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What is Uberman Sleeptracker?

The Uber­man Sleep­tracker blog is my attempt at get­ting the most out of Uber­man polypha­sic sleep (though I’m not sure which sched­ule I will use: Uber­man? Every­man? Dymax­ion?) using the Sleep­tracker sleep watch. Please see my posts on both Uber­man and Sleep­tracker to get a bet­ter idea of why these are appeal­ing to me. To my knowl­edge, no one has tried these two things together and I think they were cer­tainly both meant to be used together. The Uber­man sched­ule seems to be in need of elim­i­nat­ing the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with it and the Sleep­tracker seems to be a solu­tion in search of a really good prob­lem to solve.

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P90X

About 20 days ago, I started the P90X pro­gram and decided to take the advice of the coaches and get a full 8.5 hours of sleep each night.

I will be resum­ing the Dymax­ion sched­ule after get­ting accus­tomed to this new work­out routine.

By the way, it’s really work­ing. I’m thin­ner and stronger! I’ll post pic­tures in a few day!

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Through It All

Just a note to let you know that I’ve been using the Sleep­tracker watch a great deal and it has been great. I have found that even when I don’t use it that my body seems to have had enough biofeed­back that it knows when to wake up.

This morn­ing, in fact, I woke up early than nor­mal and I believe if it weren’t for the Sleep­traker watch that I wouldn’t be up right now get­ting a few things done and I’d be asleep right now.

I’ve been set­ting it so that I get a forty-minute nap. I set the alarm to go off an hour from now, tell it to wake me 20 min­utes ear­lier and it does the rest. It’s really great!

We have moved to a new apart­ment and I’ve just been super-busy. I’m glad I had this time to check in and blog.

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I’ve Been Out Sick

I think you may remem­ber that my daugh­ter had a cold if you have been read­ing this blog.

Well, guess what? That cold was caught by me and my wife and then it kinda changed and then my daugh­ter caught it again and then I was the last one who had it. And then, guess what, it almost cleared up for me and then turned into an ear infec­tion and then it’s turned into a cough and now my daugh­ter has it again. Oh my.

Need­less to say, I’ve been so para­noid about not get­ting well that I have gone back to my nor­mal sleep sched­ule and still tak­ing naps most times just to keep my body semi-conditioned.

I have learned two things.

One is that it’s NOT that hard to do a Dymax­ion sched­ule and the other is that you can’t drink alco­hol and expect Dymax­ion to work. It just puts me under and I can’t get a short nap.

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Dymaxion Schedule

Well, so far I am lik­ing the Dymax­ion sched­ule in terms of fit­ting it into my life (or fit­ting my life into Dymaxion).

How­ever, I’m hav­ing a tough time get­ting up after my 2am nap. I often wake up at 4 or 5:30 or even later on some days.

I think the rea­son is that some morn­ings I just have less work to do than oth­ers. I think if I were a bit more inspired to get up and work on some­thing that this would be good.

Just so that you know, the watch is great. It does wake me up. How­ever, I’m a bit too tired to get up and get out of bed every time in the mid­dle of the night. Dur­ing the day is just fine.

I think I’m still adjust­ing since it’s been about two weeks now although I thought I would be com­pletely adjusted.

I do think that alco­hol is really mess­ing things up a bit as when I do share some wine with my wife one or two and some­times more nights per week. I seem to cer­tainly not get up when my alarm goes off by 2:45 am.

Any­way, I think I’m still get­ting used to the sched­ule and on those days when I have no alco­hol in my sys­tem, I get up ear­lier after my 2am nap.

By the way, I must admit that much of the prob­lems of late that I have been hav­ing are tightly related to my daugh­ter still being sick. We’re tak­ing her to the doc­tor tomor­row to check out her lungs. She’s had some issues with raspy lungs and dif­fi­culty breath­ing at times. When we moved from LA, we were pretty con­vinced that these issues had dis­ap­peared, but it looks as though they may be per­sist­ing. When I take my 2am nap, I find that I am lis­ten­ing to her breath­ing (or not breath­ing for a few moments) and so I’m not really SLEEPING as it were. I think that by the time that I’ve set­tled in for a nap that my alarm goes off 45 min­utes later when I have entered into my deeper sleep.

I’m going to main­tain my nap sched­ule but I’m not going to expect any real break­throughs with this until she is well and I can nap in our bed at night with­out me hav­ing to worry/watch her when she is sleep­ing with mommy and daddy.

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Stabilizing…

So last night I went to nap at 2am and woke up closer to 4am this time and I wasn’t as tired.

I remem­ber wak­ing up after the 2am alarm went off at 2:30, but man was I tired. My core sleep still isn’t being dis­trib­uted yet.

So I’m going to hang with this for a while and treat this as part of the adjustment.

I’m still get­ting less than four hours of sleep dur­ing the day, though. Yes­ter­day it was more like 3 and I’m only tired about a half an hour before my planned sleep time, so this is good.

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Getting on Track Again

Last night: 2 hours of sleep from 2–4 am

Naps are on time and nor­mal at about 20 minutes.

Alter­ing my watch set­tings did help at least.

Will keep work­ing on it. My body doesn’t really want to switch my REM times of day yet, but it’s head­ing that way.

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Need To Adjust My Sleep Window and Alarm

After two nights of over­sleep­ing at the 2am nap, I think I’m going to shorten my sleep win­dow and alarm.

I have had it set at 30 min­utes so that if I fall asleep before, say 2am, and my alarm is set for 2:45 that I should wake up between 2:15 and 2:45. Well, last night my alarm went off at 2:38 and I was still quite tired and didn’t get up.

I think that I just need to not sleep quite so long (from just before 2am to 2:38 is prob­a­bly over 45 min­utes). That’s too long I think. I think that my body is just too com­fort­able sleep­ing and doesn’t want to get up. My mind is alert but tired still.

I think that what I’m doing for ear­lier in the day might be fine for these kind of 45 minute naps, so I’m going just shorten it for night.

I think that the idea here is to get my body to make the leap into going into REM sleep through­out the day instead of just at night and I think that this adjust­ment will get it to happen.

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Back on Track

Just to let you know that I am totally back on track with Dymaxion.

I think this is the eas­i­est sched­ule to main­tain than any other to be quite frank.

I’d much rather sleep four times per day for about 20 min­utes or so (1–2 hours per day) using my Sleep­tracker than to try and squeeze in six sleep peri­ods of 20 min­utes each. Four sleep peri­ods is so much eas­ier to deal with.

The day flies by to be per­fectly hon­est. I have a lot of work that I get done and that’s great. With­out this sleep sched­ule, it seems that I can never move for­ward on what I am doing. I always seem to be get­ting behind.

Let me sum­ma­rize what this is like:

Imag­ine tak­ing a nap in the morn­ing, just after­noon and just after din­ner; is that doable? What if you could then stay up until 2am, take a nap and then get up at 2:20, 2:30 or 2:40 and then do it all again? I gen­er­ally only feel tired about an hour before each nap and that’s cer­tainly not bad. What can you get done that isn’t get­ting done now?

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Everything Was Going Fine and Then…

I hit all my naps at the right time yesterday…perhaps that first time that I really made an effort to hit my 2/8/28 sched­ule and I did so successfully…

And then when I went to bed last night at 2AM for my first full day of naps that are about 20 min­utes in length, I hear my daugh­ter cough. Well, she’s been hav­ing this dry cough for a few days and we’re wait­ing for it to clear up as it hasn’t got­ten worse after it started.

Any­way, I hear the cough and then go back to sleep. And then I hear it again. This was about a minute later.

Off to sleep again and then I hear it again.

Each time I heard it, I was con­vinced that this was the last time. I also fig­ured that she must be partly awake and that is why she’s cough­ing and if she would just go to sleep and then I could just go to sleep and…she coughs again.

So, I get up and go to her and have her drink some of her water from her bottle.

Five min­utes later, the cough­ing returned.

Well, let me cut to the chase here. I didn’t sleep until 2.5 hours later than my sleep time.

Angelina had started ask­ing to go to nap with mommy and daddy so I brought her to bed for mommy to deal with her and so I went to the liv­ing room and slept until 7 am.

I feel totally wiped out and feel like I’m not going to be able to get back into the groove fully, but off I go.

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Slept Through Alarm

Well, I cer­tainly wouldn’t be the first per­son to sleep a polypha­sic sleep sched­ule to sleep through an alarm, but I did last night.

I went to bed at 2 and had set the alarm for 3:30. My watch went off at 3:16, but I don’t remem­ber it at all.

My daugh­ter has a bit of a cough and so she woke me up because she was cry­ing for mommy to come nap with us.

I got her into our bed and looked at the time and real­ized what hap­pened. It was almost 4:30am.

Well, no wor­ries. I did only get 2:30 hours of sleep which means that I will be get­ting that sleep later this morn­ing at 8.

I have to go into work (my only actual “work” sched­ule is Tues­days and Thurs­days from 9:00am to 1pm and I work from home the rest of the time) and so I need to get that sleep before I go and then do any nec­es­sary catch-up when I get back.

The weather has been really bad lately and I didn’t go into work on Tues­day; there was a tornado/waterspout that had done some dam­age only in the city where I do on-site work, so it’s a good thing I didn’t go in. I don’t mind dri­ving in the rain, but I have pretty bald tires right now and it’s no fun in the rain, but it’s very dan­ger­ous with high winds.

I think I may have to do the same thing this morn­ing unless the weather clears up or if magic elves replaced my tires dur­ing the night.

This was my first seri­ous alter­ation to my sleep sched­ule so I don’t feel bad. I feel like I could use some sleep but I will play catch-up through­out the day.

I think this will cer­tainly work if I get the sleep I missed from the 2am sleep in the morn­ing and pos­si­bly after­noon and am able to get a 10pm sleep to ward off the need for lengthy 2am sleep.

Last night when it was 8pm, I did feel the desire to get a nap, but I was attend­ing a meet­ing in town with the Lom­poc Pho­tog­ra­phers Guild where my wife and I are mem­bers. Now I wish I had got that sleep when it was calling.