嘘とワンダーランド

(Yeah, sleep again. Didn’t I say I’d write about something else for a change?)

I highly recommend writing down your exact sleep times and level of tiredness every day. It will help you see patterns and prepare for tight spots in advance. However, occasionally, it will also show you when things are not working.

Like with my sleep. For the last 3 months, there is always the same pattern. I adopt a strict sleep pattern. It works great for exactly 6 days, with maybe a slight amount of tiredness here and there. Then, on day 7, I suddenly get hit with all that missing tiredness at once. Once, I was still able to go another day, but most of the time, I just crash on the spot and sleep at least 8 hours. Of course, this is anything but practical. There is nothing I can do to avoid the crash. I have done uberman and it was easier.

I noticed this patterns before, but I’m now confident it will always be there. So it’s not my own incompetence of adapting, but something my brain just does. I never read about another polyphasic sleeper noticing that, though chronically undersleeping and then catching up on the weekend is pretty common. Yet I don’t feel like I’m getting too little sleep – I can function perfectly fine for 20 hours a day, with no caffeine and no concentration problems at all. It’s as if constantly delaying sleep during school made my brain unable to not crash once a week.

So, solutions. I mentioned 2 a few weeks ago, namely incorporating the crash into the schedule or trying to get more sleep per day. I know of several polyphasic sleepers how do crash regularly, generally on the weekend, but they do this once a month, not once a week. So I don’t think this is a good solution. I’m pretty sure crashing that often is a sign of deeper problems. Also, when doing uberman and uberman with a core, I didn’t notice this pattern. Those two worked just fine.
I also get vivid dreams everytime I sleep and feel refreshed afterwards. I make sure it’s dark, avoid sugar or anything else that screws with your awareness and so on. Really, if sleep quality is the problem than it is beyond my powers anyway.

Conclusion? It is possible to be severely sleep deprived without noticing it at all for about a week. Do not feel safe after you had several good days – you might still be doing it wrong. Reassuring, isn’t it? :) Anyway, I’ll try to make the core longer again, hoping to average it out.

Guess what. Yeah. I feel like the counter-example for both sides, with regards to polyphasic sleep. “It is impossible to sleep 4 hours or less per day and be healthy!” Hundreds of people do. “It is impossible not to adapt to polyphasic sleep! Everyone can!” muflax can’t.

Well, this is overly pessimistic. I am polyphasic, for about a year now. I sleep multiple times per day, mostly 4. I sleep, on average, around 6-7 hours per day and go about half the time with 4 hours or less. I almost never feel tired for more than 2 hours a day. Generally speaking, I feel alright-ish and my memory retention is fine. So, polyphasic sleep is at least a partial success and all those results are already better than any sleep schedule I ever had before it. I can do better in any single point, but not in most of them or the total average.

However, I’m not on everyman and I feel I can do better. Call this the engineer syndrome – I am aware of a better solution and I’ll be damned if I can’t implement it. Every time I try to, I learn something new and then fail. But this is ok. I’m getting better at this. And this time around, I genuinely feel I found The Secret(tm).

I started the adaptation on 09/02, 17 days ago. The first 6 days were pure awesome. Everything worked. The core took a day, ok, but every nap worked and after 30 hours in I was never tired – ever. Than came a crash that had nothing to do with my sleep. My study regiment broke down (and I with it). I’m working on fixing the things that caused it (and there is a big-ass rant coming up about it), but because I drifted into a few depressive days I couldn’t find the energy to get up from my core. I was awake, but I just didn’t feel like being awake. And this, of course, destroyed everything. I kinda got back on track 4 days later, but by then it was to late. I couldn’t find back into the schedule. I overslept irregularly. I did a big crash day in hope of recovering enough, but it didn’t work.

I learned two things:

1. Sleeping position is incredibly important, more important than almost any thing I have been doing. I can not stress this enough. For most of my life, I’ve been sleeping on my stomach. This feels most natural to me. But out of frustration and because it’s hard to wear a sleep mask that way, I changed it. Suddenly, I woke up with an amount of energy I had never seen before. It makes little difference for the core (though dreams get more intense), but the naps went from “meh” to “this. IS. POLYPHASIC SLEEP!!k!”. I did experience similar naps on uberman, regardless of position, but never on everyman.  So, seriously, if you are not sleeping on your back – try it. Like, NOW.
(Actually, I suspect a breathing problem (I do have a fucked up chest), though, so it might not affect everyone. Still.)

2. Re-adapting while on a bad schedule doesn’t work, but about a week of monophasic sleep as a reset works fine. If you ever had working monophasic sleep, that is. (puredoxyk, of course, tried polyphasic sleep as a measure to fight her insomnia, among other things. The very concept of insomnia is virtually foreign to me. Unless I am extremely sleep-deprived or on drugs, I can sleep any time, for as long as you want. I did once sleep for 60 hours in a row (with a bathroom break in between). So, totally different starting point for different people.)

And because it worked so great for 5 days, I have enough motivation now to make it work for longer. Possibly forever. So, I’m going to do about a week of monophasic sleep now to reset. Around Friday (09/25), I’m gonna adapt again. I hope to fix the other problems by then so I don’t fail again. :3

It’s nice to see that even puredoxyk is adapting to everyman sleep again. She just posted her Big Fat List and I thought it might be a good idea to assemble my own. I’ve been monophasic for about one week (to cleanse myself of sleep dep and other stupid reasons) and feel ready (again) to do the adaptation. 10 months of polyphasic experiences be damned. I hope the sleep mask will be here soon[0], but I’m too damn sick of monophasic sleep to wait for it any longer.

Anyway, here is my list. I do have a pretty masochistic monastic tight schedule for the day, composed of 4 units (Japanese, Russian, programming, general study), each ranging from 4-8 hours (exact times and distributions are still subject to experimentation and are the topic of another post), so I expect to be pretty much busy and occupied all day anyway, but I know how it is. You make plans, you get tired, you ignore plans. So I need a Plan B. Especially for when I’m totally sick and tired of reading or doing exercises. That’s where the List comes in.
I particularly like puredoxyk’s division in physical / mental / healthy. I’m gonna use the categories STR (physical), CON (healthy) and INT (mental). Also, activities that can (should) be done more than once are marked with “cont.”.

• do a 15 minute Anki session (INT, cont.)
• act out 3-5 Assimil lessons (INT, STR, cont.) (just reading them is too boring, but grabbing a sword and pretending you are torturing socializing with the foreign hostages is kinda cool… what?)
• look up and add selected sentences to Anki (INT, cont.) (every time I read something and I encounter a new / weird word or phrase, I take a screenshot so I can add it to my SRS later, so there’s always a queue)
• read a 漫画 (manga) (INT, cont.) (currently reading 東京赤ずきん (Tokyo Red Hood), what a great story!, ソウルイーター (Soul Eater) and うずまき (Uzumaki))
• go for a run brisk walk (STR, CON, cont.)
• clean room (STR)
• do paperwork for university
• check out this weird Japanese game (INT, cont.)
• learn another chunk of 漢字 (INT, cont.)
• write some more propaganda objective articles about SRS and other learning techniques (and try some new ones) (INT, cont.)
• code something (some unfinished projects, some ideas flying around or just fix some random bug) (INT, cont.)
• get out XBox, play some Mirror’s Edge (STR, cont.) (more of a fallback strategy because it’s better than sleep, but still a waste of time)
• play some Mario (STR, cont.) (totally not a waste of time) (interesting fact: after suffering[1] playing through Yoshi’s Island on the NDS I was so angry at the game and exstatic at the same time that I swore to finish all Mario games, just out of spite)
• meditate some more (CON, cont.) (Normally, it would be dangerous to do this when tired, but the way I sit is actually so uncomfortable until you get it right that I will start vomitting and screaming because of pain before I could ever fall asleep (I should know, I did this years ago and it took me a month to not curse my legs anymore.).)
• fold a few Cubees or paper cranes to annoy my mom (STR, cont.)

I will also need something new to drink that has no caffeine (but I love my perfect green tea :[...), is easy to prepare and totally refreshening and tasty and stuff. This fruit juice I've been drinking for the last few months is no more (new recipe?! and now there's no more celery in it?! what the fuck?!) and I'm in dire need of an alternative.

[0]How insane is it that it’s now cheaper to send something as trivial as a sleep mask from Hong Kong to Germany, instead of driving to the nearest town and buying one there? It would cost me more time and money to actually buy one just around the corner than to send it 9000 kilometers and get it through customs. This would have been unbelievable just one generation ago. As far as I’m concerned, there is no need for infrastructure anymore. If I can receive stuff from Hong Kong, have an internet connection and there’s a supermarket nearby, I’m happy. Who needs towns anyway?
[1] I might have discovered the Strikethrough button. Maybe you noticed.

Well, I mentioned a while ago I was trying modifying 3h everyman sleep to make it work for me. I tried extending the core, but that made it worse. Anything except 3 hours is pretty much useless as a core length. 90 minutes works occassionally, but it’s not really long-term.

Anyway, I then tried a second core and soon found myself ignoring the naps and just going for biphasic straight away. Well, it works. But it kinda sucks. It works way better than monophasic for me and I will now consider it my default to fall back on. I aim for 3h + 90min, but on average I get more like 5h in total, oversleeping either on the short core or falling asleep 2 hours too early on the long core. And I need caffeine again (low dose though, 1-2 weak cups of green tea per day) to make it.

It’s not so great, so I will go back to everyman, past experiences be damned. I bought a sleep mask and I will get my naps, dammit. But I’m switching right away because there’s an important exam in 5 days and switching right before that would be suicide. (I already did this once and almost failed it.)

Anyway, the real reason I’m going back is a simple statistic. It matches many of my own memories, but now I have reliable data. Here is a list of time I spent each day on several study topics in total. (This counts stuff like learning for an exam, studying vocabulary, but not just watching a movie.) Guess until when I was monophasic, when I switched to everyman and when to biphasic sleep. I was equally busy on all days (i.e. not at all).

study time (in hours) per day for the last 40 days

Polyphasic sleep doesn’t just give you more time – it changes how you use the given time as well. In most cases, for the better.

I have been on a 3h everyman schedule for a month or so, but I will now have to accept defeat. You see, I’d have a week of near-to-perfect adherence. I’d fall asleep almost every time, never miss or oversleep and I remember dreams most of the time. But I get more and more tired and after one week, I’m on uberman levels of sleep deprivation and simply have to sleep at least 4h or so more or I’m dead. I start again, same thing. 3x in a row and I accept my schedule and my body disagree with each other.

*sigh*

Still, during the first 4 days I feel great. And I was able to maintain uberman sleep, so I’m not completely incompatible. That’s why I’m not giving up on polyphasic sleep per se, but I do not some fix here and moving naps is not gonna be it. None of my naps seems flawed, so I just don’t see anything to tweak in the first place. I have the perfect everyman schedule, I eat right, take no drugs at all, am busy all the time, but I still have a total deficit.

I’ve thought about my options. I won’t add a nap because this makes it too impractical. I will try a longer core first. I’ll add one hour (maybe 1.5 if necessary) and see if this is enough too account for the deficit. On average, it should be, but it doesn’t work that way. :)
If I can’t maintain this core or if it screws with my naps too much (I can only nap when sufficiently tired – give me too much sleep and I can’t stay polyphasic.), I’ll try an intentional oversleep / 2. core every 3 days or so. Basically do regularly what I would do anyway, but early enough so I never go through the bad phase of sleep deprivation. I know that catching up with sleep is bad for your health, but it’s what I’ve been doing for almost all my time in school, so I’m kinda used to it. (笑)

Let’s see.

All the problems I encountered and how I solved them. Except for those that puredoxyk has already answered.

Problem: I wake up groggy after my nap.
Solution: First, make sure you are not simply adapting to naps in general. During the first few days it’s inevitable to feel really tired after a nap. However, the exact length of a nap is important. Contrary to what you might think, shorter is better. Start with 20 minutes and stick to it. Once you have adapted enough that you can fall asleep in a minute or so, you might fiddle with nap length.
If you tend to wake up during dreams and still feel tired, the nap is too short. If you wake up groggy and barely concious, it’s too long. I found a length of 22-23 minutes to be ideal.

Problem: No matter how long I make my core, I never feel refreshed afterwards.
Solution: First of all, a core should be (more or less) a multiple of 90 minutes. Anything else isn’t gonna work in the first place. But more importantly, the time of the day you go to sleep and wake up at matters a lot. If your core just doesn’t seem to work at all, try a completely different time. The early evening and early morning seem to be the most common ideal times. You will generally find your time by just disabling all alarms and sleeping whenever you are tired for a few days.
When in doubt, try sunset. This seems to work for most people. I can only sleep well for a long time when I go to bed at 20:00 or around 05:00. Anything else is a waste of time.

Problem: I can’t fall asleep, even though I’m tired!
Solution: Are you drinking caffeine, even tiny amounts? Stop that. Caffeine totally screws up your sleep and once you have a good, regular schedule down, you won’t need it anymore at all.
Also, make sure you are comfortable, it’s (reasonably) dark and quiet. Regular noise, especially white noise (be it artificial or from a fan) works for many people.
And of course, don’t fiddle with your schedule. Your brain needs a long time to get used to it, so if you go to bed at a different time every few days, you will never sleep well.

Problem: But I need caffeine to wake up!
Solution: Try fresh fruit or a shower instead. Works well enough for me and I was on the mental level of a plant without caffeine for at least 30 minutes after getting up. :)

Problem: I like caffeine / alcohol / other drugs, can’t I ever have them anymore on a polyphasic schedule?
Solution: Most likely not. Rare consumption isn’t too bad (after you have adapted), but it tends to screw you up every time. Believe me, I have tried. Find out what’s more important and stick to it. As I’m writing this FAQ, you might have a guess what my decision was. ;)

Problem: I find it hard to get up and often tend to oversleep or just go right to bed again.
Solution: Your bed is probably too comfortable. ;) A low room temperature makes it really hard to leave the bed. Light also tends to wake one up pretty well, especially sunlight.
During the adaptation phase, you might also resort to sleeping in normal clothes or on the couch / floor. Having something cool or important to do right after you get up helps, too.

Problem: I always oversleep during this one nap, but never anywhere else!
Solution: Is it too close to another nap, i.e. less than 2 hours? That won’t work, ever. Furthermore, try moving the nap. There are times during the day you will have trouble getting up, no matter what you do. Try to not sleep during them.

Problem: I like sleep and/or lying in my bed. Of course this conflicts with rare and short (i.e. polyphasic) sleep. What can I do?
Solution: This was one of the hardest and least expected problems I had. Everyone how hated sleep and was an insomniac, oh you had it so easy. ;) Let me tell you that trying to make sleep less comfortable won’t work. The human brain doesn’t react well to punishment. It’s futile, so don’t even try it.
There were only two things that worked here. Make it more rewarding to be awake. Do a lot of cool stuff, always have something lying around you can’t wait to get done and reward yourself often. Sweets are nice. If your life is boring and horrible, you will find it hard to convince yourself to be awake. Certainly you have played that one game, read that one book, studied that one topic, etc. that you just couldn’t put down, that you skipped sleep over and just had to do – try to make your life that awesome all the time. Stay in this mental state.
On the other hand, there is one realization I found to be very important. If you are putting pleasure first and going the way of instant gratification, understand what you will become. What’s the difference between you and this?

rat with electrodes wired to its pleasure center

For about 2 weeks I’ve been sleeping monophasically, trying a few different core durations. What I called “promising” back then, I call “waste of time” now. I see no significant change in my retention rate (95% for old facts, 84% for new facts[1]), but my motivation and ability to concentrate has dropped. I’m getting less done and can’t think straight.
I had hoped that being able to work for >6 hours at a time would improve my ability to program and read, but this isn’t the case. My log shows that the longest time I programmed in one sitting was roughly 1.5 hours. I think that “the flow” is overrated, or at least there are viable alternatives.

Anyway, I might as well go polyphasic again, so I’m back in the game. *sigh* I’d love to do uberman, but I know how life just loves to throw that one can’t-skip event in my way after 3 weeks or so. Sorry, if I had the money to make sure I could just tell everybody to fuck off for a few hours, sure. So it’s everyman again. Let’s hope I have enough discipline, experience and stuff to do to succeed this time. :)

Same bat schedule[2], same bat channel!

[1] Of course the exact number is more indicative of the specific structure and content of the facts, but given a workload of 20 new facts and ~80-100 reviews a day, it should be clear that my memory is working fine.
[2] 3h core at 20:00, naps at 5:00, 10:00, 15:00, optimized with daylight, 8 months of polyphasic experimentation and exams in mind

See this article first. These re-posts are only meant to represent my own experience with polyphasic sleep, in a somewhat distilled form and only pointing out things that are not often mentioned. Common experiences can be found elsewhere. This does not necessarily represent my current views (but may, as those often change).

2009-02-10

Polyphasic sleep brings out two vices you never thought you even had: lack of discipline and impatience. The former is obvious, as you will screw up a lot and only make yourself suffer longer and longer the less disciplined you are. (That I needed a month until my brain stopped feeling like jam might tell you something about me…)
The later, however, is really getting annoying. Except for the short core I can’t skip any time at all anymore. If something takes 6 hours, like a download for example, I will be awake (almost) all the time and have to wait. Every. Minute. Of. It. You see everything pass. Someone just went to bed and you want to talk about something? Prepare to sit there, for 8 hours or more, fully awake. Wrote some email and await an answer? You’ll have memorized 500 digits of π before you get it. You can’t skip anything, can’t just hibernate a few hours. Once the sun went down, you’ll sit in darkness, for 14 hours and more right now. If you are not president by day, superhero by night and mad scientist on the side, you’ll be bored right out of your skull. Your puny hobbies are not enough for The Night That Never Ends, mortal!
(I’m learning a language, study a difficult topic, take drugs, program, watch a shitload of TV and I’ve been, during the last 2 months, seriously considering taking up another language, learning an instrument or getting a job just so I have something to do. This has passed and I’m now extending my former studies into the free time so that I can learn better and a lot faster.)

This is driving me nuts. However, in the end, I’ll be a better person because of it. I’ll learn how to not get distracted by anticipation and spent my time meaningfully. There’ll be a time when I’ll be getting 15 hours of sunlight a day. Until then, I’ll be a gibbering wreck.

See this article first. These re-posts are only meant to represent my own experience with polyphasic sleep, in a somewhat distilled form and only pointing out things that are not often mentioned. Common experiences can be found elsewhere. This does not necessarily represent my current views (but may, as those often change).

2008-12-17

Mood swings. Dream withdrawal. Boredom.

The major enemies of uberman sleep. Result: I overslept every single nap today. Yes, all of them. The first I couldn’t prevent. My brain just ignored everything and slept right through “Dragula”. After this, I just couldn’t be bothered. I knew I failed, I liked the dreams and was just too lazy to get out of bed to do anything useful. Uberman really only works when you are busy enough for two.

2008-12-01

Great. I seem to have two choices: light, sucky sleep and hear the alarm or good, deep sleep, but don’t hear anything. I’m like my father, nothing can wake me up once I’m really asleep.

So, you guessed it, that’s a problem. I’m really unsure how to handle that. I did have functioning naps a while ago.

[you come back another day / and do no wrong]

I read through all my previous posts on sleep again and got some of my fighting spirit back. Shit, I remember now how different I felt on uberman and I miss that now. However, I still have not found a way to combat my sleepiness otoh and my inability to wake up properly when completely gone. I.. just don’t know. More conditioning? Was I too lax? And what about the light? I can’t sleep well when it’s not dark, but I can’t wake up when there is no light. I might have to rig something up, but right now I don’t have the right tools.

At least I think I have found out how to keep me awake during tiredness, but that doesn’t help you when your brain is not cooperating and never let’s you get there because you just sleep through every alarm you can imagine.

Then there is the doubt. At first it’s weak, but it grows stronger every day. “You can never maintain uberman for a long time anyway! Even if you adapt, in a few years you will have to work and more take lessons and so on and will not be able to keep your naps! No one has ever done it! It doesn’t work! It’s amazing, but it is completely incompatible to the rest of the world!” It nags and nags away at your mind, coming up in your worst hours. And I can not get rid of it anymore. I even think it is valid; I really have no clue how I can ever make uberman work once I’m not in university any more. So why all that trouble? Days and days of inhuman effort, only to abandon it anyway in at most 4 years? The Broken Mind of the Revolution – try to change the world and the world just laughs at you, crushes you, makes all work useless.
And you make compromises, think that everyman is also nice and more flexible. You can make it fit almost any work schedule you might have. But it doesn’t feel nice. You feel weak and stupid, wasting so much time on sleep (Come on, you sleep 4 hours! That’s insane! You might as well fall into a coma and sleep all day, lazypants!).
Right now, I hate everything. I hate myself, hate my brain, hate the world. It’s insane. I’m insane.

And then glimpses of hope come up in your mind. It’s once every 4 hours, so it should work, right? Classes only last 90 minutes, so you can nap between them. Work has a lunch break and maybe flexible hours, so that is doable. Even if you have to give up uberman, you gain 2 hours and a lot of energy for some years. Just one year of uberman gives you 730 additional hours, i.e. a whole month, more time compared to everyman. And once you know how to nap, you can change to a different nap schedule without much work. Get rid of the doubt. It does work.

*sigh* Let’s continue with uberman. I’m such a crybaby.

See this article first. These re-posts are only meant to represent my own experience with polyphasic sleep, in a somewhat distilled form and only pointing out things that are not often mentioned. Common experiences can be found elsewhere. This does not necessarily represent my current views (but may, as those often change).

2009-05-20

I’m pissed. So very pissed.

Polyphasic sleep is getting on my nerves. Let me summarize the last 8 (8?!) months.

October. Yay, finally some uberman! Oh god, this is hard! I may have only 2 hours of sleep, but I also only have 2 hours of not-feeling-like-a-zombie. Screw this shit.
November. Experimentation. More experimentation. Even more experimentation. It works! I feel ok! An unexpected event occurs. I’m screwed.
December. It’s futile. Uberman is just not practical. Let’s do everyman! 3 hour core, sleep galore! It works! The excitement wears off, I’m screwed.
January. Can’t think, can’t dream, can’t move. Bang my head against the wall. Some days are perfect, others are hell. Experimentation.
February. Better times, stricter schedule, more experience. Results: underwhelming. I crash, can’t get back up. This doesn’t work.
March. Not enough time. The naps too infrequent, the core too short, the sleep-throughs too frequent. This is just an adaptation problem, it will go away.
April. It didn’t. It’s futile. What about a 90 minute core and 5 naps? It works! Excitement! Uberman-with-a-core works! I study like mad, finish 2/3 of the whole semester in 3 days.
May. Instability. It really is uberman-with-a-core. Didn’t eat right? Oversleep. Did some exercise? Oversleep. Didn’t find a bug in your code? Oversleep. Made the tea a little too strong? Oversleep. Every one destabilizes the schedule. I have 3 in one week, that’s it. Impractical, totally impractical. Better than uberman, though.

And now?

I’m starting to think that everyman is a hoax. Does <em>anyone</em> really do a 3h core and 3-4 naps? Puredoxyk doesn’t. Even if I give her the benefit of a doubt and assume that every time she doesn’t report on it, she sleeps 4 hours, it still averages out to a lot more, at least 5 or 6. Nobody on jorel’s list does it. I never read about anyone who did it for a reasonably long time. Unless I see some strong evidence for it, I will consider a 3 hours core to be bullshit. It works temporarily, yes, but so does cocaine.