Weeks 1 and 2 in review

My original hope was that I wouldn't have to do anything like this since I would just stick to the schedule as planned every day and so there would be no need to calculate how long I had slept.  Yes, quite naive of me.  I'm still going to say that applies for naps though: I've only ever completely missed one, although the couple times I've overslept  so much that a nap has gotten skipped.  Still, for the most part it's been 3 20-25 minute naps every day, so I'm just going to record my core sleeps:

Week 1:
Day 1: 3 hrs
Day 2: 3 hrs
Day 3: 4 hrs
Day 4: 3 hrs
Day 5: 3 hrs
Day 6: 3 hrs
Day 7: 3 hrs
Average: 3.15hrs

Week 2:
Day 8: 9hrs
Day 9: 3hrs
Day 10: 3hrs
Day 11: 6hrs
Day 12: 3hrs
Day 13: 3hrs
Day 14: 4hrs
Average: 4.5hrs

So on Week 2 I've been oversleeping every 3 days and sleeping an average of 4.5hrs.  Seems about as good a reason as any to try out the 4.5+2 schedule.  Based on my experience this past couple weeks I'm pretty sure even if I'm getting very poor naps I'll be able to function with 4.5hrs/night of sleep.  The downside, of course, is that may day becomes an hour shorter - but it's not like I've been that pressed for time lately.

Also, I really need to figure out how long my sleep cycles are at night so I can pick the exact right amount of time to sleep.

Days 14 and 15: continuing difficulty

Things have still been rough, mainly because I haven't been able to find a comfortable way to nap in a bathroom stall.  It's actually sad because during the day I'll feel really tired and even have microsleeps every now and then, but when I walk over to the bathroom and try to nap there I don't feel nearly as sleepy.  Finding it easier to sleep when I don't want to has been a problem for me before, but it's pretty annoying for it to be happening when I'm this sleep-deprived.  I'm still convinced that poor napping is the main reason for my troubles, but I can't think of a good solution to this issue.

Might be a good idea to switch to 4.5hrs + 2naps until I get it figured out.  I could definitely use the added flexibility that only requiring 2 naps will give me, and the nap timings should be even more flexible with a 4.5-hour core sleep.

Day 13: the elusive bathroom nap

Still having a lot of trouble napping in the bathroom.  Actually, my right arm has felt weird all day, and I think it's because I pinched a nerve trying to sleep on it for my first two naps of the day.

On the bright side, the nap I took on the cab home was great, and I feel completely refreshed.

I'm starting to get the impression that this schedule is completely workable, except that I'm not getting quality naps in the office bathroom.  Thinking back to the times I've been tired or overslept (which includes this morning, unfortunately, when I woke up at the right time then went back to sleep for nearly an hour), they've all come after days at the office, when I haven't been able to take good naps.

I'm going to go to the bathroom in my house and experiment with positions.

Days 9 through 12: on the wagon, off the wagon

On Day 9 (Saturday, the morning after I overslept) I jumped back on the wagon, made it through Day 10, but on Day 11 I fell asleep around 12:30am and ended up sleeping over 6 hours.  Now it's Day 12.

Yesterday I was miserable: I had a headache for much of the night, and I felt cold again at night when I was trying to stay awake.  Today I feel great, and I'm hoping it's not just because I got 6 hours of sleep last night, but that I'm adapting.

On the bright side, even if I only feel good today because of the extra sleep, the very fact that 6 hours counts as extra sleep for my body now is quite heartening.  I'll try to keep up the 3hrs+3naps schedule, but if I don't make significant progress soon I'll considering 4.5hs+2naps.

In other news, still experimenting with ways to take naps in the office bathroom.  It's always been difficult to find a comfortable position, but I think I'm close to a breakthrough.  Then again I think that after every nap, and I can never remember what the new position was by the time I get to my next nap.

Oh, and one more thing: I'm moving my entire schedule back 30 minutes, so that I sleep from 330-630, 1130-1150, 1650-1710, 2210-2230.

Day 8: epic failure

God dammit. I slept like 9 hours last night.

I don't remember exactly when, but I was trying to read in my room sometime between 12am and 1am, and I was thinking it was really cold in my room so I decided to sit up in bed to read until I warmed up. Before I knew it I had laid down to get more comfortable, turned out the lights, and decided to go to bed early but wake up at 7.  Now, I had been thinking about going to sleep at 2:30 but still waking up at 7, so it's not like this was entirely unplanned, although I'm not sure whether it was 2:30 by the time I turned out the lights, and even if not I had already failed by sleeping a bit before then.

Of course, I didn't wake up at 7 - well, I did, but I quickly turned off my alarm and went back to bed until nearly 10.

It was a hard night to stay awake because the past three days had been very busy at work, and the last two nights I couldn't get to bed at 4 because I had too much work I was so tired yesterday that .  But I'm still pretty disappointed with myself.  Here's what I'll do from now on to prevent this from happening:

• Don't get into bed just because I'm cold.  Instead put on more clothes, drink something warm, maybe do some calisthenics to warm up my body.
• If whatever I'm doing isn't keeping my interest and it's not something I absolutely have to do at that time, switch to something that I'll enjoy more, like watching TV.
• On weekends, put my alarm somewhere where I'll have to get out of bed to turn it off.

Just calculated how much sleep I've gotten in the past week in order to make myself feel better.  The total comes out to around 35 hours compared to the over 50-60 hours I'd get in a regular week.  35 is better than how most people in the community did when they were starting out Everyman (although many of them did the 4.5-hour + 2 nap version).  Maybe I shouldn't feel so bad about myself.

Oh yeah, also that nap from yesterday.  I took it.  And a few extra, although that apparently wasn't enough to keep me from catastrophically failing later that day.

Days are so short when you don't wake up at 7.  I better get started on all the work I have to do this weekend.

Days 6 and 7: ridiculously busy

Haven't had time to update because of two consecutive 15-hour days at work. No idea how I would have survived days like this if I hadn't switched to this schedule - quite fortuitous, actually. And rest assured that I've been sticking to the schedule - if anything I've been getting less sleep. Who would have thought that I'd ever have trouble getting my work done by 4am?


I've been feeling better and better during the day, except for the hour or so before and after my 4am-7am core sleep, which continues to be brutal.

Stating to have issues with the logistics of taking three naps in a day since I started working on client stuff. As I told Dan before, that's going to be the biggest challenge of this schedule.

Today's Day 8, and there's a meeting at noon that conflicts with my first nap. Moreover, it might be hard to nap right before or after it because the team I'm working with is going to be trying hard to get materials ready for a client meeting at 3pm. This brings us to the first cliffhanger of my blog: what will become of my nap? DUN DUN DUN.

Days 4 and 5: quick update

Going to keep this one short because I want to get to bed soon, and also I don't remember much of yesterday because the days are starting to blend together. Fatigue has seemed to come and go: sometimes I have a ton of energy and sometimes I struggle to keep my eyes open at work. On the whole the fatigue seems to be getting better, however, and that probably is due to my improved napping. I've fallen asleep at every nap, although it has sometimes taken a while and I don't think I've had any REM sleep in a nap yet.

In terms of actual sleep everything has gone as planned, except my nighttime nap yesterday was cut short by a taxi driver whom I had specifically instructed to not wake me, and my afternoon nap was delayed nearly 2 hours, which had the strange effect of making it difficult to sleep during it.

Very excited about day 6 because I think the worst may have passed: I really struggled to keep my eyes open during the afternoon today, but things have been peachy since then.

Day 3: beginning to encounter resistance

I started this day on the wrong foot by oversleeping for an hour. Then I felt groggy for a couple hours, not feeling reasonably awake until around noon when I was supposed to nap anyway.

Naps are still the same as before: fairly restful, but I don't feel like I'm really sleeping during them.

Feeling very tired now, but have a little under an hour until it's time for my core sleep. With the exception of this morning, I've actually felt pretty lucid and alert throughout this experiment, except during the 11pm-4am period which has been brutal yesterday and today.

When times have gotten tough, like they have in the past few hours, I've been reading the blogs of other polyphasic sleepers. The good news is that the oversleep this morning isn't a big deal compared to the setbacks others have experienced. But the bad news is that the majority of these bloggers gave up.

Here's hoping that my unproductivity was due as much to procrastination as to sleepiness, and that once the workweek starts again tomorrow I start using my time more effectively instead of just doing everything I can to occupy my time so as not to fall asleep.

Day 2: first semi-successful nap!

I spent most of the day out of the house today, but managed to find time for all my naps. It's too early to make any conclusions, but so far the logistics of taking 3 naps a day seem manageable, if somewhat annoying and at times expensive. So far my MO for napping out in the wild has been to go to Starbucks and order a warm milk. In warmer weather, sleeping homeless-style on grass or on benches, where they can be found, could be feasible, but for the time being I can't think of any indoor places where I can nap for free without fear of being disturbed. In any case the extra four hours a day of wakefulness I get should vastly outweigh any of these inconveniences.

I've been continued to be surprised by my lucidity and alertness throughout my second day on this schedule. I didn't feel significantly more tired than yesterday, with the exception of the morning, when it was damn hard to wake up after 3 hours of sleep. What's more, my third nap of the day definitely involved some sleep, although I don't think I actually managed a full cycle of REM sleep. With luck, I may start successfully napping without even going through any particularly painful period of sleep deprivation. Tomorrow, I think, is when I'll find out how this is going to play out.

Day 1: update - epic nap failure

I'm sitting at a Starbucks in Shibuya, just having had my third unsuccessful nap of the day. At each of my prescribed nap times I've dutifully put my head down, put on Polynap's 26-minute sleep track (I'm giving myself an extra few minutes until I start reliably falling asleep immediately at the start of nap time), closed my eyes, and sat there patiently waiting to fall asleep - but nothing.

On the bright side I do feel somewhat rested after these attempts and I've felt myself almost fall asleep a couple times, but I'm definitely not adjusting as fast as I would have hoped. Looks like I need to accumulate more sleep deprivation before my body learns to fall asleep for 20-minute naps. Actually, despite only getting 3 hours of sleep last night I haven't felt tired during the day. I felt much more lucid today than I have during the past few weeks, and the afternoon was painless and productive. I'm sure that'll change soon though.

I'm excited to see what tomorrow will bring. Worst case I have a day where I'm incredibly tired but still can't nap. Even if that happens, a Saturday with 20 full hours of wakefulness should have a lot of room for fun stuff.

Day 1: the beginning of a sleep less journey

Sleep is great. I've always loved it, and until just six months ago I had time for plenty of it.

Unfortunately you can't be a student forever: or, at least, you can't be paid to be a student for more than a couple years without actually trying. So, six months ago, I started work at job about which one of my interviewers said: "60 hours is a good week." I was aware, of course, that this would be a big lifestyle change, but I had no idea how difficult sleep-deprivation would be because I had never experienced it for more than a couple days.

As I found out the hard way, 6 hours of sleep wasn't enough for me. Neither was 7, and even 8 hours was pushing it - it turned out there was a reason I had been sleeping 9 hours a day in my student days. Sure, I could survive for a week on 6, 7 hours of sleep a night, but then I would spend most of the weekend asleep. Even on good weeks when I could get more sleep I would be tired at work, especially in the afternoons, when most of my willpower would be devoted to staying awake and I would get almost no work done. I listened to my colleagues with envy: "I was really sleep-deprived this week but I feel great today because I slept 8 hours last night!", or worse, "Oh, you sleep a lot, huh. Yeah, me too. Sometimes I sleep way too much on the weekends. Sometimes, even, like 8 hours.", and wished that I, like they, could live on less sleep and have more time for work and play.

I did know of one method, rumored to have been practiced by Leonardo da Vinci: six 20-minute naps, spaced equally throughout the day, adding up to a mere 2 hours of sleep per day. I would have loved having 22 waking hours every day, but the difficulty of adjusting to such a schedule aside, the logistics of such a schedule rendered it completely infeasible for me. Still, the fantasy of transcending sleep, and thereby time, to reach a higher level of productivity persisted.

Those who read a lot on the web will be familiar with the kind of serendipity with which I found the polyphasic sleep community, an entire online community of people who sleep multiple times in the day. Having read Merlin Mann's Patching your personal suck the morning before a particularly drowsy afternoon, I resolved to find a solution to my drowsiness issues. The next day, a national holiday, I searched online for ways to live on less sleep, and an Ask MetaFilter question led me to a Wikipedia article on polyphasic sleep, with pie-chart pictures of an entire spectrum of sleep schedules ranging from the regular one sleep per day to the aforementioned six. I was intrigued by these new hybrid schedules, which offered a compromise between the two unfeasible extremes of eight hours of sleep a day and six naps a day.

Luckily the schedules all had names, and I googled the name of the most promising: the Everyman, with one moderately large pie slice of sleep at night and three little slivers throughout the day. I found the seminal article by PureDoxyk, who had previously lived by the 6-nap/day schedule (and christened it the Uberman for the feeling it gave her of transcending sleep and even time) and developed the Everyman to better accomodate for a non-student lifestyle.

After that it was a matter of voraciously reading up on the Everyman, in particular an excellent start-up guide detailing the entire spectrum of schedules and how to choose when your sleep times will be spread throughout the day. I decided on a 3-hour core sleep at 4am, and 3 naps throughout the day, around 11am, 5pm, and 11pm.

I even found a site with MP3 files designed to mask background noise and help you sleep, then wake you up after 20 minutes. Once I bought an eyemask to cut out light when I have to nap in bright places, I was set.

That was all yesterday.

So here I am, 10am on the first day on the schedule. Yesterday I tried to nap twice, unsuccessfully, and then stayed up until 4am and woke up at 7 as planned. I actually feel much more alert than I usually do, although I'm sure the drowsiness will kick in soon, if not today then certainly tomorrow.

But this is actually good: compared to other schedules, like the less-intense Everyman with a 4.5-hour core sleep and two naps, the greater initial sleep deprivation of the 3-hour Everyman is supposed to make the adaptation quicker: although not as much as the Uberman. The reason for this is that the body needs to be trained to immediately go on REM sleep so that you can get REM sleep in a 20-minute nap, and this can only happen in a state of significant sleep deprivation. With my naps yesterday I didn't even fall asleep, let alone go into REM sleep, so it looks like my body has a lot of learning to do.

About an hour and a half until my first nap of the day now. Hopefully the first of many naps I'll take in an office bathroom stall.