Everyman Report: Re-defining “Rolling your own”
*sigh* I really think the Daily Show is going down in history as some of the best media of our time. Then again, I have designs on a “VOTE FOR MONTY PYTHON” t-shirt too.
Okay, polyphase time.
It’s been an interesting four days. It was frustrating at first, because I couldn’t keep to the schedule I was trying for to save me. I frequently couldn’t sleep for naps or didn’t fall asleep easily. I was rarely oversleeping and not by much; it was just that I seemed inclined to wake up at certain times, almost no matter when I went to sleep. And not necessarily always the same time, either.
Like I said, frustrating. But yesterday it clicked, the insomnia and the weird oversleeps, and the last 24 hours have been fantastic. Sleep, dreams, and no tiredness — finally! I will try to explain what happened, but it’s still sort of new and hard to explain, so bear with me and I’ll try not to ramble on too long.
The thing is, my body doesn’t watch clocks. It watches more complicated things, like energy levels, activity levels, weather, health and so on. Everyman simply doesn’t have the clockwork regularity of the equiphasic schedules (I should say “of Uberman”, since Dymaxion as practiced by Bucky Fuller seems to have been mostly relaxed about it). So what you get, when you get adaptation (though that might be presuming too much still), is a regular schedule, but not a 24-hour regular schedule. It’s more like regular like the length of the days is regular: You have morning and noon and night, but morning might be 5:43 one day and 5:37 the next.
Here’s how the pattern that works is looking:
* 9 a.m., 20 minute nap. That one’s solid, between 8:30 - 9, usually dead on at 9. Sleep like a brick, and I love this one; it’s very peaceful.
* 2 p.m., 20 minute nap. Happens anywhere from 12:30 to 2:30, but usually between 1:30 and 2:00. Occasionally has to be skipped for work, in which case I either do the next nap (the six p.m.), or sometimes I get an energy burst then and make it up on my core instead.
* 6 p.m., 20 minute nap. May not happen at all. (If I try it and I don’t want it, I just can’t sleep.) May happen as early as 5:30 or late as 8:00.
* The former “10 p.m.” almost never happens anywhere near ten. I either take a 20 minute nap around 8, or 9, or stay awake until somewhere between 11 - 2 and take my core nap — my only one. It’s anywhere from 1.5 to 4 hours long, but most often 2.5 - 3 hours. (Over the weekend, I stayed up until 4:00, and it was three and a half…then last night I went to bed at 11:30, and it was the same length.) I definitely can’t take both the 6 p.m. and the 10-ish p.m. 20 minute naps, and once I took neither with apparently no ill effects, but taking the nap means I can stay awake later at night, rather than getting up at 2 or 3 in the morning!
* The 6 a.m. nap, gave it up. (I imagine I might still take it if I got up at 2 a.m., but usually it’s 3 or 4 and I don’t need it before my nine.) I get drowsy in the morning after my shower, but breakfast and something on TV (or homework) is more than sufficient to take care of it, and it doesn’t translate into my being tired during my commute. Actually, I haven’t been tired for my commute in almost a week now. Twice I’ve gotten tired after I get to work, and that was how I discovered that a five-minute nap could be a nice refresher.
* Oh yeah, and the five-minute nap. I didn’t have one today, but I’ve had one a day for the last couple days, and once, two of them. I just take them anytime I’m inexplicably tired between naps, and feel like it. I mean, what’s five minutes?
And yes, it really does work like it looks — very stable in the mornings, and modifying itself over the day according, I presume, to how that particular day is. But it resets like clockwork at 9 a.m. Isn’t that weird?
As you can see, this Everyman thing is even more like a roll-your-own gig than I’d figured it would be. Or more specifically, it’s not a “roll your own Uberman”, where you pick a numbers schedule out of the air and make it work. (This fits in with my experience, that almost everyone who tries to “modify Uberman” and still stick by the numbers, fails to adapt.) It’s a “roll your own sleep pattern“. Basically you take apart your existing method of sleeping at whatever times you sleep, shatter it into bits, and start arranging them until you’ve got the one you want. It’s a strange balance of discipline, at first, and flexibility, later on. And as always, it bears further study. ;)
I love being polyphasic, but this is the first time, I think, that I love Everyman. I’m quite happy with my four-hours-per-24, broken up just so. Getting here was hardly by virtue of a scientific system, and may never be (though I’m sure it can be improved upon a bit!), but it definitely marries the best of convenience, doability and freedom. Now let’s see if this holds, eh?
7 comments
Ok, so question- After your core sleep, how do you get up? You say it fluctuates, and you “seem to wake up at the same time”, which indicates that you’re just waking up naturally?
I’m still working on perfecting the Uberman before I move on to more polyphasic philanthropy, but I have a hard time imagining waking up at 6am “naturally”.
Care to elaborate? Is it something you get used to?
I messed with it, and messed with it, and messed with it, and during the last week it just started happening naturally. When I say that Everyman is a LONG adaptation, I’m not kidding — I was still struggling to wake up at least once per day well through the second month. (It was rather worth it, since I wasn’t tired the rest of the time and I was operating on 4 hours of sleep or less.)
I had been taking a core nap from 2-5, and then split the core but kept the second “half” from 3:30 - 5. I was tired every morning. But waking up “earlier” than five seemed excessive or scary to me in some way (staying up late doesn’t intimidate me, but getting up at four a.m.?!). Then one day I fell out accidentally at one, and woke up on my own at four, and felt excellent. Re-reading the above, it might not be clear enough (it was really hard to figure out how to put this down in “schedule” terms, since I’ve been winging it with gradual changes for weeks now…I think that’s just how it goes, when you’re trying to read all of your body’s clues as well as your “lifestyle” requirements at once…or perhaps I’m just not smart or organized enough to do it more systematically!). I will tryto write this all out again in another week or so, when I have a better grasp on it (in the meantime, I need to start collecting source material and links to polyphasic stuff, something this site is desperately missing I think.)
But here’s another try at clarification: If I take a nap *before* ten or so, I’ll sleep from 12 or 1 to 3 or 4. I always wake up between twoish and four, even without an alarm (though I do try to remember to set one anyway). Often, especially if I do the naps right and don’t skip the before-ten nap (which I tend to, because I get busy with fun things), I’ll wake up well in advance of my alarm, after having slept only an hour or two. On the weekends, I may nap at 9 or 10, stay awake until 3 or 4, and sleep as much as I want, which means waking up by myself at six or seven. The core nap seems pretty automatic in length now; I’m not too worried about sleeping any more than four hours at most (and it’s only been four when I’ve missed a nap previously, or haven’t felt well or something).
If I skip that 10-ish nap, though, I get tired by 11:30 or so, and I may either sleep straight through until three or four, or sleep until one or two and then get up and take a quick (no more than 15 minute) nap around 3:30 or 4:00. As long as I’m up and moving before five, I’m fine (and in order to not be, I have to ignore the fact that I woke up, and stay in bed and go back to sleep — I can do this, but then I’m exhausted until later in the day. Go figure!).
Hope that helps some…as I said, I’ll try to codify this better when I’ve been doing it a little longer; it’s really only been five days of waking-automatically and feeling rested and just “knowing” when to nap and when not to, at this point.
One thing is certain: Everyman is WEIRD.
;)
Fascinating.
please speculate, why do you think it takes longer to adapt to everyman?
Also, have you ever experimented with supplements to help you nap when you just don’t feel like it, but know you need to? L-Typtophan would be good, and is widely used to help folks go nigh-nighs. It’s just an amino acid.
I’m using 5-HTP at present for the same reason, it increases seratonin levels. It works.
Do allow me an introduction. They call me fogmoth, as I prefer the vague, retiring, obscured and subtle.
I’m a newbie to polyphase, this is only my second week. Week one was spent atttempting ‘der uberman’ - but I suffered horribly and crashed a little on day 6, precipitating everyman - which is going creamy and smoothy. It’s been 5 days and I feel wonderful, napping like a bubba with 3.5 hours of core. I’m laughing.
I salute you PD - you are the namer, and the NAMER is the expert, please appreciate that. Uber and Every are fine names indeed.
FM
Interesting…
I too am following a very flexible schedule — I just don’t have your success re: core sleep. I’ll sleep for 2-4.5 hours and whatever the lenght waking up is always a pain. I get up because of family obligations, otherwise I would sleep much longer. Seems like I’m always in deep comatose sleep when the alarm goes off :(
I’ll try eventually to get up earlier, even if it doesn’t appeal to me at all.
To report back on the 5-minute nap: it can help somewhat but does no miracle. Sometimes I won’t sleep but just slightly drift off, and feel nonetheless refreshed. Yet the tiredness starts to get bad again 1-1.5 hour later, after which I know I need a real nap. I’ll continue to experiment with it though, since on 2 occasions it allowed me to have a productive morning.
Yan
P.S. I much prefer this site’s template!
Glad you like the redesign! I’m still tweaking, but something tells me that’s a permanent state for me. ;)
I agree about the 5-minute nap — it doesn’t last very long. But it can get me through to a nap that’s an hour away, and it’s hella preferable to just trying to yawn through that hour. The best part about it, IMO, is that it’s to be taken sitting up, so virtually no risk of falling truly asleep — and if you can’t snoz for five minutes sitting up, well, you weren’t that tired anyway. (At least, I wasn’t.)
With regards to the core, I’d start playing with the times ina systematic way and see what you stumble upon: Try 1.5 hours, then 1.75, then 2, then 2.25…when you find something that works a *little* better, keep narrowing it. I’m to the point of realizing that my best core nap is three hours and twenty-five minutes long!
Best o’ luck,
PD
Nice to virtually have met you, fogmoth. I <3 your name.
Das Ubermensch is brutal, but in my experience (and collected vicarious ones), shorter than any version that incorporates a core nap. (To put a finer point on the distinction, I sometimes use the words “equiphasic” versus “nonequiphasic” to denote the difference.)
If I was forced, say, by a snarky commenter, to speculate as to why… ;) … I would probably say that when you switch to an equiphasic “naps-only” schedule, you pull your body cold-turkey off the tendency to sleep as a reset mechanism, to break up your days, etc. Leaving behind the “sleep in a chunk” habit is hard, but like most habits, dropping it entirely is faster than trying to wean down off it. Adopting Everyman, you’re trying to bend, but not break, your body’s tendency to sleep in a chunk…you want a *smaller* chunk, which, rather than making you feel like you’re not sleeping at all (a la Uberman), makes you feel like you’re simply not sleeping enough, and for a while your body fights the transition, trying to make up the sleep debt you’re building instead of just giving up and adjusting.
Good enough guess? -PD
Do you recommend that one starts with uberman for quick adaption to polyphasic sleep, and then when you need flexibility for ones schedule, switch to everyman? Would that shorten the adaption times, yet still put you in a good position to take on a more flexible schedule?
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