An Überman says what?

Back to Everyman

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:06:12 -0500

Well, after about 4 days I hit the expected sleep deprived states, which, although not terrible, were enough to keep me from being productive. I’ve decided to go back to normal Everyman 3-3 for now and try to keep that schedule tight. I’ll take my core at 11pm, then naps at 6am, 11am, and 5pm.
It was interesting though, that it took so long for the sleep debt to build. I think I’m right on the edge of being able to get deep sleep in short naps. I doubt the adaptation would really take all that long, but I can’t afford to be unproductive for a week right now...
I’ve been getting a bit more exercise now that I have my bike all set up. Previously I was ‘only’ swimming a mile a day. Now I’m taking a short bike ride in the morning (14 miles yesterday). Once I get my legs acclimated I’m thinking about riding the bike to and from work, which is about 20 miles each way. The biggest hang up will be figuring out a good way of carrying my computer...

More Catching Up

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:35:45 -0500

Since the last update I’ve been following a pretty loose everyman. Even though I was trying to be more regular it wasn’t really happening and my schedule has been all over the place. I only had about four oversleeps, two for about 9 hours and a couple of shorter ones, but I missed a fair number of naps and wasn’t really diligent about getting them in at the right time.
Even so, I suppose I’ve only been averaging about four hours of sleep a day. I haven’t acclimated though, so I’ve been feeling a little tired and like there is some sleep missing.
On the plus side, my nap reflex/technique is great. I can take a 22 minute nap and feel refreshed afterward.
Tuesday, after the last great oversleep (9 hours), I decided I needed to get things more under control. I didn’t really make a conscious decision to go full Uberman, but that is what came out. Since then I’ve hit every nap on schedule and have had no oversleeps. I was planning on just doing the Uberman schedule for a day, but I never had any real sleep dep symptoms, so I just kept going. So far I’ve felt a little tired, but I actually feel like I’m getting rest and not accumulating a sleep debt.
All I can think is that during my awkward phase I passed a threshold where I am starting to get some deep sleep during my naps. I’m not quite there yet, because I don’t feel really truly rested most of the time, but I don’t feel sleep deprived either. It’s more like I’ve been awake all day and it’s 3am on a monophasic schedule. Tired, but tolerable.’
Concentration seems to be ok and most of the time I don’t have trouble staying awake. If I get sloppy and watch too much TV though, I’ll tend to want to nod off.
I’m planning on sticking with this schedule until either the adaptation fully clicks or I get some real nasty sleep dep. I’m hopeful that the sleep dep won’t happen and I’ll just adapt.
More to come later...

Catching Up

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 04:38:23 -0500

It’s been a while. I’m still at it but I did take a couple of days off the schedule and let myself sleep to try to slam the cold/flu that I had. Somehow I just didn’t think pushing an aggressive sleep schedule would be conducive to recovery.
Now I’m back in the saddle and trying to be a bit more regular. My schedule is core at 4:30-6, and 20 minutes at 11, 4, and 8 with an optional midnight-ish nap if I need it (so far I haven’t). I a few minutes late for my core now, so I need to go, but I hate it when these blogs just end with no explanation and you don’t know what happened, so I wanted to do a brief update.

Autonomic Somnambulatory Actions

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:43:05 -0500

So Monday I didn’t really hit the nap schedule very accurately and by the time 3:00 rolled around I decided that a 3 hour core would be a good idea. I set the clock for 6 and I remember getting up, turning it off and being generally awake and aware, then I remember waking up at 8. Eh? Time lapse awareness? No idea what happened.
I don’t suppose a 5 hour core isn’t really all that horrifying and I felt pretty good today, so whatever, but your mind can be pretty crafty at getting what it wants sometimes, can’t it?
Since I slept so long :-) I skipped the 11am nap. Then, as luck would have it, there was someone in my office with a logic analyzer all afternoon until 6 so that was my next nap. Seems like it should be more of a problem, but here it is, 12:30 and I feel pretty good after a 20 minute snooze at 11pm.
I know I should be more strict about hitting the schedule at this point, but I’m amazed at how flexible it actually seems to be. Of course, there might be longer term effects I don’t perceive yet...

Restarts

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:32:23 -0500

Bit of a restart this weekend. I had a slight sore throat Friday evening so I slept in about 9 hours on Saturday morning. Seems to have done the trick for the sore throat, but it is really pretty early in the whole thing for me to be taking such liberties.
Anyway, I hopped back on the schedule yesterday and today wasn’t too bad, so hopefully no real harm done.
I did notice that my mood was down even though I felt physically fine on Saturday. It just seemed like I had squandered seven extra hours in bed. I’m sure I needed it though to fight whatever (cold, allergies...) was trying to get me down.
Even when I’m not terribly productive at night I still get a lot more done than I do sleeping...

Balance

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:53:11 -0500

Resuming the schedule after yesterday morning’s sleep fart seemed to go pretty easily. I did my core from 11:30 to 1:30 and discovered that waking up after two hours is a lot easier than waking up after one and a half. It might be that my cycles are longer by a half hour or it could be that I have a very short cycle of about an hour. In any case, two hours seems like a fine core so I think I’ll try leaving it there for a while.
Most people I talk to about polyphasic sleep seem to think I’m doing something really strange, something that is unbalanced. I think polyphasic sleep can actually lend a lot of balance to your life, especially if you work for The Man.
Consider how a normal day goes for most people. They get up at 6:30, spend an hour getting ready for work and having breakfast, burn 30 minutes in traffic, work eight hours and take an hour for lunch, and spend another half hour in traffic going home. If they work out then that’s another hour or two. They get home at 6:30 or 7:00 and have dinner, then watch an hour or two of TV. Maybe they spend an hour talking to their family, helping their kids with homework, or reading a book. That’s pretty much the end of their day since they need to be in bed by 10:30 to get their eight hours of sleep. This person just spent 12 hours doing job related crap and got to spend two or three on personal and family things. That seems unbalanced to me.
For me the day might seem pretty much the same on the surface, but when 10:30 comes I take a two hour nap and then I have six more hours of personal time. I get to spend almost as much time on my own interests as I do on work. Ah, balance....
This manifests in interesting ways. A couple of nights ago I came home from work and Kerrill wanted to go to the grocery store. Before polyphase, that would have seemed like a burden, using up two hours of my small allotment of family/personal time to shop for food. Now it ain’t no thing. I still have a whole evening and morning left and I can spend the grocery shopping time with my wife and not feel like I’m losing all my personal time.

Day 15 - Meh!

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:37:49 -0500

Not really sure what happened but I didn’t get up from my core until 7:00am. The alarm was set, I’m sure I must have turned it off. Funny thing is that my phone was by the bed and I’m sure it was plugged into the charger when I went to sleep. It was the reminder to take my 7am nap that woke me up!
So much for making fun of the people with multiple alarms...
I’ll just resume today like nothing happened and see how the recovery goes.
Yesterday was fine, but I did feel a little frayed. Like I was running on just barely enough sleep to keep from being really tired. All of the naps worked fine, and I didn’t have trouble staying awake until about an hour before my scheduled core time. I was trying to do the 4 nap thing, I think I’ll shift back to the 5 nap thing until this is more settled in...

Day 13 - Back to work

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:49:31 -0500

We’re still trying to settle on a schedule. This morning I went ahead and did a three hour core from 3am till 6am since we were moving things around. It was still difficult to get up, even with the extra sleep. I don’t really think it is a “how much” question so much as it is timing the cycle correctly so that I don’t end up dragging myself out of deep sleep.
Other than that, the day was great. I had a little tiredness before nap times, but generally felt 10/10. I took a swim after work and it felt easy and strong, which was quite a contrast to some of the midnight swims I took last week. Exercise seems to suffer when you’re sleep deprived.
I don’t think I like the core in the middle of the night like that. It breaks the night into two parts and makes the first part seem like the late part of the previous day. It is all psychological, but I think I would be more productive during the dark hours if they seemed like the early part of the new day. Feels more energetic.
So I’m moving my core back to around midnight. I think the schedule will look something like a core at 12:30-2:00 am and naps at 7:00 am, 11:00 am, 3:30 pm, and 8:00 pm. That should be fairly workable.

Day 12 - First real day of Everyman

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:18:18 -0500

Well, the first day on the new schedule went well. It was pretty difficult to wake up from the core though. In fact, it took well over an hour before I really woke up completely. During that hour I went for a mile walk, had a hot and cold shower, and ate breakfast. I was still feeling groggy after all that...
Once the grogginess wore off I felt pretty good. All of the naps were a lock and every one felt really refreshing. On two of the naps though, I slept the entire 20 minutes, which made waking up from the nap a little more difficult than usual. Most of the time I would wake up several minutes before the alarm.
Considering that the oversleeps that led to the schedule change weren't but a few hours each and that there were only two, I should be feeling beat if this schedule wasn't already meeting my sleep needs. I might be surprised, but I don't think it will get any more difficult than this and should get progressively better as I get used to waking from the core sleep. Other than the groggy period after the core this morning I've felt about 9/10 all day.
I started out intending to do the core sleep at 11pm, but Alex pointed out that there would be much less chance of a social conflict if we did it at 3am so we are moving it to that slot, starting tonight. It will be interesting to see what the next few days brings in terms of adaptation. If I can just get the post core wakeup time down to something reasonable I would be pretty happy with how this feels already.
Note that the comment system changed, due to me moving the blog to my mobile me account. I couldn’t figure out a way to move the comments (i’ll keep working on that), but new comments should work fine.

Day 11 - Change of Course

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:18:15 -0500

By early morning I was having major problems again with sleep dep. Not that that was unexpected since we had reset the adaptation with the day 10 sleep in, but I guess I was hoping it wouldn't be as bad as before.
I suppose we could just tough it out, but I have to go back to work on Monday (I've had the last week off) and I don't think they would appreciate me showing up with severe narcolepsy, so I decided to switch to Everyman with a 1.5 hour core. I'm hoping that since we were so close to uberman adaptation the addition of ANY core sleep will seem like unbounded luxury.
The addition of a 1.5 hour core at 7am today removed all of the sleep dep symptoms for me and I felt pretty good all day. It was a bear to wake up from though, I'll have to work on the timing there I think... The ongoing plan is to put the core at 11pm-12:30pm.
Alex was originally going to continue on with the uberman schedule, but he started having trouble later today and fell asleep a couple of times. Enough to throw his adaptation to the wind probably, so he will be joining me on the new schedule.
I haven't seen too many accounts of people doing Everyman 1.5, so this will be interesting. We will maintain all 5 of the other naps for the time being so it really isn't too much of a change in schedule for us, just an extension of one nap. If we get to a point where we are comfortable dropping one of the daytime naps there really won't be much difference in waking time from uberman.
We will try to do this through the end of the month before we modify anything though. If we get non-functional we'll extend to Everyman 3, but I would like make a best effort on this one.
Serious respect to ANYONE who is able to pull off uberman...