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.