Category — polyphasic sleep

My recent bout of halfassed, overworked monophasism has taught me many things.  A short (i.e. rushed) list below:

• Sleeping for longer than 3-4 hours has cumulative negative consequences for my back & neck problems
• If I don't get at least one daytime nap, I run out of "nerves"; as in, somebody's getting on my last one by about 5pm
• Both the feeling of being tired, and the feeling of being groggy after waking from a 7+-hour sleep, are my least favorite feelings ever gods how I hate them
• Writing in the cracks of your worklife does not work when your work also happens on computers, and you don't have time to put hour-or-more breaks between the activities
• When almost all your time is in use doing "the basics" (work, sleep, errands), all the things you do for "play" (i.e. random learning/exploring/reading) go away…and life feels horribly adult and two-dimensional without them
• Summertime is WAY too short without the nights

…There, wasn't that enlightening?  Now, to round off your day, here's a picture I took of a Bad Movie DVD Cover where it says "Thou Shalt Not" while a guy shoots himself in the foot. 

I thought it was pretty good advice, myself.

;)

So it occurred to me the other day that I neglected to put one major thing in the last post:  I STILL NAP.  This makes my version of the "typical overworked monophaser" sleep-schedule a bit different from the norm; but it also illustrates that 20-minute naps can still be awesome in that context.

I don't nap with the kind of regularity I think would be best; I still get tired at my usual nap-times (unless I'm running too hard to notice), and if I'm going to snag a nap, it'll often be nearly where one of my naps would have been on Everyman 3.  I never get more than one a day lately, though; but on the 3rd or 4th day of sleeping 4-6 hours at night, that nap can really save my skin.  I don't wake up feeling perfectly rested like I'm used to, but it keeps me going.

Oh, and yes, I can still fall asleep really fast (in 2-3 minutes, max), and I still wake up fairly automatically after about 19 minutes.  I set an alarm, but more often than not I wake up ahead of it — I deliberately set it a little past when I would normally wake up though, to give myself the chance to wake up naturally, and that generally works great.  If I'm extra-tired, I may sleep through and the alarm will have to get me up. 

Hm, come to think of it, I had a late night last night (went to my first convention, hung out with a bunch of great people — arguably Southeast Michigan's best! — and went swimming, yay), and I'm still recovering from a crazy week past and preparing for a crazy week to come…and I have about 40 minutes before I need to jump in the car & run…so maybe it's time for another 20 minutes of wonderfulness right now. 

That's the thing with naps…especially once you learn to take them…you've got to get them when you can.  When they're this short, that's pretty easy, thank goodness.  And no, taking naps is not the same as being polyphasic; but it's better than being monophasic without them, if you ask me!

…

In other, somewhat more personal news, my husband stumbled across this great article (he's awesome for that, among other things ;), written by a drug-treatment counselor with 20 years experience, on what the real causes and effects of treatment programs for teens are.  As someone who was put through that exact thing when I was barely 14 — not over drugs, but general misbehavior – I could not more strongly urge parents, and future parents, to read this entire article and take what it says to heart.  Agree with the drug message or not, the truth is that more often than not, such problems have deeper origins involving the whole family, and the worst thing you can do about them is pack your kid off to an institution…that's something I would pay a lot of money to impress on people.  If you read the article because of this message, thank you!

Once again — and I'm sure this will deeply shock everyone — I'm waaaay behind on the polyphasic-related email I've been receiving, so if I owe you an email, it's totally my fault…again. 

In my own defense, I'm adjusting to a crazy hard job during an utterly crazy time at the company; I have a lot of responsibility and a lot to prove; and I have to move across the country in, like, a month.  So add moving and traveling 800 miles every couple weeks to apartment-hunt to 80-hour weeks with nights and weekends and, well, that's me. 

Seriously, I have neglected to email my mom more than once.  Don't feel shunned.  ;)

However, it's fascinating to me that I'm now living the exact pseudo-monophasic modern Western sleep schedule that I've railed about for years.  I stay up too late; I get 4-6 hours most nights; sometimes 7; some weekend day if I can I'll sleep 9 or 10 and feel groggy but oddly refreshed afterwards.  I'm exquisitely dependent on a good dose of daily caffeine; I'm starting to have to fight gravitating towards energy drinks.

I *am* that professional nerd.  And I am the worst sleeper ever; and for the moment, I really can't avoid it.  

The only reason this isn't upsetting in the extreme is that I've determined, for sure, that my job will be cool about letting me get a nap in.  There's still the commute and other details to iron out, but that's promising enough that I'm willing to use it as an excuse to not panic.  I may just be too busy, and too out-and-about-with-no-car, to pull off Uberman; I've accepted that.  But Everyman 3 — one of the great loves of my life — looks very darn likely again in the near future.  

THANK.  GOODNESS.  I hate sleeping and I hate being tired, and I've been doing more of both the last few months than I ever did while I was polyphasic.  Ew ew ew.  …Still, it is a heck of an experiential opportunity, to try the typical, horrible (I-M-increasingly-justified-O) sleep schedule that the typical overworked slob in my socioeconomic arena keeps…I suspect I'll be glad to have learned this, later on.

Before I go, I want to say thank you to everyone who's been emailing me — there have been quite a lot lately! — I do enjoy your stories, questions and comments, even when I can't get back to you promptly.  Thanks so much for taking the time to fill me in.

PD 

So I was recently on a website, nothing special or important to me, just somewhere I landed to look up something, as often happens.  On the right sidebar of this site is a quotes widget, kind of like mine except with more general, popular quotes and it refreshed like every two seconds — fast enough that you had to work to keep up with reading them.

Naturally this would be an exercise my brain (especially in its current depleted state — more on that in a minute) would enjoy, so I stared at the thing for a minute, watching the wisdom go by.

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

You know you're in love when you don't want to sleep because finally, reality is better than your dreams.

He's like a drug to you, Bella.

…Wait, what? 

What's that simple sentence doing there?  It's a plain, ineloquent statement made to some character, with no context, no profundity, and no poetry.  Why is that quotable?

My eyes latch onto it long enough to get the name.

…Oh god.  Really?  Really?

Some days it's an actual, difficult chore to maintain any faith in humanity.

(In other news, I'm working pretty much constantly for a month, so please forgive me falling off the planet.  Things changed radically again, now I'm moving again, and I really need the money so I took on a ton of work to help pay for it.  It's going to be a crazy few months!  But good crazy, progress-crazy.  At the moment I don't even have a sleep-schedule, and "stimulants" are my new middle name, so I apologize to all the sleepers for whom I'm being a horrible example right now; I assure you it's temporary, and I'm very excited about finding out where I can fit polyphasic sleep in my new lifestyle, once I settle into it.  Thank you all for your support and comments and questions and attention, and I will post again when I can.  –I know I said weekends, but now I'm working the next three or four, so unfortunately now I'm no longer sure.  But I will absolutely try.  Thank you again!!)

*pant pant*

Okay, this week I almost wrote a Wednesday post.  I actually did write it — Wednesday night — and then it mysteriously got eaten alive, whole and chomping.  Gone.  And here it is Saturday, and I haven't been able to replace it.

See, here's the thing.  New job (YAY) is a mostly-from-home gig, which I'm quickly learning is harder than an at-the-office gig in a lot of ways (many of the same ways that doing college course-work online was surprisingly harder than going to school, actually).  It's only been a few months, and I have a weeeeird commuter schedule with a lot of new stuff to get used to, plus numerous big family-changes and stuff, so thank you all for being awesome and cutting me slack; I've needed it.

I think I'm going to switch to doing my weekly updates (as you know, there are Twitters and periodic small updates whenever, but the weekly ones are — or are supposed to be — the substantive ones) on the weekend, if that's okay.  I just spend too much time in front of the computer on a weekday as it is, and I just don't think I can work in any more.  Look at Ye Olde Schedule now:

• bet. 4-5a:  wake up, exercise, write fiction
• 6a, 2-3x a week:  kungfu class
• bet. 7-8a:  nap
• 8:30a:  start work
• about 1p:  nap
• theoretically 5p, but more often 7p:  done with work
• 5:30 or 7p, 2-3x a week:  more kungfu/taiji/stuff
• after work/class until 9p:  parent
• somewhere in the 7-8p range, if I can:  nap
• 11:30p:  bedtime if I didn't get an evening nap; I buy another 1-1.5 hours if I did.  I spend that time reading or watching TV and making chainmail, or exercising if I don't feel like I've had enough that day.

…So I'm on this rotating E3-E4.5 schedule where "it depends" on if I get all of my naps, or if work or the kiddo steals one, how much sleep I get at night.  Sometimes I even only get one nap, and then I sleep 6 hours.  Sometimes I overwork myself ridiculously at kungfu or working out (remember how I wasn't much of a straight-up-working-out freak?  That changed, heh) and need extra sleep to heal something.  (By the way, ice, some Ibuprofen and extra water before bed, and whatever herbal or topical healing-stuff you like, plus 3 hours extra sleep is the BEST cure for pulled muscles and stuff.  I've no idea if it works when you're monophasic, so don't ask.  ;) 

And one week every month, now, I travel, and spend that whole week working a LOT and sleeping in temporary places.  I've still only done it twice, so I haven't figured out how I can nap when I'm out of town, but I absolutely do plan to figure it out, if I can.  In fact, now that I'm mostly working from home, I absolutely plan to see if I can set up an Uberman-friendly schedule.  OH HELL YES.  If it's possible, I'm so on it.  But I'm still way in the early phases of figuring that out, unfortunately, so there's not much to write about yet.

And while I'm home, I'm spending 1-2 hours typing in the morning, and then 8+ hours during the day doing this rather astonishing combination of texting, talking on the phone, emailing, technie stuff, and chatting (IM is a big way my department communicates, so it's pretty much constant).  After that, I simply cannot look at any of the three computers I use every day (uh-huh) after 9pm; I can't.  So I've basically given up all video-games (except for my Wii, which I adore on the odd chance I get time to play it) and dropped largely off the face of the regularly-updating Internet Planet for a while. 

Like, 40 of you good readers got email replies from me this morning, some of which you'd been waiting on over a month.  Seriously. Oh, and I've pretty much been kicked out of my SF-critiquing group, for nonactivity.  D'oh!

Anyway, this is your formal assurance that there are Plans.  To start with, regular updates will be returning, albeit on weekends.  Progress on the 2nd Edition of Ubersleep, which I left at about 2/3 done, will resume.  Somehow.  And I'll keep everyone posted on the details of my situation that are relevant to casing out a possible future Uberman opportunity, which, if I did it, I would do it right, including videos and daily notes and the whole shebang.  I'm busy as shit, but I remain hopeful — which, really, ought to be my motto.  I need a T-Shirt…

PD

Step one:  Stifle your ego sufficiently, then proceed.

Step two:  Disgorge soul.

As a longtime sufferer of depression (to start the conversation light & impersonal), I have a special hatred of advice that can be summed up as "Get Over It" — I've seen too many situations where that's impossible and cruel to suggest.  Yet as a philosophy nut I fully admit that such advice may sometimes be useful, though this doesn't dampen my eye-rolling, fist-shaking rage when it is.

The thing is, you really can't benefit from any good influences that are around you if you won't pay attention to them.  (I know, Buddha is an effing broken record sometimes.)  And you really can't pay much attention to them if you're busy being overwhelmed by how much you resent / are horrified by / hate people or deities for / wish you'd never encountered the past…or how much you hope for / are afraid of / are worried about some aspect or another of the future.  In this sense past and future are obstructions, to peace, answers, and help.

So when things hit a certain kind of deep-dug, long-term suck, "get over it" — in the sense of making a conscious decision to stop letting thoughts of past or future intervene, to shelve your ego and just do what's in front of you as best as you can — is sometimes, unfortunately, the best advice.

Step two point five:  Refine.

Don't fight the darkness;
Watch your flashlight.

Step Two point seven five:  Chit-chat.

So things are good here, work is great, family is great, arch-nemeses both corporeal and psychological are failing to destroy both…I took on the hundredpushups and twohundredsitups programs and they're awesome; been getting to class lots too, woot…sleep schedule is still Everyman 4.5 for now, but I travel more often now and it's monophasic then, due to not having set up a way to nap in Home #2 yet; but thank the gods for E4.5, even; it's a big help. 

How are ya'll?

Step Three:  Hit "Publish".

Step Three Point One (Optional):  Add Picture for Effect.

chikuru: How to add four hours to your day without bending space-time.

…From which I stole, with permission, this really cool graphic representation of the 3-hour Everyman Schedule.

(The article is a nice short overview, too, with some good and very diverse links.  Thanks, chikuru!)

So, for the sake of argument, say you suck at getting naps, for whatever reason.  Maybe the best you can do is to snag one in the early morning, and another sometime in the afternoon or evening.

Well, that's good enough for rock & roll, as they say.  With two naps a day, you can (if you're like me, I should say) sleep 4.5 hours at night and do just peachy.

It's not as time-saving as Everyman 3, with gives you several hours of extra morning- and evening-time; and of course it lacks all the mind-bending coolness of Uberman/Dymaxion.  You end up sleeping almost 6 hours in total, which is enough for some people monophasically (but not me), so it might not even actually save you any sleep.

But you can go to sleep about midnight and get up before five.  You trade a few tiny pieces of mid-morning or late-afternoon or whenever you nap, for being able to stay up later and get up earlier than most people — or rather, stay up as late as someone who stays up late, and get up as early as someone who gets up early.  So if you're like me, and you like having a little extra time both at night and in the a.m., it's awesome.

More info on Everyman 4.5 below the cut!

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Mm, another Lifehacker article by a tech-startup-consultant-rockstar who's going to teach us all to be clean, slick and productive through the magic of a daytime nap. *yawn* (No, I'm not tired. ;) Anyway, dutifully I read the article, amusedly I chuckled at the first comment being about polyphasic sleep (which is either too weird a topic for LH to really cover, or lacks the prerequisite of being presented by a sufficiently slick techstar) — and verily I note for you, who are probably curious but also probably know more about napping than this guy, the short version:

• You don't have to actually fall asleep to nap – it's enough to drift off to a half-sleep state
• Even if it normally takes you 30+ minutes to fall asleep, you can benefit from 20 minute power naps
• First, learn what you're aiming for, for example by using something like pzizz.  Then, practice reproducing that feeling – plan for a few months before you get good at it
• Don't over-sleep when power-napping, it will only make you feel groggy

from How I Mastered the Power Nap

…And all of those are good points, I suppose, even though they all come down, as far as I can tell, to "have some discipline and really try it".

Which does–I freely admit–work!

So, for all that I've hax0red sleep a bit, which I'll admit to being cautiously proud of, apparently the subtle art of taking notes is just horrendously beyond me.  This is the first I've written of any of it since last week!  *d'oh*

So this is the, um, end of the first week of Everyman 3 again, after about three months monophasic–er, wait, when did I make that post?–or roughly so.  (Look, scientists, at what a terrible job I'm doing!  I'm worthless at data!  Somebody should really do this right, in a lab!!)  But hey, gimme a break; what I just experienced can only barely be called an adaptation. 

A more accurate term, I think, is "I just fell back into the sleep schedule I've had for the last almost four years".  And I've been busy enough at computery-stuff lately that I haven't had free time that I could spend in front of the box, not unless I wanted my neck to stage an outright revolt.  Plus, what to write?  It was…well, it was nothing, really.  I was tired for like, an evening.  I couldn't get, or sleep for, one nap or another for the first couple days, but if I just missed one I plowed through and kept going, and if I missed two naps, I slept 4.5 at night — which is basically how I always do it, with some variation.  I went back to making adjustments-on-the-fly almost immediately, though I'm trying to be more disciplined so that hopefully the habit will weather some upheaval.  I have been pretty good compared to my average behavior the last 3.5 years.

Er, if my failure to make "adaptation notes" or something disappointed anyone, I'm terribly sorry.  There just wasn't much to tell — other than that I feel awesome, and wow am I glad to have that back.  Better still, it looks possible — far from guaranteed, but maybe doable — that I can keep this schedule straight through my upcoming transition.  When I tell you what happened to suddenly make this a possibility, you may find your jaw in your lap all a'sudden; I did.  But I can't yet.  Then again, only being able to have my Everyman schedule back is hardly a fail!

Details, though — I can provide some more of those.  Click through if you'd like to read them.  And….woot!  \o/

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