Hurdles of Everyman
So, this is officially a “problem” with the Everyman schedule I’m on.
I’ve noticed that I get into cycles where I can’t sleep for my evening nap — I’m in one now. It’s definitely stress-related. I get home from work and I’m just too wound up to sleep until ten or eleven, at which point a) it’s too close to my core and b) it’s hard as hell to get up after 20 minutes.
So I lay down between 7-9 (whenever I feel most likely to sleep, though perhaps I’m being too lenient about the time there) and don’t sleep, meaning I get really tired at night, meaning I have to fight the tendency to oversleep my core and/or be tired in the morning. Alternately, especially if I’m feeling depressed or ill (lately it’s been both), I stay in bed and keep trying and eventually do fall asleep, and then it’s impossible to wake up for three hours. (I say “impossible” because I’ll oversleep my usual alarm and tell my husband to leave me alone, which he then does because he feels bad that I couldn’t sleep.)
This, as you can imagine, completely ruins my day. I lose my evening hours which I use for relaxing, replacing them with nighttime hours during which I have to stay at least somewhat active, and which it’s hard to be up for without disturbing the household. Mostly I end up too tired to stay up all night, and I usually end up taking another, irregular, unsatisfying core that makes it difficult to sleep during my naps the next day.
Nasty Catch-22. The only way out is to force myself to stay awake all night and take only a 20-minute nap (essentially switching my evening nap and my core), and then I’m pretty hideously tired in the morning but things will even out tomorrow.
The latter is what I’ll do — like I said, this has happened before and I probably mentioned it, but after tonight I realized that it’s definitely a pattern that tends to emerge when I’m stressed out, and one which I’m going to have to develop some defenses against. I’ll have to do something about my not sleeping in the evenings…maybe do relaxation or meditation beforehand, or (this is my latest idea) sleep in my car, where I can’t listen to the household.
I was fairly horrified to realize that I was having this problem, but then I realized that it still doesn’t make polyphasic sleep any more problematic than monophasic sleep was. (I used to have a tendency to not fall asleep until 3-4 a.m. when I was stressed, and/or to sleep way too much when I was depressed and screw up my schedule.) And with polyphase, at least I’m only missing out on half the time I missed out on when I screwed up monophasically. So ha. Victory by lesser defeat! ;)
Now. Time to go find things to keep me up for the rest of the night. Just like the old days, heh.
-PD
4 comments
Hi PD,
This is mark, a fellow everyman’er and occasional poster on the Yahoo group. I’ve been trying something lately that may help your evening can’t sleep problem. I’ve been taking my naps in pairs. One 20 min nap, 25 minutes awake doing something active like vacuuming, dishes, sweeping the porch then another 20 min nap. No core, just 6 nap pairs each day (although the adjustment period has had some inadvertant cores).
In you case, the first non-sleeping nap might get you drowsy and after a short waking period, you’d have a shot at hitting your second nap, that’s what happens to me when I can’t sleep during the first nap.
I have this half-baked theory that during the second nap, my brain can get what it missed the first time, without needing a core while keeping each nap to 20 min to avoid the drowsy feeling of a longer sleep. I wasn’t going to post anything until I had more experience with it, but figured you might be able to use a nap-pair for the tough evenings.
- mark
Hey Mark — Thanks for the tip! As you’ll see from two entries down the line, it turned out that taking that core early didn’t actually hurt me at all … I simply stayed up all night, minus one 20-minute nap! I’m still a little freaked out by the evenings thing though — I never know when I’m going to be able to sleep or for how long! In any case, keep me posted about how the “nap pairing” thing goes — that’s unique, as far as I know, so keep good records! The People Want To Know! ;)
Hi PD, sorry for the extent.
Hope it helps. The few times that it gets time to nap and you are not sleepy, there is something I do that helps. Go to bed or wherever, lay down, drop your body (loose the conscience about it), drop your breathing rate (important!), try to go into meditation (not thinking at all, concentrate on your breathing first and then in your heart rate), go as close to the sleep feeling as you can, trying to reproduce what you feel as you get asleep normally (in your brain). Even if you know that in the 20 min. you are not going to fall, you will get some kind of recovery. Sometimes you will even fall asleep although you thought it was impossible. As you try and experiment, you will get closer to some kind of meditation state that helps a lot to keep the schedule, both for your head as for your routine. With time you really get to calm down the noise in your head. What is sleep anyway? How close we can get to the real thing being conscious, and what extent of recovery do we get in this situation? You cannot fall asleep when you want, but you can put yourself lying against the door, waiting for it to open. Ear corks required!
That’s good news indeed. I do remember from the split core period that the evening nap was like a supercharger and I wouldn’t get tired until 3 am or so. I really liked the boost, but depending on 1.5 hours of sleep right around 8:00 got in the way of doing things with friends after work.
I’m afraid that I’ve been a bit lax, actually totally lax, on keeping records. I stopped recording in my spreadsheet about two months ago. It just got on my nerves to have to do something each wakeup instead of just getting on with life. So any reporting on this method will have to be qualitative in nature. I’ll start a thread over at the yahoo site once I feel good about the system or bail out on it.
- mark
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