Overdue Sleep Update!

Wow, I kinda left ya’ll hanging there, didn’t I? Sorry! Crazy times, trying to put back some semblance of a schedule after school and that stupid summer virus I caught. *ugh*

Things are re-regulating, though. I needn’t have worried as much as I did about losing my schedule completely; even when I continued to sleep whenever and for how long I was able (since the cold made it impossible to sleep on demand), I stayed roughly polyphasic and got tired, if not "was able to sleep" at roughly the right times. Yay, habit-forming brain!

The cold or whatever I caught came with a lingering cough, so I’m just starting to be able to sleep really normally. I did somehow "unlearn" some of my previous skill for falling asleep quickly, so for most of the last week I’ve been frustrated by not being able to sleep for between one and all of my daytime naps. ("Frustrated" is probably understating it…a better word might be "irate as hell" — and by the way, being irate isn’t much conducive to napping, either!) But I took the usual steps, which include:

- Making sure I got not even a whiff of caffeine, and little or no sugar, within 2 hours of an oncoming daytime nap;

- Forcing myself to lay perfectly still and meditate for the entire naptime — not only does this help me go to sleep, but even if I can’t sleep, twenty minutes of meditation usually makes me feel quite rested, at least for a while;

- Tightening up the naptimes as much as possible, so they don’t get pushed back or skipped nearly as often as they might when my schedule is otherwise good

So, for the last three days now, I’ve been getting a good daytime nap 1-2 times a day, usually. This often means I sleep 4.5 hours at night — as you may suspect, when you’re on a restricted schedule, it’s amazingly hard to wake up earlier than you need to, so if I’m shorted a nap, I frequently wake up after 4.5 hours at night, wondering why I didn’t hear my alarm!

However, I’ve gone from Everyman 3 to 4.5 and back again before, so I’m not too worried about it. I figure I’ll give it a few more days for my daytime naps to become more reliable (I still occasionally have one where I get a coughing fit and then can’t sleep), and then I’ll start really pushing to stick with 3 hours at night.

I also rewrote my "daily schedule" to incorporate the lack of school, so that helps — it’s always easier for me to wake up if I have something I need to do.

Oo, and I put exercise first thing, at 4-4:30 a.m.; something I was scared to do before. But it really works — a half hour of even mild exercise wakes me up amazingly well if I’m groggy. Good to know!

…

Oh, one more thing — I need a geeky watch, I think, that has, at the bare minimum, several settable alarms. It would help me immeasurably if an alarm went off to remind me of my daytime naps! (In fact, now that I think about it, I had one back when I was doing Uberman, and it did help. Even when you get tired automatically at the right time, sometimes you need a reminder to stop what you’re doing!) It would also be awesome if it had something on it that I could use to track my "dots", but I suppose that’d be asking a lot. Anyway, said geeky watch needs to be wearable in an office — does anybody know of one, especially that doesn’t cost a hundred million bones to obtain? I’d be much obliged!

pic by sean dreilinger