Category — polyphasic sleep

Day 6 done!  The Kenpo workout is actually pretty fun; I'm not much on karate for martial art purposes, but it does make fun exercise, I'll give it that.  Plus it'll be easy enough to modify the workout to use kungfu-style punches and kicks, once I get better at it, yeah?  That would be 4w3s0m3.

(I'm not as hugely into l33t as I used to be — like most people, I grew out of the 90's eventually — but I've always appreciated 4w3s0m3 for being such a cool balance of alphas and numerics.)

The Universe also dropped the opportunity for a five-mile hilly bike-ride yesterday, and of course I took it (especially since that cold made me miss Underwater Hockey — by the way though, the cold went 95% away after a day! Woot!).  And yesterday was Legs & Pullups* day, so that was 5 miles on top of an hour of lunges and squats in the morning.  Oh yes.  My rear end is so sore today, ladies and gentlemen, that I have to sit with a pillow.

Actually I pretty much feel like hamburger all over at this point…well, actually my abs are ok today, but they were wrecked last night (Legs & Pullups* comes with a bonus 15 min of stab-me-in-the-stomach-please-it-would-be-kinder, as do two other workouts every week). 

Notably, my knees also seem OK, though I should get better about taking the glucosamine/chondroitin supplement I bought, just in case.  (Note for those who, like me, hate pills:  Emergen-C makes a Joint Support packet!) 

Anyway, tomorrow is stretching, which I'm sure will also be epic.  But as I could really use an epic stretch, and possibly a meat-tenderizer, that's great by me. 

One other cool thing I'm noticing:  A workout like this functions as a good anchor for one's routine.  Getting up every morning and exercising for what amounts to two hours (once you factor in getting ready, showering after, all that) threw everything else into a new orbit, but as it all settles there I get to tweak things, and the workout helps keep them where I put them.  Pretty rad. 

On the downside, I now sleep about twice as much as I did, which means that the two-hour workout is actually costing me six.  I made the decision to do it knowing that, though, and my plan once I finish the 90-day program is to switch to something shorter (there are plenty of maintenance programs that are like 20 minutes a day) and get my polyphasic schedule back.  I'm OK with not having it for a time while I tackle a specific big project (like getting that honest-to-awesome athlete's body I've always wanted), but I want it back as soon as that's feasible. 

Anyway, on that note, I should take this writing time while I've got it…!

*Psssh hell no I can't do pullups.  Yet.  I also can't hang a pullup bar in this apartment anyway, so that works out.  The program has options for using bands to simulate pull-ups until you can do real ones, so that's what I'm doing for now.  ::fistbumps for anyone out there who can actually do pull-ups!::

…P90X starts tomorrow.

I was watching bits of the videos yesterday, and wow, is that intimidating.  Not, funnily enough, because of the exercises — those look hard, as they should be, but I'm not worried about being able to do All The Everything on the first go; I'd much rather have the system as a whole last me for many cycles, which means I want it to be stupid hard at first — but because of the, well, aesthetics of the thing.

Tony, the guy who leads these, is definitely one of the more perfect examples of the specimen of humanity that he is.  His look is flawless, his "patter" is the perfect mix of motivating and non-intimidating, and his environment is just about perfectly tailored to impress a certain kind of person.

Which is about as far from me as you can get.

I don't find the people in the videos attractive or sympathetic; I snort at the "motivational" hoorah and constant hilarious use of XTREEM linguistics; faced with the carefully-tailored Fitness Environment, I feel both bored and uncomfortable.  But, I've had to ask myself, are the aesthetics of such a program what we really need to be in line with?  And the answer is no:  I want a good, non-shortcutty fitness program with structure and discipline elements, and P90X looks made-to-order for that.   So I will get started with it as it is, and I'll tailor my clothes and my workout space — my aesthetics — to make me comfortable.  That probably means kungfu clothes and turning Tony's patter down so it's easily overwhelmed by hardcore.  ;)

Here's what prep has entailed:

• Complete Google Doc where I'm keeping all the notes for tracking and cheat-sheety use later on (diet, workout schedules, water requirements, that kind of thing)
• Setup the space:  Clean, and get my TV's sound working (Thank You Husband!*)
• Find all the gear:  5lb square weights that are also push-up handles, rubber bands (starting at 8lb, to be adjusted if needed…I typically move more weight than the Average Girl Weight, due to being built on the curvy/muscular side rather than the thin one; but I'm not intending to get higher than 20lb total with this, since martial arts needs lean, not bulky, muscles), mat …need some water bottles still though, and more workout clothes would not hurt eventually
• Plan the schedule:  I'll do all my workouts first thing in the morning, which means I need to wake up no later than 6.  If I'm not polyphasic that'll mean a bedtime of 10pm, which will fry my bacon, but I'm not planning to put up with raw monophasism very long…maybe for recovery purposes the first 3 weeks (in fact I may take a daytime nap plus 8h of night sleep for that phase, since better recovery = better progress), but after that I'll be eyeballing how to sleep less if I can.  Expect a post or ten on that, of course.  ;)
• Remove all junk food from the house…sadly, this has meant eating most of it.  ;)
• Buy non-junk food so that I have a chance in hell of meeting the insanely protein-heavy dietary requirements of the first month…pepperoni slices, pickles, cheese, eggs, and tuna fish all over the place, plus as many fruits and veggies as I can shove in the fridge.  I have to eat a whopping 1800 calories a day, which, while still less than the "average", is a full 400 more than I usually aim for (and generally hit), and since it has to be 80% carb-free at first, that means a lot, lot, lot of unusual (for me) food, and pretty much eating it constantly.  Should be interesting.
• Mindset:  Doing more kungfu/taiji practice when I want to "relax"; and pausing often to feel the turning of the cycles and prepare for the THUNK! as a new, pretty heavy gear slams into place tomorrow … this "preparation" for something hard is a trick I learned getting big tattoos, if you care.  You get excited about it, you wait for the pain as a harbinger of a change you really want … this got me through 22 hours of labor too, same deal.  When you've mentally equated pain to a goal you really want to reach, you don't flinch from the pain, and not flinching is, in my experience, a good half of the battle.  ;)

So, to summarize the lessons so far:

-  Make your own aesthetics

-  Plan your butt off as a way to pre-commit to difficult paths

-  Don't assume that all techies know shit about your TV  ;)

-  Get ready to welcome necessary pain:  Not flinching is half the battle.

*Yes, my husband does all things relating to TVs and stereos and crap.  My (yes, considerable) technical expertise ends at the computer keyboard, and while it does spread out into some heavier machinery (I like me some shop equipment, oh yes), it doesn't go anywhere near consumer electronics.  I even got a friend to root my cell phone!

*sigh*  So, WordPress keeps eating my posts.  Sorry about the lack of them, but I have no patience lately for rewriting a big long thing I just lost to whatever bug sometimes randomly sends me back to the Dashboard page and then has only saved a blank draft.

This should get said, though:  Next week (beginning the 29th), I have big-deal visitors from out of town.  I'm off work and will likely not get any naps at all, due to showing people around.

The week after that, I'm going to start P90X, a 90-day athlete-training program that's formulated around a "no shortcuts, just work out at high speed for an hour every day while completely revamping your diet" mentality.  I like that kind of thinking, heh, even if the program itself is written in XTREEEM LINNNGO that couldn't be marketed more perpendicularly to me if they tried.  (Also, HOLY PROOFREADING BATMAN — it's like they just assumed the people who'd be buying this thing wouldn't know a misspelling if it sat on them.)  Fortunately I have friends to go hunting for good programs for me, so that I can wade through as little of that language as possible! 

Anyway, I'll probably do enough posting about that brutalness while I'm on it, but it's worth noting for now that "athlete training" and "super-efficient sleep schedule" are probably not compatible noun-phrases.  My plan is to keep at least one of my daily naps (I have a sneaking suspicion it will be helpful for muscle recovery anyway) while sleeping as much as I need to during the first week or two, when (if my workout buddy is any indication) I'll be a walking wad of hamburger.  After a few weeks, when my body will be getting used to that level of exercise, I'll look at adding another nap and possibly reducing my nightly sleep again.  I'd like to get to at least 6/1 Everyman (insofar as that's Everyman…basically it's siesta with a shorter siesta), if not back to 4.5; but either way, I get to try it and see if it can be done — which we all know is one of my favorite things. 

And then I'll be able to do a writeup on that question I get all the time, too — "Can athletes swing polyphasic sleep?"  I've always wanted to know too!

I hope nobody takes this as "I'm abandoning polyphasic sleep" — I'm just making a lifestyle change, after years as a polyphaser, that may be incompatible with it for a while.  I still love my sleep schedule(s) and will always be looking for a way to keep them and/or make them even more efficient (there's another Uberman run in my future, I know there is).  And I need this lifestyle change; Fall is a tough time for me for reasons you don't care about, and this will be nice and absorbing and distracting while being significantly healthier than a lot of things I could be throwing myself into. 

Plus, and I know this is somewhat shallow of me, but it'll be nice to not just know some kungfu, but also look like I do.  ;)

The I Ching says that to make a major change in your life, you spend three days thinking about it to make sure you understand what you're changing and why and how; then spend three days consciously doing things differently; then spend three more days watching yourself to make sure the change has stuck.

This hack is something I've found immensely useful for making major life-changes.  It doesn't require the 3/3/3 days structure proposed by the Book of Changes (yup, that's what I Ching means ;), but that structure offers a convenient way to talk about the three "phases" this hack works in, so I'll refer to it anyway.  You can do this no matter how long or deliberately-delineated your three "phases" are, though.

1. As part of your Pre-Change contemplating/planning days, you pick three words that signify what you want to do.  (It can be two, or four or five if needed, but you're going for short phrase / mantra-length.)  If you're quitting a substance, it can be "I Quit"; if you're changing your sleep-schedule, it can be "Get Up".  I like two-word phrases myself, because they can easily be said on an inhale/exhale, but obviously one can find a rhythm to any phrase if you work at it.  And you do — for three days (or your length of choice), you work on that phrase, repeating it often, meditating on it, writing about it, and letting it sink deep into you until it feels like a magic spell…or in my preferred analogy, a sudo command.  ;)
    
2. During your Days of Change, you lean hard on that phrase.  Don't just save it for "when you need it" — repeat it constantly; let it define your entire world during that time.  If your whole life seems to be about that phrase for three days, you won't have to struggle to change your behavior; the change will literally be in the air, all around you.  Think about going to a major event, like a conference or concert:  You don't have to work very hard to live like you're part of that event, because it's the environment, it's the atmosphere.  Use your phrase to make an atmosphere out of your change.
    
3. During the Days Following, you get back to "normal life", but you keep that phrase in your pocket for whenever you feel the urge to slip back into the old way of doing things.  (The I Ching's advice for this period of time is "Resoluteness" … having the sudo hack is like having a Resoluteness Pill you can take as needed.)  Whenever you feel weak or question your goals, you pull your phrase back out.  It will give you strength and remind you why you want to stick with what you've accomplished. 

I've used the sudo hack a bunch of times with varying degrees of deliberateness, but recently I used it very deliberately to kick a tough bad habit, and it worked so well — I'm on day 9 with no slip-ups as I write this — that I thought, "OK, time to write about that one!". 

All credit goes to the I Ching and to the Universe for being so considerate as to have a sudo command, of course.  ;)

**WARNING** the following is a) a bit flippant and b) may only apply if you're long-term adapted to polyphasic sleep; if you're still adjusting, don't screw with things!

On Friday night, I slept…in definitely one of the top 3 most beautiful locations I've ever been in!  A friend (who is just the right amount of crazy) and I snuck our way into a clearing at the very edge of the ocean next to a lighthouse and set up camp…it was warm but not hot, with a lovely breeze (and no bugs), the sound of the surf, and, because it was a clearing in the woods, every time we were still for more than five minutes, it filled up with bunnies.  It was a bit late when I got to bed (1:30), but I was up by 5 and then took a nap at 6, so got my 4.5 hours, roughly.

Then, swimming in the ocean through intense waves for about 3.5 hours the next morning.  I'm trying to learn freediving (diving and staying at the bottom with only a snorkel, no scuba stuff).  It's a rough learning curve!  ;) 

On Saturday, I nodded off in a moving vehicle for the first time since I was a small child.  I needed two naps just to keep from falling asleep mid-sentence during the day.  I was in bed by 10:30, and forgot to re-set my 4am alarm, so I woke up at 6:30.  (I also ate about 2,000 calories yesterday and was still pretty hungry.  Diving takes a LOT out of you.  Surprisingly quite a lot more than weightlifting.) 

But considering the circumstances, I call NONE of that a fail.  ;)

(More seriously, 4.5 has worked well for me all week…the only dicey spot is making sure I get my nap at work, but the nice part is that if I can't get it until 2-3 o'clock in the afternoon, that seems work fine still.)

OK, I think I accomplished what I needed to with this…for those of you who've seen some of my other Master Schedules, this one isn't quite as crazy as the tangliest of those; but nor is it as light on detail as I've tried at other times.  I feel like I'm narrowing down to the right level of moderation (for me)…awesome.  Here's some notes (because I can't imagine anybody giving a crap about the actual schedule, but I'll share it if you ask):

• Put two meals in at specific times, to make sure I get at least that many
• Set up a new calendar in Google and put all the events that are reminder-worthy in it; now my phone will go off every day with text-reminders, and if GMail is open (it usually is) I'll get a pop-up too.  Thanks (again) Google!
• Rather than have a different schedule for every day (which I've done) or for weekends and weekdays, I focused on the things that should be true EVERY day:  Naps, writing, meditation, fitness & forms practice, etc.  This gives me a base schedule that always applies (and that I can set reminders to go off for every single day, taking advantage of the brain's ability to form habits and react at repeatable times).
• For time that might be free depending on the day, I have lists of things I would like to do with it — Multiple pre-existing lists, for writing, projects, cleaning things and various studies — so in the schedule, I just specified which lists to look at if I have free time in those chunks.  (And really, any list will do; getting things done is getting things done!  ;) 

So, firm yet flexible.  Covers weekends and holidays and crazy work-days pretty much equally well.  Enough reminders to pull me back on-track if I get off, but not so many as to make me throw my phone in the Charles.  I'll have to tweak it if the E4.5 sleep schedule doesn't work out like I want it to, but such is live.

All told, I'm proud of this one!  If you have any scheduling tricks/tips of your own, by all means share them.

I'm changing my Everyman schedule over to the 4.5h core + 2 naps version. 

Getting the evening nap has been ridiculously difficult lately due to changes in lifestyle that will persist at least another month and a half, and it'll be easier to scoot things around to accomodate that than to keep hit-or-missing it.  I haven't been making good use of the time between 11:30pm – 1am anyway, so I think I'd rather use it for getting enough sleep to get through my day.

So my new schedule is sleep 11:30 – 4a, naps at 7am and 1pm.  (Note about the morning nap:  Scooting my first nap to earlier was something I did back in my Tweaking phase; it just works better for me.)

Another note, this time about E4.5 in general:  How to space the two naps is an interesting question.  While the obvious answer seems to be "as evenly as possible" (this definitely works best with Everyman 3 and Uberman/Dymaxion), the couple times I've done E4.5 I've always found that just knocking out the least-productive nap and leaving the other two, or scooting them minimal to space things a bit more, works best for me.  (Please keep in mind that "me" is not "everyone" and that I've been sleeping polyphasically a long time now, so that may affect things.)  Also, for work purposes, 1pm is just a good time that I've already got blocked out, so I'm going to try leaving it there and see if that works before I try moving it.

I'm eager to give this schedule a longer-term try — typically I only do 4.5 for a few days at a time, and then revert to E3 as soon as I can, for time-saving reasons and because I like E3 as my long-term schedule — and see how viable and useful it turns out to be.

If anybody else out there is using E4.5, your thoughts would be very welcome!

-PD

So now there's Google+, in addition to my site, LJ, Twitter, and some other places I don't publicly advertise I'm at — and now, thanks to Google being far more awesome at interoperability than just about anybody else, it feels like things are bound to get confusing.  On the other hand, I can remember feeling that way in 2004 when I signed up for LiveJournal, too…I was like, "What, this AND Usenet??"  And things have gone ok since then.  I suppose I should just stick to my principles which, when it comes to technology, generally amount to "Chill out, it's just people and it's not, on balance, scarier or weirder than anything else people do."

Sure, things like OpenPCR (WOOT), Bitcoins (meh), and a Roomba that mops (Are you frakking kidding me?) can make it seem like the 21st century is the Boston Molasses Flood writ large and grey…but that's just our adrenal glands talking, and it's a hard fast rule out here that Thou Shalt Keep The Lizard Brain Off The Internet. 

Don't stop here, Yoshi, this is Cerebrum Country.

Yesterday I went really swimming in the ocean for the first time in my life.  I've sploshed around in ocean waves twice before, but this time there was wet gear and snorkels and fins and my job was to keep up with two spearfishers while we trucked a really long way out to an island, which it turned out the surf was too hairy to stop and rest on, and then a really long way back, all in crazy current and way more waves than I was ready for.  I definitely confirmed that I'm in the best shape of my life by, you know, not dying — I actually kept up pretty well, all told.  And it was beautiful and amazing and terrifying and I've never been so happy to reach land in my life and my legs are trashed today, and I'm totally gonna do it again. 

…I also learned from this that there's a big fat line between exercise you can keep a polyphasic schedule through (my usual kungfu & weightlifting) and exercise you NEED to pass out after.  Even though I took 2 naps between getting home and bedtime, I passed out — I mean out — about 11pm last night and didn't crack an eyelid until 8am.  I suspect this has more to do with how much more exercise I got than usual, than the objective amount of exercise; but of course that's just me guessing.

Peace, ya'll, and enjoy your weekends!

MMMWWWAAAHHHHRRRRGHHH…

[Zombie noises continue as dirt-covered fingers climb up over the edge of the keyboard.  In the ghastly glow of the monitor, the eyes that appear are ringed with deep black circles, and the mouth reeks of stale coffee and delivery food.]

Ugggh, coming back to the world of the living feels awful.  But I'm doing it!  My Insanely Massive Project at work is pretty much complete — everything goes live on Monday, so it's not to say there isn't still stress, but the brunt of the work-work is done with, and I even have this weekend mostly off!  (I haven't had a weekend, or even a weekend day, in pretty much a month.  But this weekend I just need to supervise some testing here and there, so woot!)

Needless to say, I'll have some massive work to do putting my schedule back together…I've just been plain exhausted, sleeping 4-6h most nights, getting naps when I can't stand up anymore (if at all) and crashing out for 7-9 hours once a week or so in order to jolt my brain into working again…it's ugly.  But Wednesday night I slept 8 hours (like a brick) and yesterday I made myself lay down for two naps (even if I was still too stressed-out to sleep for them); last night I got a solid 6h and today my aim is to lay down for ALL my naps.  If the usual re-adaptation rules hold, and my schedule actually does get less crazy (no promises; depending on how things go I might still have another week or so of craziness), then by mid-next-week I should be back on track, or getting close to it. 

Anyway, all the time I've spent online that wasn't working was writing, which is awesome; and I have a good-sized story I'm really proud of in the last stages of being readied for submission, so woot!  That makes me feel like work didn't completely eat my life, even if it came close.  But eh, I knew it would, and I wanted to do this project anyway and it was pretty fun, so aside from the occasional over-dramatic zombie reference I guess I can't complain.  ;)

More soon!  I have to catch this nap, then it's off to kungfu (which I've also been missing due to work, so woot!).  Hope you're all well!

PD

P.S.  I recently admitted to a non-family-member for the first time that I suffer from workaholism in the clinical sense.  For a response I got, "Well actually I think that's putting it a bit lightly, don't you?"  Sheesh!

Can you adapt to a polyphasic schedule by briefly replacing your sleep with a whole bunch of naps, and then gradually culling them back until you have just the right amount?  User and brave explorer of possibilities "Forevernade" on the Zeo forums makes a good case for it:

"I have been had[sic] several adaptations, and because my first adaptation to everyman took me so long I was determined to cut the adaptation by a significant amount. After loosing[sic] the ability to get a quality nap, I thought what better way to learn to nap but to nap often? Frequency of a stimulus has often been shown to induce the quickest adaptation in biology, so I went with this.

I stayed up for a day and two nights, before commencing Uberman, and then used a weekend (2 days), to nap every 2 hours, on the dot.

At first I didn't nap, then later I started napping. By the night time of the first weekend day I was dreaming like when I was on Everyman, and by the second night I realised every time I had a nap I would simply REM like normal or I was simply not tired (so I began light sleeping through naps). At this point I started to cut out naps out, aiming toward napping every 4 hours, and by the monday day, I had naturally commenced Uberman.

 

Tuesday I was a little tired, and Wednesday I was sleepy, and by Thursday I was adapted. I never went through a zombie mode. I never had a drawn out adaptation, and it seems that the 'Naptation' I organised over the weekend got me into the rhythem [sic]."

Of course, like all adaptation stories, I'm hesitant to call it a "success" until I hear "…and I've been doing it for 30+ days now" — but as possibilities go, this is a fascinating one.  I may even try it myself if/when I have to adapt to a different schedule.