Day Twoops

Willpower can keep you up until one a.m., but it can’t get you up at four.

(Somewhere in the future, that will make a handy aphorism for something that needs a vague-sounding aphorism.)

Details on the re-adaptation, day two and the stupid $@%!ng alarm, under the cut.  >,<

I’m pretty sure my two main alarms (on my cell-phone) went off, but I don’t remember them. And my backup alarm, the one guaranteed to wake anybody from two rooms away…is tricky to set. Which means I probably shouldn’t have set it (or not set it, as it turned out) at midnight last night, when I was so loopy my husband was openly mocking me without fear. (Without fear, I tell you!  What’s the world coming to?)

The good(-ish) news is, I slept in exactly 3 hours.  This is good for two reasons:  First, it’s a six-hour total, which means my naps yesterday “took”; that’s how much I would normally oversleep if I were to sleep in as much as I could on my old Everyman schedule.  If things weren’t going as well, I’d have expected to sleep for a total of 7 or 8 hours rather than six.  Secondly, it’s good because it made me angry; I had JUST gotten used to having the extra time, and I had plans for it this morning, so I’m super pissed at having to get up, grab a shower and run.  This pissedness will prove good motivation for tonight…which is going to be as productive, adaptation-wise, as a Day Two, but probably as difficult as a Day Three.  (They do that, when you screw up, if you hadn’t noticed — you don’t get as much out of the subsequent days, adaptation-wise, but they are pretty much just as hard, or harder, than they would have been if you’d done it right.)

By the way, I will fix this in a rather unorthodox way, but that’s because this is Tuesday. Lemme ‘splain.  (No, is too much; let me sum up. ;)  Every Tuesday evening I have a kungfu class that always turns me into a dishrag.  It also almost always makes me miss my evening nap.  So on a normal Tuesday, I usually don’t worry about the evening nap (assuming I even get home in time to take it); and I go to bed at 11:30, to get 4.5 hours of sleep, which makes up for the missed nap and seems to help me process the mad amounts of extra exercise.  Because today is now day two/three, and I have that class tonight (and it’s definitely going to kill my evening nap), I’m going to compensate thusly, with a bit of a Sleep Patch-Job:  I’m going to nap early this afternoon (probably 11 or 12 instead of 1pm), and then try to catch a nap before class (about 6, if I can pull it off).  I’m hoping I can then stay up until 1, since it’s the strict 1-4 nap that’s the challenge to get used to here.

*sigh*

So, Dumb Stupid Lesson from this one: Set the tricky alarms in the afternoon, or early in the evening, so that they go off when you need them!  I think because I didn’t need the Big Bad Alarm on the morning of Day Two, part of me assumed that the cell-phone-alarms were going to be enough all the way through.

And it IS true that this has been easier than I expected so far, or at least more immediately familiar.  But duh, it’s been my schedule for three years.  I’m sure the adaptation will be shorter than a full one — but the second and third days at least are still going to be challenging; I have to get over a “hump” there, where the new habit of conking out all night gets replaced with that oh-so-tantalizing three-hour nap.  ;)  Other people adapting or thinking of adapting who are reading my progress here should note:  It’s going to go faster for me than it will for a Freshie. I have been on this schedule for three years, and though I’ve totally gotten off it now, it’ll make sense if I re-adapt pretty quickly once I get the timing down.  So please don’t take it as a personal failure or anything if you’re adapting, and it doesn’t go as quickly!