So this attempt was MUCH better than my first. It is now 1:50 AM on 6/23/2010 and I have not missed a single nap and only overslept like 10 minutes on one (didn't hear my alarms I guess).
12:00 am - This has been and probably always will be my hardest nap. I, once again, did not sleep during it. Fortunately, because it was my first nap of my 2nd try, I still had energy from my sleep the day before. That pretty much lasted me up until my 4 am nap.
4:00 am - While 12 may be the hardest nap, 4 is definitely the easiest. Passed out within a few minutes and woke up quite refreshed. Unfortunately, because I didn't get 8 hours of sleep the day before AND I'm not getting REM sleep, this energy didn't last long. Around 6 am I was feeling pretty tired and by 7 am I was counting down the minutes till my next nap. I thought I would have the desire to want to go run or work out or something, but I came into a terrible loop hole type situation. Because I was tired, I didn't want to do anything and because I didn't want to do anything, I became more tired. This basically caused me to veg out watching TV for damn near the whole 3.5 hour waking period. I really need to focus on getting up and moving if I'm to survive the impending "zombie phase" that I hear about.
8:00 am - This nap was so-so. I fell asleep, but only for a little bit. I did, however, wake up refreshed and fairly energetic. I basically just worked from 8 - 12, so nothing too exciting happened. I did start to feel tired right before the noon nap, which helped in falling asleep for it.
12:00 pm - Slept pretty well. This is usually the time when I'm waking up on weekends and falling back to sleep because I just want to, so I kind of give some credit to those skills kicking in. I watched more TV in this time frame because tho I slept well, I still felt kind of tired. I haven't quite gotten back my desire to go out and do things yet and I suspect that won't be coming back anytime soon (at least without forcing it).
4:00 pm - I'm starting to get the hang of falling asleep on command. I've developed a certain strategy in sleeping which allows my body to go into that super relaxed state right before you fall asleep. This has NEVER worked before on a monophasic sleep schedule, so I'm surprised it's working so well now. Perhaps my body is already adapting. I haven't quite mastered it yet though. I can get to the super relaxed state, then I lose concentration and get brought back to a conscious state of mind where I feel much more awake.
Anyway, this time slot was filled up with shopping with the g/f and getting food to stock the fridge. This was also the first time when an impending nap had to speed up the rate in which we needed to get things done so I could get home. Basically this was the first time a nap has hindered my life. It wasn't bad this time because we didn't need to rush that much, but it is still a sign of things to come. I suspect in the future I will have many times where I will need to choose between skipping a nap or inconveniencing myself greatly to take one.
8:00 pm - Last nap of the day. Got home at like 7:50 pm, so cut it a little close. I slept like a rock this time. It was fantastic. I woke up extremely refreshed and the most energetic I've felt since I started. Watched a lot of season 2 of True Blood with my g/f (one of the few shows she really likes) and ate one of the healthiest meals I've had in a long time. It was basically a platter of green apples, Gruyère cheese, and baguette, as well as pita and salami dipped into a red pepper hummus. SO tastey...
Overall, things are going 100x better this time around. Of course this is only day 1 and day 2 is usually the worst day, so we will see how that goes, but I am optimistic. I don't really have a whole lot of new insight into how uberman is changing my lifestyle, so I will leave it at this for now. Be sure to check back tomorrow at around this time for the day 2 update.
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Glad to see that you got so much sleep on your (second) first day. I just waited 30 minutes for the alarms to go off on my first day.
ReplyDelete8PM is interesting. Either it's a nice example of the placebo effect or you're going to adapt extremely quickly.
Are you doing performance tests on yourself throughout the research period?
I totally forgot to keep track of that. I will be now from now on and will update my blog with that info.
ReplyDeleteYeah I'm happy with how my first day went. I hope the 8 pm nap wasn't a placebo because fast adaptation is what I was aiming for by preparing the two weeks beforehand. We will see though =).