Uberman restart (Days 1-2 Summary)

This post is a continuation of the previous post.

Due to the 10 hour oversleep on (Tuesday December 16th, 2008) , I felt that most of the sleep deprivation I had accumulated was now gone, and I could just "restart", fresh. For clarification, days start at 12:00 AM, so the hardest part of the day is mentioned first.

Most of my naps, I'm doing in my bed. I'm just most comfortable there and can fall asleep the fastest. If I start having a lot of oversleep problems, then I'll change that. I'm also using nap mp3's in order to sleep. I use the 23 minute version found at http://polynap.grelly.com/?page_id=7

The nap mp3 has white noise for 23 minutes and then wakes you up with chickens/roosters/music and so on.

Day 1 - Wednesday December 17th, 2008

This new day 1 didn't go exactly as I planned. In the early morning phase of it, I watched some tv and played some video games (Tales of Vesperia). Unfortunately, at 8:30 AM, I decided on an extra nap and ended up sleeping until 12 AM --- basically causing a 4 hour oversleep. Other than that, I felt alright and the rest went without a hitch.

This oversleep was bad, and made me realize that although I made it 12 days through Uberman before, I needed to be vigilent about getting up during naps again. I thought it would be easy because of my previous experience in the fall, but that is clearly not the case. Not a great start, but it's a start.

Day 2 - Thursday December 18th, 2008

I had problems deciding what I would do in the early morning. I ended up watching some Beach Girls (it's a mini-series my mom lent to me --- I'm not going to put it to waste), played some Halo 3, and at about 5 AM watched some Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. At my 8 AM nap, I slept until 10 which sucks. It was the old "let's take a second nap" problem. I need to stop that. But, it was only 2 hours, so I'm getting better.

I was SO tired after this oversleep. I don't even know how I woke up, but I'm happy I did. To keep myself from going back to sleep, I watched a couple episodes of Scrubs, which made me waken right up :) I love Scrubs -- it's an amazing show.

I took my 12 PM nap early (at 11:30 AM), because of a doctors appointment. Even so, the rest of the day seemed to go well. I'm starting to dream and sleep for a lot more of my naps now, then I did on Day 1.

I was in a social situation today where I had to wonder off to get my 8 PM nap. It's the day my mom was celebrating my brothers birthday (my parents are divorced), and we were watching a movie. My mom went to get a smoke break at about about 7:55 PM, so I decided to take that opportunity to say "well, since you're taking a smoke break, I'll go take a quick nap. Be back in 20 minutes or so".

Learning to adjust and go and take naps like this in social situations will be hard, but well worth it. When I did Uberman before, I sometimes skipped naps or moved them because of social situations. However, slipping off to have a nap isn't *that* bad, 20 minutes to most people is nothing. Pushing myself to do it will be the tough, but rewarding, thing.

3:50 AM, Friday December 19th, 2008 (start of day 3)

I decided to give an update on the last week because I was up at 2 AM, and people in the #polyphasers channel on FreeNode were talking about who was keeping a blog. I figured I now had the time to kill to continue this blog, which had the original intention of being kept. My mental state is normal, for the most part. I can feel a tad bit of tiredness and my eyes are tired, I have to blink once in a while.

My largest goal for later this morning is to NOT TAKE AN EXTRA NAP. Not even at 2 AM or 6 AM, and definitely not directly after one of my normal naps. I feel a lot better after I move around and wake up after 10 minutes anyways. The problem is waking up and getting out of bed, of course.

The actual naps are weird. I know I'm sleeping, but sometimes I'm not sure. It seems that I go directly into dream imagery from consciousness, which is a weird feeling. I can wake up from that pretty quickly too, and for almost no reason. It seems my naps are going:

sleep->wake->mental imagery (dream?)->sleep->wake->sleep->wake->sleep->wake

It's really weird.

Overall, I've learned a few things so far:

1) Avoid taking extra naps, as extra naps lead to extra naps, which lead to oversleeping.
2) Do not take an extra nap immediately after a scheduled nap time.
3) When the alarm goes off, GET UP! If I move around a bit, I'll feel better within 10 minutes or so.
4) If really tired, watch Scrubs. It wakens me right up :)

I'm slightly scared for day 3. From others blogs, specifically Placebo at http://polynap.grelly.com/ , day 3 is supposed to be really hard. I guess it's something to look forward to :)

Anyways, that's it for this update. The rest should *hopefully* happen as life happens.

Update & Uberman Day 1-2 (failure...)

Alright, I know I haven't updated this blog in a while. Sorry about that (although I'm not really expecting to have had that many readers at this point...yet :P). Since last time, I used naps to augment times when I haven't been sleeping properly, or to help me pull all nighters. Sometimes, I had a pseudo-everyman thing going, where I would sleep for 3-6 hours and than have naps throughout the day. For the most part, though, I reverted back to sleeping monophasically, about 7-10 hours, depending on the level of sleep deprivation I was experiencing. I tend to stay up late....and some days I'd get less sleep, and so on.

I have since decided to adapt to the uberman sleep pattern. I will be sleeping for approximately 20 minutes at the following times:

12 AM, 4 AM, 8 AM, 12 PM, 4 PM, and 8 PM.

I had a plan in my head to start on Monday, December the 15th, so Saturday (Dec 13th) night was the last night I had a normal sleep, and I started the naps about halfway through the day on Sunday. I decided that during the night, to make things easier, I'd take a nap every 2 hours instead of four. This meant that I'd sleep at 2, 4, 6, and 8 AM. Unfortunately, Monday, at around 6:30 AM, I took an extra nap and ended up sleeping for 4 hours. I continued the naps regardless. Then, Tuesday morning, at about the same time, I ended up oversleeping by 10 hours. Ooops.

These oversleeps both happened in the same way: first, I'd have an extra nap, to try and not be as tired and to kill some time. Then, after the nap, I'd wake up and decide that I wanted another nap. I did not wake up from the second nap, either through sucking at setting an alarm, or because I'd just sleep through it or turn it off in my sleep. I'm not really sure now, as I can't really remember.

What have I learned? Never EVER take a second nap, for any reason. If I absolutely have to, get up and move around for a half an hour or something before doing so, and make sure my alarm is set. My theory is that I had sleep inertia started, and the second nap just kept it going. Yep, this sucks.

First Post!

Recently I started a journal, but it really hasn't forced me to write much about polyphasic sleep. Since it seems to be the cool thing to do to start a blog when you're adapting to polyphasic sleep, I figured that's what I'd do. I lasted approximately 14 days on uberman at the beginning of the school year, but ultimately failed due to oversleeps and not being strict enough with the schedule. I will now be trying the everyman schedule.

The everyman "version" that I'm picking involves a 3 hour "core", where I sleep for 3 hours at night. Then, during the day and early evening, I'll have 3 20-minute naps. The proposed schedule is:

Core: 4:00-7:00 AM
Nap 1: 12:00-12:20 PM
Nap 2: 5:00-5:20 PM
Nap 3: 10:00-12:20 PM

I've been following a seemingly random polyphasic schedule, where I have a core for 4.5 or 6 hours and just kind of nap when I want to (nearly evently spaced apart). It is kinda neat to be able to do on the fly. However, I'd love to minimize this to a 3 hour core, to get the real benefits from a polyphasic schedule, but without the limitations created by the uberman sleep
pattern.

Notes:

(1) If this interferes with school at all, I will be stopping. If I'm not adopted by exam time (or relatively well adopted), I will be going monophasic for the first two weeks of December. I'd probably just go back to my 4.5-6 hour core thing with a couple of naps, because it seems natural to me. (With that one, I'm getting about 5.5-6.5 hours every 24, which I suppose isn't THAT bad)

(2) I plan, even though I'm adopting to everyman now, to adopt to uberman during the winter break after exams. Everyman now is just to minimize sleep, and I suppose to gain practice napping for when I go uberman in about a month and a half. If uberman doesn't fit my schedule for next semester, then I'll just stick to everyman instead.

Anyways, enough ramble. I'll try and update regularly for the first few days.