Kirk’s Blog

• SSS: 3

Something seems to have gone right for the last nap.  Thank goodness because I tried to take a nap at 7:30ish PM earlier today and couldn’t fall asleep.  I went to bed at 9:20 PM and set the alarm for 10:20 PM because I knew I needed some extra time to fall asleep.  I just hope I didn’t get more than 30 minutes of sleep, but I do feel energized and refreshed from the nap.  I also had a considerable appetite when I woke up.  I still feel sleepy (energized and sleepy, yes I know, strange but true), and I can imagine that is just going to get more intense as the night progresses.  I know that if I can just have 4 perfect days of no oversleeps, I’ll be on the path to more restful naps.

• SSS: 6

I lay down to take a nap around 2:00 PM, and then I reset the alarm for another 30 minutes since I didn’t fall asleep. I’m not sure where the last 30 minutes came from since I got up at 3:30 PM, and I don’t remember falling asleep. At that point, my dad came in looking for me to pick me up, and I was in a daze trying to make this entry. I must have been in the middle of some deep sleep because I was very out of it.

We’re on the road now an hour later and I’m feeling a bit more together. My logic was that I should get some sleep so that it won’t be so hard on me later when I’d be catching up on any missed naps. I think in actuality, I wasn’t feeling sleepy enough to take the nap in the first place. The nap was not as restful as the previous two, and I have no idea how long I actually slept at this point. In examining the alarms, I’ve discovered that I slept past one, and that means I must have had 45 minutes or so of sleep. When I decided to reset the alarms, I only reset one of them, the quieter one; I didn’t expect to oversleep. I also have a vague memory of pressing the snooze button, but I don’t know if that happened during this nap or another nap.

One hour later (5:33 PM). . . I’m more fully awake with a slight irritation in my throat. I hope gauging nap times on the fly will not make me more susceptible to bad judgment and unsuccessful naps than a more regular schedule.

• SSS: 2

I just took a nap from 11:20 AM to 11:50 AM.  I’m still waking up from it.  The alarm went off for some time before I realized what was happening.  Perhaps my body is already trained to wake up at the times of my scheduled naps, and therefore there are strange experiences of lying there while the alarm goes off, unaware of what’s happening, when I have to wake up at a time not on the normal schedule.

• SSS: 2

Well I slept rather deeply during that last nap.  I got sleepy as 8:30 AM approached and then woke up from a deep slumber as the alarm went off at 9:00 AM.  I still feel a bit out of it and am gaining coherence, but I feel all in all pretty rested.  That’s a good sign.  At least now, I better understand how to determine how well transitioned I am to the schedule.  I think from here on out, I’m going to gauge my level of sleepiness at each nap time and make the decision on whether or not to nap yet.  If not, I will delay the nap for up to a couple hours.  If I feel sleepy before the timed nap within a couple hours, I will nap then.

• SSS: 2.5

There’s a lot happening here, and I’m afraid this blog entry may reflect the confused state of my current thoughts. I don’t know if I should consider where I am in the transition as a success or a failure. I have a generalized idea of what I consider a successful polyphasic adjustment to be, and whether I’m on the road to achieving that is incredibly hard to determine. There are a lot of people out there doing this polyphasic thing (or trying to anyway), and they all seem to have different ideas on how things are supposed to work, and no one seems to really know or is able to say anything definitively. It may actually be worth getting Stampi’s book for all the practical information it contains, even if it is $155.

Last night I thought I had achieved “success” but that may not have been the case. Tonight I felt very sleepy, and I in fact nodded off in the chair twice (once while waiting for Battle.net to hook me up to a game, a 4vs4 game which of course would never materialize at such a late hour), for about an hour each time. And that may be why I feel alert right now although upon retrospect it’s hard to say because there’s generally an increase in coherence after the night hours anyway. Part of the reason I did it was because I thought I had transitioned and I was disappointed to discover that wasn’t the case. It may be worth posting the first part of my one week review here, since I doubt at this point I will finish it:

I’m coming to some more developed hypotheses regarding how to transition to polyphasic sleep, aka Uberman’s Sleep Schedule, which pull together many of the thoughts and experiences I’ve been going through during the first week of the transition. It’s been a mixed bag, a roller coaster of ups and downs, leading me to think I’m almost there (fully adjusted) at some times and feeling a great distance to cover at other times. In general, I think the ups and downs are caused by inconsistency of sleep during the naps. My theory is that by creating optimum conditions at the beginning of each nap, one can eliminate oversleeping. By oversleeping, I’m talking about the type of oversleep that cannot be controlled by one’s will. For example, sleeping past extremely loud alarms without ever turning them off would fit into this category while turning off the alarm and drifting back to sleep would not be applicable. I am also talking only about oversleeps that occur during the transition period - not oversleeps that happen after one has already adjusted, since I do not have any personal experience with that yet.

Those optimum conditions would entail a cool down time so that the nap is restful. I thought, and still do to some extent, that the oversleeps are caused by poor naps that accumulate putting excess pressure on your body. Seeing as it takes me a while to fall asleep sometimes, I decided that lying down for 15 minutes before the nap would help me to get sleepy enough to take it. Steve Pavlina, for example, claimed that he was able to fall asleep within 5 minutes under normal circumstances even before the transition to polyphasic, and that may be why he recommended the early riser transition first. I was never able to achieve that, but I do think that the restfulness of the naps is the key to this whole thing.

However, the logic may need to be reversed, and someone on the uberman yahoo group (he authors http://www.sleepingschedules.com) helped me to understand this. Rather than making the naps restful in order to prevent the oversleeps, more restful naps are a result of, and an indicator of, a successful transition. The fact that I’m still having trouble falling asleep during my naps is an indication that I haven’t adjusted yet, and I think being able to get some sleep in hour-long naps will prevent or delay my body from getting that sleep in the little naps. It may still, however, be possible to tackle the problem from both ends. One person suggested that we just nap whenever we feel sleepy and to make sure that the naps are at least an hour and half apart from each other. As long as the naps are short in duration, this may actually be a good technique – as long as one doesn’t oversleep.

• SSS: 3

Something has definitely changed.  Last night after my 9:00 PM nap (nap 38), I felt particularly energized, so much so that I accidentally kept on working right up till nap 39 instead of giving myself the usual 30 minutes cool down time to prepare for the nap.  I didn’t really sleep much during that nap, and the energy from nap 38 carried me through the night.  In fact, I haven’t had so much energy at night since I started this thing.  For nearly the entire night, I maintained a perfect 2 on the SSS without any need for external stimuli such as music or games to keep me awake.  I sat in silence all night, or almost all night, and was able to concentrate very well.  In fact, I’d say my concentration was the highest since I’ve been here.  I started working on a 1 week review, which I will post when I finish with it.

Right now I feel a slump in energy, but it’s a different kind of energy low than earlier in the week.  Before I mostly felt spaced out.  There were times when I had more energy or less energy, but on the whole I was spaced out most of the time.  I don’t feel spaced out right now.  It’s more like the feeling of the afternoon slump.  Perhaps I’m at a weird transition stage between circadian rhythms and something more ultradian because it is afterall the afternoon.  However, I can’t say at this point whether this slump in energy is the afternoon slump in terms of periodicity or if it’s something else.

Naps 40 (5am) and 41 (9am) went smoothly.  I allocated 30 minutes before each of them to cool down and then laid down for 15 minutes before the nap was actually supposed to start.  After waking up from nap 40, I felt refreshed and upbeat.  I felt a certain positivity and joyous gratitude for such a beautiful day, and I stopped to watch a vibrant red bird when I stepped out of the house.  For the whole previous week, I was too spaced out to appreciate anything so simple and profound as nature herself.  Even after the intense vitality I experienced after the nap of death, there was still something missing.  On a monophasic schedule, after a perfect night’s sleep, I tend to experience the “power of now” so to speak - a general appreciation for just being.  I feel that I have been separated from that throughout this experience until around naps 37 & 38.

• SSS: 2

I feel pretty good right now. It’s probably because I fell asleep in the chair for a little while between naps 36 and 37 while trying to do some emails (maybe an hour?) and had a dream. I suppose it’s just a minor setback because it can’t make up for all of the accumulated sleep deprivation since the 7.5 hour nap. However, I should be extra aware this time of any guerilla tactics employed by the body. That’s how it started last time… a little sleep here and little there… all serving the purpose of delaying the ultimate test, that is sleeping through the alarm. I should not have allowed myself to be so sleepy on the chair because I gave my body the opportunity to take advantage of that.

All of these delays are annoying. I would like to think that it’s a matter of will, and if so then it’s just wasting time to allow myself to fall asleep like that. If I can just get my body to the point of maximum sleep deprivation, then it will have to adapt at that point. That’s all there is to it. I think of it like a balloon, the air being the sleep deprivation. These little naps just let some air out, and then as it gets fuller, it gets harder and harder to keep blowing up because the balloon reaches its maximum size and looses elasticity. The final stages then require the most effort until finally… BOOM! The ballon explodes, and the body is forced to find another way. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective to just not sleep for 2 days or something like that and then start the little naps. It seems like it would speed up the process.

That would account for why Steve Pavlina adapted so quickly: because he didn’t oversleep! In all of my searching on the internet, I haven’t encountered one other person who has adapted without oversleeping. How on earth did he managed to avoid the guerilla tactics of the body and not sleep past alarms is beyond comprehension. If it really is all a matter of will, then he must have some amazing inner resources that enabled him to do that. If there is something else involved, he may have been innately predispositioned to have an easier time than others for whatever reason.

• SSS: 5

Well I’m not scared of the water anymore, but it certainly does motivate me to get out of bed! Haha, I really am getting more and more like a cat. Not only have I been taking “cat naps” but now I’m repelled by water, lol. And, by the way, the ringer on my cell phone is a cat’s meow.

Anyway, the entire process has become quite detached and mechanical. The first day after the nap of death I was bursting with energy the whole day, then the next day I was again spaced out. The first time I went through all this (the first days of the adjustment), I felt an emotional reaction to each change of mood/alertness. Now it all seems so predictable. My mind has the end result in focus, and it just has to wait patiently for the body to catch up. There is not really any more fear of oversleeping or screwing up in any other way, so now it’s just a matter of time.

I also feel like I am starting all over after that oversleep. For the first half of yesterday, each nap did not have much of an impact on my overall mood, which could best be described as spaced out (i.e. - a 4 on the SSS). By the time I woke up from nap 31 at 5:00 PM, I was feeling much more rested. The spaceyness had practically vanished, and I was feeling pretty normal. One thing I did differently was that I laid down in bed on my back for 15 minutes before I was supposed to actually start the nap. In that 15 minutes I got sleepy and ready to take a nap, and then I finally allowed myself to fall asleep, rolling over to my side, as the nap start time passed.

Naps 33-34 (night time) were not quite so successfull, and I felt more severely out of it than after naps 28-30 (day time). All of them were successful in the sense that I actually fell asleep, but none of them left me feeling very good. For nap 32, I didn’t fall asleep at all, and the energy from nap 31 carried me through to nap 33. All night I was on the verge of falling asleep with SSS values of 6 and occasional bouts of 7. So, I mainly played Warcraft 3 the entire night, where sleep has no place. When I would stop playing, I still felt energized, and I was actually going to do some school work at one point, but I quickly became sleepy again. So I went back to Warcraft 3. I almost fell asleep in the chair a couple times while waiting for Battle.net to match me up with an opponent. When the match did happen and I opened my eyes to look at the screen, I was dizzy, and things were out of focus. However, by the time I established the first 3 buildings or so of my base, I was alert and engaged. During the last game, I got into an exchange of “yo mama” insults with my opponent to help me wake up as it seemed to be taking longer than normal.