Category — polyphasic sleep

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.

Oy, I have to stop waiting to be able to finish one of the bigger/better posts before I give an update, or it'll never happen…I have like six drafts started that I can't find time for (so pardon this post being a bit rough). 

So, I'm about to Be A Bad Example again.  I knew this was coming, but now that it's here I don't want it to be…I want my naps, darnit!  Everything (and Everyman) was going so well, but I knew the lurker on the threshold would get here eventually, and it looks like it officially has.

The Lurker is a project I have at work:  A big project, massive, bigger than anything I've ever tackled and the kind of thing that sets your resume in a precious unbreakable resin — and on top of that, it's fun.  How can you complain, right?  Well, you can complain when it means your afternoon (1pm) and evening (7pm) naps are constantly getting eaten alive by working straight through lunch and then staying late almost every day!

The project culminates in the first two weeks of July, for all or part of which I'll be working pretty much constantly.  (Yes, I will have no Fourth this year, but that's actually ok; I would miss Michigan's lax fireworks-enforcement too much if I tried, anyway.  SPLODEY!  What good is a holiday about war if you can't 'splode some things??  If there's anything else fun about war, I missed it!)

I'm trying to hang on to my schedule, to at least sleep my 4.5 or 6 at night depending on whether I got one or two naps during the day (let's face it, I've only gotten all three about once a week for the last several)…but even that is starting to get shaky.  Yesterday, for instance, I got just one nap, but didn't go to bed until almost midnight, making getting up at four an adventure, to say the least.  (I hate sleeping in now, and will only do it if I feel I must for health reasons, which usually means on weekends when the grind catches up with me.)  I'm also starting to do my eating mostly on weekends, or in the cracks of the day with whatever's at hand, and to drink an order of magnitude more coffee than water…not good, not not good.  Especially when the other thing I'm doing — my non-computer thing — is kungfu, and I'm doing it more as I grab opportunities whenever I see them; but it sort of requires a baseline of health, food and sleep being rather important pieces there.  (I am going to try to fix the food thing…I'm shopping more — er, mostly thanks to Boston's proclivity for letting you get anything delivered — and working to re-implement my "polyphasic food" (many tiny meals) system that worked so well for me before.  Wish me luck.) 

So I'll need to do everything better, even as I suspect the next month and a half is going to push me to doing worse. 

Good thing I'm ok with paradoxes, eh?

;)

Anyway, my writing time is evaporating — and that, at least, is something I've been good about preserving, even if it is often at the cost of as much sleep as I need — and one thing I've been learning is that I have certain needs that really determine how a day goes for me:  Food and sleep are nice, but I can live without enough of them for a day or two and suffer pretty much no direct impact.  (Thankfully, I'm young-ish and very healthy.)  But kungfu (of some variety) and writing are not optional — if I skip them, I have a significantly crappier day, and the impact is immediate.  If I even get a few paragraphs in and some stance-work and meditation, things go dramatically differently.

Do you have key things like that?  If so, I'd love to hear about them, just because I'm finding the concept fascinating.

But otherwise I'm outie; and here, since that wasn't much of a post, have a video that made me laugh and got in my head all day.  (That's right, inhale my netviruses!) 

(In minor but cool related news:  I actually scored a gaming group for a weekly Tabletop RPG night!  So yeah, there goes my sleep on Saturdays…but who cares.  Woot! Roll a D6!  ;)

First off, Woohoo my uploading problem is fixed!  I owe huge thanks to Nicky at Tumble Design for this — I would never have sussed out that PHP error on my own, and Nicky did it for nothing…Thanks again!

(For the curious, my hosting ops needed to set the 'upload_tmp_dir' setting in the PHP Configuration to '/tmp'; it was unspecified, and that was causing WordPress to not find files for uploading.)

I've only got seconds before I need to run off to work (again!…sometimes it feels like I've discovered the Ubersleep of Work (UberWork?! Augh!) where it's just one long rolling…thing…  ;)  …But if nothing else, I wanted to post this, FINALLY, because come on, it's SO COOL that someone translated the Ubersleep book into Russian, and now I can finally post it!!

(Thanks tons to M Ken for the translation!)

UBERSLEEP in Russian

I know I owe Comments, and besides that I owe Emails and Snailmails and various Adminnings — but I also owed Sleep, BIG time, and now that I'm caught up with Morpheus I owe Writing, and badly enough that Writing is who I'm paying today, even barring everybody else.  (Well, I'm also paying Housework, at least minimally, but this is because Writing doesn't have the ability to make me run out of clothes — yet — sorry Writing!)

(For a week and a half, I've been shorting myself on sleep like it was some kind of contest…4,5,6 hours at night, zero or one naps — basically naps when I was going to fall over otherwise — day after day after day.  Yesterday I got to the point where no matter how many naps I took — one was an hour, too — I just kept feeling more tired; I was done.  I stayed up until past 3am for a work/social thing, and then passed out until almost noon today…and now I feel better, finally.  WHEW.)

But I promised Morpheus I would be better.  Our relationship is perhaps more fraught than most; sometimes I worry he'll actually just give up and leave me for good.  (Sometimes I wish he would, too.)  Still, you work with whom you've got.

OK, back to writing this story about dream-wizards who, having mastered access to the ZPF, can talk to each other cross-continent…it's not going so well, really; I suck at setting, I think…but it's all learning. 

(I've had some great thoughts about time-travel, which are really making me want to write my time-travel novel.  But it's not ready yet, not exactly, and if I dove into it it would need all kinds of time and devotion and work that, while I'd love to give it, I also am giving to other writing first (I'm honing my skills by writing short-stories for now, especially since I have access to a fantastic critiquer who helps encourage me to publish; and lord knows the novel stuff requires access to those skills too). 

Still, I am excited as hell to write a time-travel novel…the philosophy of space and time is one of my favorites.  And I think I can actually do a world where time-travel is coincident with Presentism, the Simultaneity of Eternity and General Relativity.  ::drooooool::)

This is coming late — I've been writing comments and emails to answer the "I'm a teenager; should I do this?" question for literally years — but I think something in me just resisted the idea that it needed its own post.  (It does have a section in the book, within the first 10 pages.)  But obviously I was wrong; and it's time to pay up.

The short version:  Have you ever seen an extreme, wildly experimental tweak/upgrade be recommended for people who haven't finished growing yet?  EVER?

Didn't think so.  This one isn't, either.

There are two major reasons why:

1.  The physical reason.  Sleep is a major component of the huge tangle of complex processes that governs human growth.  Restricting it, or in any way messing with it, while you're still in the middle of the last major growth-cycle of your life is about as good a plan as deciding to replace your transmission while you're going eighty on the freeway. 

Remember that you only get one shot at developing the physical and mental things that are happening in your teens:  If you screw it up, your body does NOT go back and do it over just to be sure.  You may permanently lose mental capacity or physical hardiness that you can never get back. 

I'm a big, big fan of polyphasic sleep, but doing it right now rather than in a year or two is not worth that risk.

The physical reason lasts until you're out of your teens, for women; and into your early twenties, for men.  There's a bit of "know thyself" here too:  If you've been developing slowly, or are not in the best of health anyway, then you should wait longer than someone who's super-healthy and started developing very early. 

The legal reason lasts until you reach the legal age of majority in your jurisdiction:

2.  The legal reason.  In most countries, until you reach the age of majority, your guardians are held legally responsible for your care.  That means that if you're neglected — i.e. if anything happens to you that could have been prevented if they were paying closer attention — they can go to jail for it.  It happens all the time.

Being a legal minor also means that adults who hurt you by convincing you to do things that are bad for you can also go to jail.  When you reach the age of majority, society figures that you're on your own now; if someone cons you into taking drugs or spending all your money, well, life's hard; but while you're a minor, you have some legal protection from that sort of thing. 

That means that, if you tried polyphasic sleep and in any way damaged yourself, your parents/guardians and me could be held legally responsible and gotten in serious shit.  The fact that you're a smart person, quite probably smarter than many of the legal adults around you, and that you felt capable and inclined to take on the risks personally — as well as the fact that you tell your parents, or put it in writing that you won't blame me — does not matter legally.  The law has to draw a line somewhere, and when it comes to minors, most laws are very strict:  That line is your age, period.  Your parents could have their lawyers write me a notarized letter saying it's fine, but if one of your neighbors saw your sleep-dep and reported it as abuse/neglect, life would get very awful for your parents and I both.  Almost nothing in the adult world sucks as bad as being sued, and I would really, really rather not, if you don't mind.

In conclusion…I know being a minor sucks.  I know that having limited rights compared to people a couple years older than you is intensely irritating and unfair.  I hated it too.

But the reason for your intensely irritating pre-adult years is so that you can learn to be an adult.  And one part of that is realizing when you do and do not have the right to take risks, and that includes risking yourself and the people who do or may depend on you.  By risking your health during your growth, you're potentially screwing everyone from yourself to your friends to your parents and kids, later on in life, when you aren't as healthy as you should be.  By risking your guardians' or my legal responsibility, you're putting thousands of our dollars and months or years of our stress ahead of your desire to not have to just wait until you're of legal age before trying something crazy.

I had to learn this the hard way, like I'm sure most people do — I wound up risking my father's career, and then having to really eat crow when things got out of control, he almost lost everything, and I had to take all the blame in order to avoid screwing my whole family over.  And I have a kid now, so it's easy for me to look down at her and think, "Christ, I really have to take care of myself.  Stupid shit like driving too fast while not wearing a seatbelt can have a ridiculously high cost."

You'll learn it the hard way too, and you'll feel stupid sometimes, but meh, that's growing for ya.  The trick to navigating it successfully is to be careful, and be aware that there are, in fact, big nasty consequences lurking around that you can't see from where you are.  Take risks — all humans must — but take calculated risks.  (i.e. if you're going to try drugs, don't pick heroin; if you decide to try sex, wear a condom — that kind of thing.)  That way the mistakes you make — which are inevitable — won't come with pricetags like addiction and AIDS.  They'll still suck — drugs will still probably make you really unpleasantly sick, and the person you choose to sleep with will, at some point in your life, either suck at it or be awesome and then not call you back (whee!) — but you can, with some forethought, keep the risks you take from ruining your life too badly.  This is a key skill of adulthood, and one of the major things all those fraught-with-heavy-decisions teenage years are there to teach you.

In my rather-well-informed opinion, polyphasic sleep is not worth the risk of doing it earlier than the age of majority.  For the record, I was almost 20 when I first tried it.  I also never dieted to try to lose weight (and I was chubby) while I was under 18, because my parents were in medicine and explained the risks to me — the same risks polyphasic sleep has, pretty much.  Even though I hated being the pudgy kid, it was not worth the possible damage to my growth, etc., to start dieting too early.  So I am preaching what I practice here, in case that counts for anything.

OK, off the soapbox.  You're all smart people and I know you can weigh the risks and make good decisions.  My advice is that you decide, if you're under the age of majority, to wait until you're safely done growing, and no longer under the legal protection of people who don't deserve to go to jail for your decisions (and don't forget, I'd rather not be sued either), before experimenting with crazy sleep schedules — or diets, or drugs, or anything else that can be permanently harmful if done too early. 

Trust me, all the crazy shit will still be there to experiment with, when you're ready.  I will personally see to it.  ;)

We don’t believe folks like Steve Jobs who claim “Open systems don’t always win.” We don’t believe that it’s ethical for body measuring companies to block users access to their information.  We don’t believe that Zeo shouldn’t be ripped open and hacked–hell, do that and we may just give you a job.

We do believe that you own your data, can take your data with you, and get to decide what to do with it.  We believe that you should be able to hack your SD Card data and get at your raw brainwaves. We believe in the power of open source software that anyone can modify to their own needs.  And we believe in our users ability to set us straight when we go off course.

From "Privacy Activists Rejoice, ZeoDecoderViewer is in Alpha!"

Yaaaaay, Zeo!  I love when a company I've raved about does rave-worthy things after the fact, thus making me look either smart or psychic. 

To clarify all the ways in which this is awesome:

• The ZeoDecoderViewer can process & show polyphasic nap data!
  
• It's free!
• It lets you see your sleep data on your own computer, without uploading it to the Zeo website!
• It's exactly the kind of thing most electronics companies refuse to do, because they want to "lock customers in" instead of giving them what they want!

Nice work, Zeo!  I really hope I get time to try this soon…if any of you do, please drop a comment & let me know what you think?

Thanks!

*roflz!*

…Actually the whole site cracked me up.  But I am, after all, a massive nerd.  (Yes, star wars nerd too.  I am, in fact, married to the first man (or woman) to ever beat me at Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.  …He beat me by a lot, too, which is scary.)

Speaking of nerds, does it seem somehow fundamentally unfair that there are nerds today, who are too young to have been nerds before it was at all cool, back when you got beaten up for it?  Sometimes I get Shutup, Whippersnapper-y over that.  It's like not having Paid Your Dues, lol.

Saturday morning.  I slept quite a lot extra, to make up for lost naps during the week (there were quite a few) and the ridiculous whupping I took yesterday in Sanda.  (God was it fun, but ow the Later.)  Got up about 7, worked for a little over an hour (yes, ew Saturday am work, but it's nice to just be able to get things done uninterrupted by meetings and crap for a while), and Hath Surfd.  Today I must needs combine Writing, Stretching (see above about asswhooping), Cleaning (well, loading bookshelves and unearthing/emptying further boxes…it never ends!!) and playing video games.  (Talk about nerd…I bought Final Fantasy VII for the PS3, and am completely loving playing it again.  It's AWESOME, after all.)  And I will get my naps, so my sleep can be back online and humming for Monday.

More srs writings later; I've got 'em half-finished, on the shelf of half-finished things, right next to my novel and Enlightenment.

P.S.  I want a T-Shirt that says "GOP STIGGLING".  Wearing it in public would be SO fun.  (Yes, not just nerd…MOM nerd.)

P.S.S.:

Okay, so sleep was extra mean to me yesterday. 

In the morning, I napped, but faded in and out a few times (and as many people will tell you, a broken nap is nowhere near as good as a whole one).  Then I followed that with a 1.5-mile walk in the shin-deep fresh snow, an hour of Sanda (now with extra pushups!), the 1.5-mile walk back (still nobody had shoveled, grr), and then did the shoveling for my place, since I was so covered in snow by that point that I knew if I took off my coat and gear, I wouldn't want to put the sopping stuff back on.  I was wiped.

I tried for an hour and a half to get my afternoon nap, and kept getting interrupted by various dumb little stuff.

Then a half-hour before naptime yesterday evening, a (far-too-honored-to-be-ejected) guest came over and stayed for an hour and a half!  Augh!

I laid down afterwards, stared at the back of my eyes until the timer went off, and was near tears when my husband came to wake me from my "ten more minutes".  My boy put his foot down and told me I'd better stay in bed, and–here's a funny part–almost as soon as he said it, before he even left the room, I closed my eyes and was out cold for six hours, until 4am.

I woke up feeling weird…rested, but dizzy and disoriented (probably didn't help that I was fully dressed, including a hoodie with full pockets), and with a swollen tonsil.  I stayed up until my morning naptime, laid down…and slept right through the alarm, for an hour and a half.

[What is it with an hour and a half??  Is 90 my unlucky number this week or what?]

Then I woke up feeling…well, more normal.  Suddenly I'm sore from all the exercise, which I take as a good sign.  I still feel a bit slow, but better, including in the throat.

I'm wondering…perhaps I shouldn't have indulged that urge I had the other day, to write a poem composed entirely of post-it notes left by the denizens of Dreamland, on the mirrors of who knows how many human beings?  (I have a thing about mysterious post-it notes…don't ask.)

Maybe they were a secret?  Or copyrighted…? 

;)

Anyway, perhaps to exorcize the bad sleep lately, here's the poem (under the "read more"):

UPDATE:  Did in fact get 2 good naps after posting this!  Maybe that exorcism was actually necessary…? 

Post-it Notes from Dreamland…

[Read more →]

So, I finished a story about mental patients, polyphasic sleep, and time travel.  Now I'm working on one about walking barefoot through post-apocalyptic Detroit in the winter, the I Ching, and wireless encryption schema.  Write what you know, right?  Heh.  I think I had a good idea for a third one while I was sleeping, but now I can't remember it…hate that.  ;)

I'm always torn about submitting them…it's a good exercise in producing publishable material, but I don't write these stories for money, nor recognition, though I guess neither could hurt.  I'm writing them to polish my skills so I can do justice to the novels in my head, which my whole life is a struggle to get down on "paper".  I've agreed to try a few rounds of submitting these, but if it doesn't work out, I suppose I'll just put them here.  Got a website, might as well, right?  And thanks to PayPal and stuff, I could put them up here for, like, a dollar, and that way I wouldn't be undercutting the market or doing damage to other writers' ability to sell stories. 

Sleep is being mean to me lately.  I'm really stressed out about a couple things, and life is hectic, and the combination means that I've been routinely missing 1-2 naps a day all. freaking. month.  I'm also, not sick, but my throat is always really dry and I've been coughing, vast quantities of tea and throat lozenges notwithstanding, which sometimes interrupts my sleep or makes it hard to get there.  Gah I hate winter.  And my least favorite thing about polyphasic sleep in the *whole world* is when I painstakingly lie down three times a day, and then have to go to bed by 10 (if I didn't sleep at all) or 11:30 (if I slept once) anyway.  I mean, I suppose it's a win that I can sleep only 6 hours even with no naps — as long as I laid down for them, even if I didn't sleep, it works that much — but bah, still highly irritating.  And I always lose the evenings, because that's when I run out of energy; I can't, for instance, decide to stay up until 12-1 o'clock and sleep in the next day; the only way it works is to go to bed early and get up at 4 again. 

And it's not so bad, I suppose — still way better than monophasic.  Maybe periods of crappy sleep are just a price we pay for winter and stress, polyphasic or not; and I should be grateful that crappy sleep for me still keeps me rested and moving during the day (I'm only tired during the day when I need a nap and can't get it at all, which is rare — I still make laying down for naps a high priority) and lets me sleep a maximum of six hours to feel fully rested.  But BAH, I know how much better it could be going, and that still drives me nuts.  I haven't been using the Zeo, because my naps are so erratic; plus I can only "record" half of them on any given day due to running around, and I'm concerned about handing over all this off-whack data without full context, and I don't have time to be noting everything that happens every day and why I did or didn't sleep. 

OK, back to writing…maybe I'll bash off another pseudopoem; sometimes they help get me unstuck.  It was highly fun to post that last one, to share it and have people like it, when realistically its only destination was ever the back pockets of my nigh-endless files of unused crap…surprise win!

And then there's Sanda this morning, which I'm going to, cold and nasty out or not.  I think I've found an avenue to turn these classes into Chen-style Taiji lessons too, which I'm very geeked about.  The teacher I have now is *fantastic*, and I've been hoping he'd have room for Taiji classes for me since I started with him.  If it weren't for how awesome he is, I might not have stuck with Sanda anyway — it's not really my thing, but it's exercise and he makes learning it really fun.  (Beware world:  I can now throw a wicked punch.  I thought it was bad before, from the kungfu, but what you learn in forms is nothing next to practicing by throwing hundreds of punches a week, getting the snap and whip of it just right…jeez.  It's fun, but I now have to be *really* careful not to accidentally, in jest or by instinct, punch at anybody.  It wouldn't be funny anymore!)

(But it better work this time!)*

OK, so I owe a post like the Pope owes an apology by now, but please be aware that I'm writing this one in teeeeny chunks in-between matriarchs glaring at me for being too overtly nerdy for the Holidays, and forgive me any incontinuities more than usual.

Regarding the Zeo experiment:  It's been a month now, and per my personal experiences with polyphasic sleep, the first month is a learning experience.  If you want to read about everybody else's experiences, look at the Zeo forums here.  And before you angst about the amount of struggle and failure and trying-again you see there, keep in mind that it's about the proportion of such that I'm used to, over the last decade.  And then go look at a raw-foods or veganism forum, and you'll realize that switching up a major part of your lifestyle to a more efficient method is just hard.  Several of us are doing well and really happy, though — and all of us have gathered valuable data for later, too, I think.

I myself adapted quickly, compared to what I know as normal — by about three weeks in, things were right back to where they were before I went off the schedule last year.  I'm now fully polyphasic again, and I love it and I have no intention of ever going back, thank you.  I'm doing Everyman because I don't have the kind of lifestyle that would support Uberman — even on Everyman, it's hard to maintain a perfect schedule, what with the crazy hours and all.  But it's just like being monophasic — it's nice if you can get to bed and wake up at the same time every day, but in the real world that's sometimes not possible, and you compensate however works.  For me, if I miss one nap, sometimes I don't need to do anything, but sometimes (i.e. if I've had a really hard day) I sleep 4.5 hours for my core, and that catches me up.  If I miss two naps or all of them, I'll sleep 6 hours, which is a "full night" for me now — I have to miss a lot of sleep for several days in order to sleep 8 hours, or I have to be sick.

One other thing I want to mention just for fun:  I haven't been sick at all this year!  People all around me have, but in spite of the move and everything, I managed — by dint of staying warm and sticking to taking vitamins and good food whenever possible — to avoid all of it.  Knock on wood, but I'm really happy — usually I don't make it to the holidays without some kind of cold or flu.  *woot!*

The thing I've struggled with most is actually the Zeo — and this is not really a fault of it, unless you call the oppositional combination of my hair and its headband "its fault".  I do have more hair than most three people, to be fair…but that headband falls off *constantly*, and I don't think I've had a full day yet of getting complete readings for all my naps.  Still, I like the Zeo for its other features and for the informational content it does provide, and I plan to continue using it, so on a long enough timeline I'm sure my sleep will be satisfactorily documented anyway.  I've been doing less in the way of crunching the data than most people, so if that's your interest, check the forums for some good stuff.

OK, I'm both being yelled at and it's time for my nap — my goal is to get my naps while I'm here anyway, so I can go to all the 6am kungfu classes (ZOMG I've missed those!!) and still handle all the family stuff, which is filling up every available second like green and red grey goo.  ;)

I'll probably check in again before the holidays are over — there's actually quite a lot I want to write that's not update-related — but just in case, you all have a lovely and warm one!

PD

*If you get this reference, you are a) old and awesome or b) not old and freaking awesome.  ;)