Polyphasic Sleep – A Wife’s Perspective – Part 2

Part 2(Part 3 of: How Not to Convert to the Polyphasic Sleep Schedule)

I LOVE HIM TO BITS, BUT IF HE KEEPS UP WITH THIS I’M OUT OF HERE……continued.

He wants to do a PhD in something or other. Whatever it is this week. He buys heaps of physics books on eBay that he doesn’t read, with titles like “The Elegant Universe” and “The Life of the Cosmos”. The last book to arrive was “The Story of Zero”. But to tell you the truth he doesn’t seem to get anywhere. He is a zero of getting things done. What about my website? Says he needs more hatting. But it hasn’t changed in over a year. Everybody loves it, but he says it isn’t finished and its just a temporary thing. I know these things take time but he seems to be taking all of it.

When he started staying up all night it was OK at first. It was new and he was excited and I was excited for him and I went along with it. I try to support whatever he wants to do. You can’t love somebody and stand in their way — you can just never do that no matter what silliness he wants to do as that might spell the end of everything. So I try to be as supportive as possible because he’s actually very talented and he’s the only reason my business is going the way it is at all. But I didn’t think then that anyone can forego daily sleep and stay up all night and only have naps and I still don’t. Having said that, I’ve always been supportive of whatever he wants to do.

Well, the first couple of weeks went OK. Our bedroom is also his office. We set up a screen and I sleep with ear plugs so it wasn’t a problem. He would lay down beside me to nap. He would never get under the covers. He said that he wasn’t sleeping, it was napping, and that if he got under the covers it would be too much like sleeping. So OK.

I never really knew when he’d get up or if he’d just keep on sleeping. I’d let him sleep. At first I didn’t mind. He had to move through this idea in his own way, and hopefully get it out of him. He would sleep for 4, 6, 8 or 9 hours sometimes. And boy would he snore. He refused to admit that he snored during his naps. He called the long “naps” oversleeping. It was weird. He went an entire month, except maybe a day or two when he was core sleeping, sleeping in his clothes.

I could never keep up with his schedule. It seemed to change a lot. He wasn’t getting anything done. Sometimes I’d wake up and he’d be out of the house. He’d be at the gym or having a coffee somewhere. Sometimes he was out walking listening to his “podcasts”.I started to get jealous. Why couldn’t I have coffee in the mornings?

But then he wasn’t coming home until midday or sometimes 1 or 2 pm. He was sleeping in his car. No I correct myself, he was oversleeping in his car. He was staying up all night on his computer then going to the gym at 6 am. Then he’d “nap” somewhere in his car and I wouldn’t see him until the afternoon. This was no way to have a marriage.

He looked terrible. I’ve never seen eyes so red. I thought his eyes were actually bleeding. He was leaving things behind when he went to work. He melted his favourite jumper on the bar heater he used while he was sleeping; this this from the man who has 3 fire extinguishers in the house and gives my daughter a hard time for having her heater too close under her desk. He was eating at night and getting fat. And in general he just looked like shit. And he was uncommunicative and sullen and not really there at all. He basically left me for a month, which is what it felt like.

In the last week he finally got moving on taking the photographs he needed to produce my brochure. I was perhaps starting to see the promised increase in his production. He said they had to be top quality and he was having trouble with the lighting. So the only place our “light tent” could fit was on our bed! Its a massive thing and it stayed there for a week. Our bedroom was turned into a photographic studio. I didn’t mind because I could sleep in my bindery on the floor, and my back felt good for it. But after about a week of Timmy sleeping in a ball behind the tent or in some parking lot in his car, one night he didn’t even come home from work. (He works at night and I usually expect him any time after midnight.) He showed up around midday the next day. He’d been asleep in his car. I’d had enough and I told him so. If he didn’t want to sleep with me in my own bed that was fine. If he didn’t want to be married that was fine. As far as I was concerned he was doing this so he could break up with me. That was how it felt.

Oh no, no he said. He wasn’t trying to do any of that, he was just having a hard time adjusting. All he had to do was stop oversleeping. But I’d had enough. Apparently he had too. He said he would start sleeping normally again. So that night he came to bed and snored his head off.

So that’s my story of a polyphasic husband. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I don’t really think he intentionally tried to make my life hell. He says he had to adapt to it to have the time to achieve his goals. But the during the last month he got less done than the last two months combined. Production, that is, work on projects, practically stopped as far as I could see. I hope not too many other people get sucked into this program. I wonder how many marriages get destroyed because of it. A person needs to sleep. If anyone is thinking of trying this I wouldn’t recommend it.

Polyphasic Sleep – A Wife’s Perspective

Part 1

(Part 2 of: How Not to Convert to the Polyphasic Sleep Schedule)

I LOVE HIM TO BITS, BUT IF HE KEEPS UP WITH THIS I’M OUT OF HERE…

When Timmy first told me about polyphasic sleep I thought it was going to be another one of those phases he goes through. He said he was going to cut his sleep down to 2 hours per night. I thought he was crazy.

He explained it to me and I still thought he was crazy. About a week later he was still talking about it, “getting me ready”, for the big changes ahead and I realized he was serious.

I even thought about doing it myself. I could use those extra hours in the day. I cook and clean and do just about everything else as well as run my own own bindery (I’m a bookbinder) in the front of the house. I’m also trying to get my own art off the ground and I thought it could work for me.

Bananas! I must have been in a delusion. The last month has been ridiculous.

Timmy has a lot on his plate. He does all my paperwork, he is building my website and he does all my digital work, and he is making me a brochure. Never mind the fact that he’s been working on that brochure for over six months. Longer, a year maybe. I wait patiently. I thought perhaps he might get something done if he had more time. I really, really need that brochure. He means well. But how much Photoshop do you need to learn just to make a simple brochure? Well apparently quite a bit and so I wait.

Anyway that’s not what this is about. This is about a man who decides he’s only going get two hours of sleep per night spread out over a series of 20 minute naps.

What do you think might happen?

To be continued…

Polyphasic Sleep (Uberman) – 30 days…

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FAILURE…

…because if you never give up you have never failed — you’ve just not yet succeeded. It is with this frame of reference that I report my as yet lack of success with Uberman. But its been a very interesting ride.

Lets take a look as these stats.

This graph shows the total hours of sleep I was able to maintain over a 30 day period. The pink line shows a 7 day running average. (The previous graphs showed a 3 day running average.)

As you can see I managed an average of about 6 hours sleep perday at best. In the last week I got really serious and decided that no matter how I felt I was doing Uberman. I would just carry on regardless. In that last week my bed was occupied by a massive light tent and surrounded by 100O watt lights. I slept in the crevice behind the tent. My wife slept in her workshop. It was a little surreal. Ouch

To add to the insanity I also made a commitment to a solid gym schedule. I did bodybuilding 3 days in a row. That is, I resumed weight training after a 2 month break. For some reason I thought that training in the gym and sleep deprivation might cancel out in some strange way. In the first day they did.

I took to sleeping in my car. I was so tired on the last night coming home from work that I stopped the car and fell asleep so I wouldn’t crash. I woke up at 11am the next day. Fortunately it was a Sunday and the usual traffic clearway was not in use.

My wife completely spat the dummy. She accused me of deliberately avoiding her and not sleeping at home. She seemed to think my operating basis was to stay up all night and then sleep all day in the car in a park somewhere. That was not my operating basis. But it did happen a few times in the last week as I attempted to adjust to sleep deprivation and gym over-training.

I wasn’t feeling all that good either.

This Stanford Scale graph shows my daily average on the Stanford Sleepiness Scale. The heavy black shows my daily average. The higher on the graph the better. I barely made my production make-break point on any given day. The lighter lines show the am and pm averages. In general I felt better over night than I did during the day and evening. The morning day was the worst. I did most of my over-sleeping during that time.

PROGRAM SUMMARY

There’s lot of things I can say. However I can’t say much about how to succeed on Uberman as I haven’t. But I am well qualified to say how not to do Uberman. See this post for decent summary (which covered up to about day 4). Doing everything I outlined there should absolutely guarantee failure.

Seriously, the main thing I learned was how important it was to be consistent. Not all schedules allow for Uberman. I still don’t even know if it works. All I have are words on the Internet to say that it does. But I have faith that it does.

The main mistake I made was not sticking with a plan. When it got too tough I made a change in my program to try and solve the problem. The solution just made it worse and so I spiralled out of control into a rollercoaster existence of massive sleep deprivation and over-sleeping.

Will I try it again? You bet. I start tonight.

How Not to Convert to the Polyphasic Sleep Schedule – Day 25

Part one.

No matter the state of knowledge and awareness of the universe, or lack thereof, there is always something that each one of us knows which could be imparted for the benefit of others

I haven’t yet made it on the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule so I can’t tell you how to do it. But I can tell you how not to do it. Oh yes, I know how to (not) do that

HOW NOT TO DO UBERMAN

The first thing you should do to utterly fail at Uberman is to make sure you are hopelessly addicted to coffee before you start. That way, as you try to wean yourself off the coffee, you’ll get headaches and a dull sleepy feeling pretty much permanently evern before you start. You should be in the middle of withdrawal symptoms the day you start Uberman.

The next thing is to ensure failure is to make sure you have a job as a “professional” driver on night shift, so as to make the ensuing days of sleep deprivation unbearable and at times a little dangerous. Or get some other job that entails lots of repitition, flashing lights, stupid people, and poisonous, mind dulling fumes. It also helps to have a bit of a chip on your shoulder, a bit of a job snob, so not only will you be struggling with the transition, you’ll hate yourself as well. Its absolutely essential that your shift times vary up to two hours either way so your sleep schedule is ruined from day one.

The next thing to ensure failure is to do it in the middle of winter so the nights are cold and the mornings even colder. Make sure you live in an old crapy house that would make an hippy green with envy and that is hard, if not impossible, to heat with the small crapy electric bar heaters that you own. Also, live miles and miles away from any all-night gyms or coffee shops. Make yourself a huge “HOLLY SHIT KEEP BUSY LIST” to keep yourself occupied during the wee hours. Fill the list with things that require you to sit still for long hours at your computer or desk. Then fill it with things to do in your workshop, only to realize, too late, that the slightest noise will wake up your neighbour. Out of sheer necessity, when you are forced to do something, anything in your workshop to stay awake, you can then live in constant fear waiting for your neighbour to come charging through your door with a wood splitter.

The next thing to do is to start on a whim without properly thinking it through. Just start and work it out as you go along. Go for about three days on the schedule, getting no more than 3 hours of sleep per day. But don’t have regular nap times. Change them around to suit your work schedule. This above all things is an excellent strategy for failure.

By about day four you should be ready to kill yourself. This would be a good time to start oversleeping. If, by some freak of strong will and excellent character, you are still persisting with the program, oversleeping will null any adjustment your body is making and prolong the agony of sleep deprivation. Oversleep every second day for maximum torture and elongation of the adjustment period.

To be continured….