Learning from our mistakes, Ed and I have put together this list for your edification on the essential rules that we imposed on ourselves to keep ourselves on track. Without them, this project would have been a miserable shot in the dark ending in failure. I’ve put them together here in a concise format for your “Uber Edification.”

1. Buddy system!

The first and single most important factor in our success. Our schedules are offset by a half hour, to guarantee that there is never a time that both of us are asleep at the same time. At the ends of each of our naps, the awake one makes sure that the other does not sleep more than 22 minutes. We have saved each other again and again from oversleeps and unplanned sleeps. If you removed everything else in this list, I would still ascribe a decent chance at success to any polysleep attempt that adhered this rule, rule number one. Without this rule I don’t think I would bother even attempting an Uberman schedule.

One important corollary to this rule is that it doesn’t work if you and your buddy don’t stick together. Every time one of us has messed up our schedule, it’s been because we were apart for some reason. Maybe I went home to shower or Ed went to a party or something, the reason doesn’t matter. Every time you separate yourself from your buddy you are taking a huge risk. The primary reason for the failure of our first attempt was that I spent most of the day away from him and the result was a catastrophic sleep episode.

So the problem is, where do you find a buddy? I can’t really help you there, Ed and I have been friends since high school and our eccentric sides match up rather well, so it was providence that we both decided to jump into this at the same time. I took my laptop over his place and I’ve been doing all my work here, I haven’t been back to my place in weeks. That option isn’t available to everybody though. If you can find a partner, you’ll definitely want somebody who you get along well with, who you can put up hanging out with 22 hours a day for a month straight. Ed and I also have good personal skills, our egos don’t get in the way of things, and we generally have a good attitude about things, which is helpful when it’s 4 am and you are both groggy and grumpy. We have given each other full and complete authority to use lethal force by any means necessary to keep each other awake during the rough times.

2. No food 1.5 hours before bed

When I was a hibernator, I would commonly stuff my face before going to bed, despite warnings about how it wasn’t good. People told me that it was causing my insomnia, but even when I refrained from eating that didn’t fix my insomnia. The reason I did that was because I would get so busy during the day that I would forget to eat, until finally I would get home, eat a cow, and then go to bed. I retained that habit going into Uberman, and I paid for it until I learned not to do it. Food in the stomach will make you oversleep guaranteed. If you’re especially prone to “the itis” then you might want to make this a 2 hour rule. For example, Ed broke the rule just now (he ate at 8:30 just before his 9:30 nap) and he’d have overslept if I hadn’t gone in there to wake him up. Carbs especially will make you conk, so staying away from breads at the beginning of your adaptation is a good idea.

3. Zombie Rule

Ed and I have the “Zombie Rule.” As happens from time to time during Uberman adaptation, a person will turn into a zombie. In this state they are prone to making stupid choices, like sitting down on couches or closing their eyes. If your buddy sees you being a zombie and falling asleep as a result, they can call “Zombie Rule!” on you. This means that you need to do everything that they say for the next few minutes. Then, your buddy will ascribe that you do jumping jacks, eat some sugary food, dance to Surfin’ Bird, or play a violent video game. When you’re that tired, you lack the capacity to make intelligent choices about what you need to do to stay awake, so your buddy takes over that rule for you. It’s vital that each person accepts Zombie Rule and actually does what his partner suggests, or the benefit is gone. Sometimes you’ve got to swallow your pride that you were not manly enough to stay awake and now you have to listen to your friend.

4. Nod-off Rule

The cousin of the Zombie Rule is the Nod-off Rule. This rule states that if you’re doing something, and you nod off to sleep, then you need to immediately stand up and start doing something else. Whatever that activity was, it was obviously insufficient to keep you awake. There’s no use sitting there and fighting nod-offs, that’s a battle you’ll lose eventually. If you find yourself nodding off, you should immediately change activities to a more sleep-warding one. One example of something we would do for the Nod-off Rule is to walk outside and touch the phone pole on the corner and then walk back inside, that simple exercise clears the head and helped keep us awake. (It being freezing out helps too.)

5. Video games

There is no better way to stay awake than playing a very fast-paced video game that requires use of your reflexes and brain. Ed became addicted to Metal Gear Solid 4, playing it in a hilarious way that involved killing everything in sight instead of the usual sneaking. My crutches were God of War and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Just make sure you fast-forward the cutscenes and stand up during loading times.

6. Sleep tracks, eye covers

Both Ed and I use ipods with modified versions of Placebo’s sleep tracks. We both use the 18 minute versions, but mine fades out after 12 minutes instead, with 6 minutes of silence before the alarms start. This helps me rest better and makes the alarms more abrupt. I also took out the techno music and replaced it with fire sirens, to give more of a sense of urgency. Finally I recorded my voice at the end saying, “If you can hear this, you may already be a zombie!” These tracks don’t always work in waking us up, but they definitely offer a more consistent sleep and wake up. We also sleep with the lights on, but with a cover over our eyes to block out the light. As soon as we hear the alarm, we take the eye cover off of our eyes before we do anything else, so that the light hitting our eyes helps us to wake up.

7. Practice wakeups

Every couple of days, we do practice wakeups. This consists of forwarding our sleep track to just before when the alarms go off, lying down and listening to them for about a minute until the alarms go off, and then quickly standing up and yell, “I AM AN UBERMAN!!!” Do this about ten times. The idea is to get the muscle memory of getting right up as soon as you hear that, to prevent the “one more minute” mentality that promotes oversleeps. It seems stupid but it really works, the next time you hear that alarm during one of your naps you will pop up immediately, ready to yell something.

8. Exercise

At 3:30 we go on a run. Exercise is the best way to get good sleep. A person who exercises regularly and is in good shape gets to sleep easier, needs less sleep and gets more benefit out of their sleep. It seems backwards from what it should be, but it works. It’s also a great way to keep awake, there’s no way you’re going to fall asleep if you’re on a treadmill. Care however should be taken not to exercise just before bedtime, at least half an hour wind-down is needed. You are also more cognizant and productive if you feel healthier because you’ve been exercising. This is actually good all-around advice, not just Uber advice.

9. Pavlinaps

So-called Pavlinaps are planned, mid-term naps that are not part of a person’s regular schedule. They are called Pavlinaps because Steve Pavlina described them in his Uberman adaptation. During the midnight death march, taking an extra 20-minute nap at the midpoint between two of your other naps can help you bear the intense sleep deprivation without messing up your schedule. In my experience, Pavlinaps didn’t affect our schedules negatively, so long as they are the same length as your regular naps.

10. Schedule, timing, routine

Having a consistent schedule is essential for Uberman adoption. Without it, you are not sending a clear enough signal to your body about how much sleep it will be getting and when. The adoption of 20-minute REM naps is completely reliant on having a strict consistent to-the-minute schedule for the first seven days. Timing is everything.

After that, Ed and I dropped into a routine. Similar to how monophasic people get out of bed, take a shower, eat breakfast, brush their teeth, shave and etc every morning, Ed and I have developed our “morning” routines. First things first we find something to eat. Eating is always the first thing to be done after getting up from a nap. Getting this out of the way means that you won’t be hungry an hour before nap, when eating is dangerous. Then we do morning stuff like brush and whatever, and share our schedules with each other before we go about our business. Having a routine helps get the brain used to the fact that this is the way it’s going to be from now on, and helps reduce the effect of time dilation.

11. Determination

This rule is last, but it is not the least. Uberman is hard. Everyman is also hard. You will need a great deal of determination in order to make it. When it’s 4 am and you feel like you’re so tired that your face is melting, you need to have the determination to remember the rules and not mess up. It doesn’t matter if your friend is good at keeping you awake, if you don’t have the determination to listen to him and get through the rough spots, you’ll never make it. You have to decide for yourself why you’re doing it, and whether or not you’re taking it seriously enough to do it the right way or not. With Uberman and Everyman, there is either the right way or no way.

Today is day 8 of my second Uberman attempt. I haven’t really said much of anything on this blog since the start of the adaptation attempt, mostly because it’s all gone swimmingly with no major oversleeps or unplanned sleeps for either myself or Ed. We’re not out of the woods quite yet, but I can slowly feel my nights getting less and less drowsy and requiring less and less video games to force me to stay awake. After some reflecting about it, I’ve determined that there are two primary obstacles that a person has to overcome when they are adapting.

1. 20 minute REM sleep. If the person doing the Uberman adaptation attempt has never done it before, likely they will not have gained the ability to get sleep in 20 minute increments by dropping into REM sleep immediately. Uberman uses this ability exclusively to get sleep, as there is no core sleep cycle with Uberman, so the first goal of an Uberman-in-training should be to force the body to adopt this sleep method. During the first few days, the body’s normal 8-hour sleeping cycle is never achieved, always having been interrupted after 20 minutes. So for those days, the body will get absolutely no REM sleep. Consistent adherence to a strict 20-minute schedule can help break the brain’s reign over your sleep, and it will then start to use the 20 minutes it is given to its fullest potential. Until then however, the primary danger is oversleep. Around day 5 is the hump — if you can get past it without making any errors, then you have successfully accomplished your goal of utilizing 20 minute REM sleeps and overcome this obstacle.

2. Nightly Death Marches. Once the body is utilizing the 20 minute increments to get its sleep, then the main phase of sleep deprivation is over and you can go about your life during the day normally. The primary challenge now is at night, when the body is still used to getting its 8 hour core sleep, and tries hard to reclaim that schedule. The primary danger now is not oversleep but unplanned sleep. Even though the body is getting all of the sleep it needs due to the 20 minute REM naps, it still sends strong messages to sleep during the hours that the person would normally be asleep in their previous sleep cycle. The hump for this obstacle comes around night 8-12, and may last for two or three nights before getting better.

Part of the reason that our current attempt is so successful is that obstacle 1 had already been overcome during our first attempt, and we simply retained the habit and picked up where we left off on attempt 2, going straight for obstacle 2. It may have even been beneficial to do it this way, since we were not faced with having to overcome two obstacles at once. I think that most people who fail do so because they overcome obstacle 1, only to be greeted with a different obstacle that they were not expecting.

We also have developed a number of habits and ground rules that have helped us reduce the number of errors that we make, I intend to blog about that (or maybe Ed will) in my next post.

Dreaming is pretty important as far as REM sleep goes. The goal of the 20 minute naps is to get as much REM sleep as possible. The reason Uberman works is because the body drops straight into the REM sleep it needs as soon as you put your head down. If you’re not dreaming, you’re not having REM sleep, and your man is not Ubering. So how to tell if you’ve been dreaming? If you’re like me you don’t always remember. I can’t remember what dreams I had, so this is how I tell. If when I wake up I feel like I’m in the middle of something that I know I didn’t start before I went down for the nap, then that something was a dream that I rudely interrupted for the purpose of waking up. Plenty of times I’ve woken up from a nap, trying to remember what I was just talking about with someone, and then realizing that I had awoken in an empty room. I count that as a victory.

The good news is that I’m dropping into REM sleep quickly. It looks like I never lost that habit despite my reset time and being sick. Just about every nap drops me into REM sleep. This doesn’t resolve the death march problem, which will only go away with time, but it sure helps a lot. I just came out of my second night, and the zombie mode death march last night was particularly gruesome. At times, even extreme cold and forced exercise couldn’t keep me awake. The most loud and violent video game I could find at hand (a GTA3:SA killing spree) wasn’t enough to keep my eyelids from closing. I was forced to resort to an extra Pavlina-style 20 minute nap, which I tried to strategically place at the midpoint between two other naps. That helped a lot, and my appetite for naps didn’t subside. I can’t say what the effect will be in the long run, but it helped me get through last night without going insane.

Given that’s wasn’t an unintentional mishap, I consider myself well on course. I don’t intend to use more Pavlina naps unless they’re absolutely required. My video game arsenal should be more than sufficient to keep me up. Two days in isn’t a great deal of time, but it’s a decent start. I find myself able to arise myself from my naps quite more easily than during my first go-around. Ed is in day 5 of his, and our zombie death march times are about four hours apart, enabling us to keep tabs on each other. We’ve found a pretty consistent schedule of work and video game playing that lets us keep on track very well, so there doesn’t seem to be much else to support. If the hump remains at the same place it was before (day 4-5) then he should be coming over it right now as I’m approaching it. Since last time we stopped just after the hump, that will be the critical time for us to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Today is the first day of my new Uberman lifestyle. I feel refreshed. I feel excited. I feel tired. Mostly tired.

The good news is that I don’t seem to have lost the ability to slip into a dream-like state after less than 20 minutes of sleep. I was going to continue to do an everyman-like sleep schedule while I was resetting, to keep my body used to the 20 minute naps. The plan was to get less than normal sleep each night, maybe 6 hours or so, which would leave me tired enough to take three naps throughout the day. However I developed a head cold after a couple days and dropped that notion in favor of getting more sleep. (Odd that I didn’t catch the cold during my Uber attempt! Or maybe I did and it didn’t manifest itself until later…) In any case, in any and every nap I’ve taken during the reset time, I’ve dropped into dreaming pretty quickly, which leaves me to believe that I’ve retained that ability.

The hardest part of adjusting to Uberman for me is what I call the ‘Midnight Death March,’ or the time between 2 am and 10 am when I am normally sleeping. During this time your body does just about everything in its power to convince you to go to sleep. This is the “zombie time.” This is the danger zone, where I need to be extra vigilant. Sitting down on a couch during this time can lead to slumber. Missing an alarm can lead to oversleeping. This is the vital time.

Pavlina wrote about placing an extra nap during this time to assist in the adjustment process. At first this seemed counter-productive, as it gives in to the body’s sleep insistence, but after more thought, I decided that if it’s a 20 minute nap directly between the normal 20 minute naps, then this may rather alleviate the sleep deprivation without having any negative effects on the development of the new four-hour sleeping cycle. I talked with Ed about it and he shared with me how he added an extra 20 minute nap during his first death march, and hasn’t needed a new one since. I’ve resolved to take this same approach should I require it.

Tonight I begin night one of my second attempt at Uberman. I took my first nap about an hour ago. Wish me luck.

When I say suffer I really mean it. It’s not like “Hey, I’m Dave Attel I don’t like to sleep at night.” I really mean suffer. I don’t ingest caffeine, I don’t have a TV in my bedroom, I don’t have sleep apnea, I’m in great shape and I exercise regularly, but sometimes I just can’t sleep. What sucks is when you have been staring at the ceiling for three hours, it’s 5 am, you have a client who is going to call you at 10:30 the next day and you aren’t the least bit tired. That’s really suffering pain. Maybe there are starving kids in Kenya who suffer more than I do but I think my suffering is legitimate, and anyway Uberman won’t fix their problems.

I first was made aware of Uberman by my close long-time friend Ed. When I heard of the idea first it didn’t seem like something that I could do. I lead a very active lifestyle and I don’t like the idea of being tied to a sleep schedule. That all changed at 7 am on the morning of last Tuesday when I decided to read more into this thing. You mean, you only sleep two hours a day but you are energetic and refreshed the entire time? Sign me up! Lord knows I have plenty of work that needs done, and having more hours in the day is a plus. What really sold it for me wasn’t the potential solution for insomnia or the extra work hours, but the description of how people would feel while they are on this schedule. So on that morning I made the spontaneous decision to give it a try right there and then.

Mind you this was at 7 am, I had not slept for about 20 hours at this point. Did I mention I suffer from insomnia? I was finally getting tired and I could have gone to bed right there and then, but NO! Destiny was calling me. I had to try it to see what it was like. It sounded like a great way to shorten your lifespan, but you never know unless you try, and I’ll try anything once. I waited three more hours to make sure I was good and damn tired, and then I set my alarm for 20 minutes.

The first day was one of the best. Although a bit groggy from fooling my body into odd sleeping patterns, I realized that the 20 minute naps were just enough rest to stay ahead of the impending wave of sleep. I had already begun to understand how the pattern was sustainable. Every nap bought me a couple hours of awake time, and all I needed to do was stave off the tiredness while my body adjusted to a new 6-hour schedule. Being an insomniac I am well suited towards designing sleeping schedules. I’ve slid in and out of a dozen or so variations of the monophasic and biphasic schedules in my time. Sleep deprivation isn’t a problem for me, it’s a way of life. This Uberstuff should be a snap for somebody like me.

The next day, Ed invited me over to his place. I would spend the next week sleeping in twenty minute intervals in various places. Sometimes on a couch, sometimes on the floor, sometimes in a bed. My experience with regular sleeping schedules has taught me that it’s always easier to get up when you’re sleeping someplace new. Variating my place of sleep helped me resist complacency. My waking time consisted of me making lame attempts to get some work done on my laptop and lonely stretches of time pacing the room in an attempt to keep my head off the floor.

Oddly enough, as adept as I was at sleep deprivation, it’d been a long time since I’ve had to do so much of it in such a small span of time. Staying awake for 28 hours is one thing, staying awake for 128 hours is another thing all together. That’s what it feels like when you’re starting Uber; until your body starts getting proper REM sleep during your 20 minute naps, you begin to long for the feeling of having woken up from a nice long nap. In addition to this, the unusual interjection of the 20 minute naps is a different kind of tired than I’m used to.

Ed and I realized rather quickly how helpful it is to have somebody waking you from your naps. We began to rely on each other to keep us both awake and waking properly after each one. Ed is a firm subscriber to the notion that the adoption process is a deal of forcing the body to recognize that it will no longer be able to get the kind of sleep it wants with monolithic sleep. Once the body is at its breaking point, it finds a new way of getting the REM sleep it so badly needs during the regular 20 minute naps. Punctuality and determination are vital. While the body is still adjusting, it will find any and every way to force you into the sleep that it needs. Commonly I would wake up confused about my goals, thinking that another 20 minutes in the sack was the way to go. (Hint: another 6 hours would follow.) Since the naps are so short, any activity that you were engaged in just prior to sleep is still present in your mind, and more than once I woke up thinking that my purpose in that sleep was to build structures of goo balls or manipulate time to solve puzzles, which of course requires another 20 minutes of sleep to accomplish. It got to the point where I refused to do anything but pace just before my allotted time. This is the critical time for having a partner who can rise you when you are narcoleptic and console you when you don’t know what your first name is.

Day four arrives. Everything is hazy now. Uber-partner relations are beginning to strain. Sleep is your enemy. Food is your enemy. Couches are your enemy. I can do this. I will do this. This is nothing for me. All of my research says that we are just now passing over the hump. I just have to hold out a moment longer. I’ll just pace a little bit more. Day five arrives and finally it comes — I had a dream during one of my naps. Dreams mean REM sleep and REM sleep means adjustment. That’s it! It’s all downhill from here.

Except not. My previous experience with sleeping began to work against me. Adjusting from one monophasic sleep schedule to another is one thing, your body just switches the time that you are asleep. With Uberman, the body no longer has any “time that you are asleep” and it tries to compensate. The night hours are the hardest, even after you are getting proper REM sleep and have held a consistent schedule for a week, it’s still extremely tiring during the hours where you would have been in bed. I understimated the time that it takes to adjust to Uberman, thinking that it was similar to my other sleeping schedule changes in that once it starts to catch it falls into place rather quickly. I began taking liberties with my scheduled times, thinking the clock would regulate itself now that I’m over the hump. I missed a nap entirely. After half a day of this, I arrived back at Ed’s place just in time for my 6 am nap, and slept a full six hours.

Anger. Denial. Rationalization. Acceptance. I had made a number of mistakes. A mistake in underestimating exactly how hard it was to adopt this particular sleeping schedule, a mistake in not listening to my friend’s advice on the topic, a mistake in not preparing myself adequately for the task at hand. But now I’ve had a taste of what it’s like, and the Ambrosia of Uber is a sweet and irresistible flavor that I was not ready to give up on. The feeling of being awake all of the time was exhilarating. I love the time at night alone with just me and my work. I love all of the extra time. I love the experience of sleeping for 20 minutes but waking up feeling like I had slept a full night’s sleep. I love that I always fall asleep quickly and I don’t have to worry about whether I’m going to be insomniatic tonight. I love how I can go to a party and be there until 4 in the morning, and then be ready to start working at 6 the next day. I felt like I had finally fixed a huge problem I’ve always had, and I never wanted to go back. So, I did what I always do when I fail. I isolated the problems, developed strategies to deal with them, and tried again immediately.

Spending time separate from each other was definitely a huge problem. All of the infractions we made against our goals were made when we weren’t in close proximity to keep the plan on course. Ed made a less severe mistake in failing to rise properly while I was out. We both wanted to keep going so we marched on further into our sleep-deprived madness. I used an old trick of mine to get back on track. Typically if I stay up late I push my bedtime schedule back later such that I’m sleeping and rising at a later time, but if I stay up really really really late and then crash then it doesn’t affect the schedule. So from my six hour nap I did not sleep for about 20 hours before again adopting the 20 minute naps. People say you should wait a week before another attempt to let your schedule adjust, but people also say you should get eight hours of sleep at night and that doesn’t always do it for me either, so I decided to carve my own way. I stayed up, resisting the urge to continue my 20 minute naps, and then ignoring my circadian rhythm to adopt the monophasic schedule. After about 22 hours of no sleep, I was confident enough that I had broke any trend that had been set with that six hour mistake. I woke up from my next 20 minute nap feeling like the living dead.

That was the worst of it though. From then on my sleeps started getting better. Over a 16 hour period every nap felt better than the last. I woke up refreshed and with enough energy that I felt I could kill a large animal with my bare hands. I got loads of work done. I started using headphones to sleep against white noise, and that only served to deepen the quality of my 20 minute refreshment periods. If I didn’t know better I would say that I had somehow, magically, against all reason, been fully adjusted to the new schedule because of the mistake. However I knew that was unrealistic and the worst was yet to come. The 2-10 am period where I am normally in a bed was still on the horizon. 2am struck and I took my nap, and then went back to my place in search of a shower and some food. I felt I could keep myself up better doing chores at my place than I could at my friend’s house. The shower was nice. I don’t remember sitting down on the couch. I do remember wondering in my sleep why there was sunlight during my 6 am nap.

So Ed and I have decided to call it quits on this attempt. We’re going to try again in a week or so. I think that we will have an advantage now that our bodies have been trained to use the 20 minute naps. I’m going to attempt to keep an Everyman-like schedule between now and then, maintaining a core sleep as needed with some naps during the day, so that I can continue to hold the 20 minute habit. Normally I would never write a post like this because I realize that nobody really cares what other people have to say most of the time, but at the moment the polyphase community is very small and something Ed said about contributing data struck home with me, so maybe there is enough of a nugget of golden information in this effort to justify my efforts.

I’ll post again when I’ve started my next attempt. Good luck to all in the meantime.