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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.

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Tried For A Nap…

For my 8pm nap, I wasn’t able to get to bed until 9:15. I was awake until the alarm went off at 10:00. How­ever, I did rest my body and I felt that I did drift off now and then.

I’m doing this in prepa­ra­tion for my sleep tonight which will be from the time that I feel the most tired until prob­a­bly 3:30am. So, maybe 2 until 3:30?

I have so much more energy by the way. I think it’s just plain awesome.

Is any­one read­ing these? Please leave com­ments below if you are. Thanks!

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Making Great Progress

So last night I woke at 4:30 instead of 5:30 am and the day went great. The after­noon nap was eas­ier this time; I went right to sleep.

I’m look­ing for­ward to my 8pm nap and tonight I’m going to set my alarm for 3:30 instead of 4:30.

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Rough Time Napping

So I went to get my Dymax­ion nap this after­noon and I had set my To Bed time at 3:45pm, wake win­dow at 30 min­utes and alarm time at 4:00. I lay down at 3:35-ish.

Well, I lay there and lay there and checked the time at it was 4:00

I real­ized that if I’m going to get a nap that I’m going to need to quiet my mind.

For­tu­nately for me, I invented a method to do this which I devel­oped.

I reset my watch for the alarm at 4:30, To Bed at 4:00 with a 30-minute window.

My watch woke me up at 4:26 and I was very rested.

Hooray!

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The Clear Mind Method (which I invented)

It can be used to help quiet your mind for sleep, clear your head, pre­pare for a task when many other things are dis­tract­ing you, etc.

Use it in good health:

First, close your eyes.

Sec­ond, either imag­ine you are doing this (and if you can please do) hold out your hands palms up.

Third, imag­ine that the activ­ity of your ver­bal inner voice (the one that you will be using to actu­ally talk your­self through this process and also the same one that says unkind things when you really want to say them out loud) is rep­re­sented by a light. Today I was using a can­dle light image to rep­re­sent the activ­ity; some­times it was red, some­times orange and some­times yel­low. By “activ­ity” I mean that if you have a stereo with an equal­izer and when music plays the lights are very active, I mean active in this way. The more noise or ver­bal activ­ity of your inner voice, the more that this light flick­ers in your palm. Use your inner voice in a con­struc­tive way and announce to your­self what you are mon­i­tor­ing. “Right hand.” “Left hand.” “Right hand.” “Left hand.”

Fourth, imag­ine that the sen­sa­tions you feel are rep­re­sented by a flicker in your left hand. The idea is to actu­ally FEEL with your skin, feel how hun­gry you are, feel any pain in your body, feel any dis­com­fort, feel any kind of sen­sa­tion that you can feel. Feel your own breath. Feel your own weight. Tense up your feet and relax and FEEL that tens­ing and FEEL that relief. Work your way from the bot­tom of your feet up through tens­ing your legs, torso, arms and up to your scalp. Today I was imag­in­ing the the flick­er­ing to be a blue can­dle flame.

Fifth, as you work your way up your body in the fourth step, check in with your inner voice and watch the activ­ity for both as you go. Try to do these alter­nately. Right hand, left hand, right hand, etc. Announce these to your­self as men­tioned before. Watch the activ­ity with your mind’s eye but feel the sen­sa­tions and watch the activ­ity in both palms.

Sixth, as you watch the activ­ity light in one hand, you also watch the other one. You will notice that as you work your way up and announce what you are mon­i­tor­ing, your mind will be calmer. At a point, you will only hear your own inner voice and your body will be float­ing with­out sen­sa­tion. At that point, you tell that voice to stop. If you hear any­thing again, you just watch your palms in your mind’s eye. Watch that activ­ity until it dies out like a fire that has no more fuel to burn.

I’ve been doing this for a year now, so I actu­ally don’t have to hold out my palms and I was able to do it curled up for sleep.

I’m delighted to share this with you.

Enjoy.

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Living Enhanced by Technology

I’ve been think­ing for some time about what it is that I am doing with this exper­i­ment to reduce the amount of time that I spend sleep­ing by using technology.

I’ve been mean­ing to share that I have heard about some­one who used polypha­sic sleep­ing although I don’t know what their sched­ule was, but I do know that they were the cap­tain of the USS Carl Vin­son and that my friend, who was in the Marines with me, shared about how he used to do these cat­naps but he was always on his post. I think it’d be great if the US Navy did more research on polypha­sic sleep because if a ship’s cap­tain can do it, then it would dra­mat­i­cally reduce the num­ber of peo­ple needed to do one job and would also reduce the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of a fight­ing force if it is awake all day and only nap­ping occa­sion­ally. At night, a mil­i­tary instal­la­toin goes dark while some peo­ple stay up on 3rd shift watch­ing the base. What if they could all be awake all day and nap­ping occa­sion­ally instead? What could they get done with fewer people?

Any­way, the rea­son I men­tion this is that the cap­tain of the ship may or may not have used a clock to wake up, which is basi­cally what many polypha­sic sleep­ers do with­out. They have trained their minds to wake up after a short rest period which is pretty cool.

But is what I am doing the same thing? Because I’m using tech­nol­ogy to do this, does it make it any less use­ful or valuable?

Well, you would have to be a Lud­dite to believe that. You’re using the inter­net right now to read this, so your life must in some way be improved by tech­nol­ogy, even if it is for pure enter­tain­ment alone. If you use Microsoft Win­dows or Apple OS, then you prob­a­bly use pro­grams such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and any other host of soft­ware to get stuff done. If you use anti-virus soft­ware, then this is proof that you want to pro­tect your abil­ity to get stuff done.

Do you drive a car? Take pic­tures? Lis­ten to radio, watch movies or have a cell­phone? Do…you…use…electricity…?

The ques­tion is really not “Does using tech­nol­ogy com­pro­mise us as human beings?” but instead is “At what point does the use of tech­nol­ogy not let us be inde­pen­dent of technology?”

I think that peo­ple who are not in some Third World coun­try with­out elec­tric­ity know the dif­fer­ence between life with­out tech­nol­ogy and with and they pre­fer with. Even home­less peo­ple use the bus to get across town.

But then there are the Amish, right? And Lord knows what a soft spot I have for them in my heart after heaing the incred­i­ble dis­play of Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples at the Amish school shoot­ing in 2006. Not only does it make me glad to call myself a Chris­t­ian, but it also makes me ques­tion whether or not I should become Amish and aban­don tech­nol­ogy. They are clearly doing some­thing right.

And yet I know that there is detri­ment in excess, but I can’t say that hav­ing more time can be an ill of excess. The only con­cern that I have is for my own health. How­ever, I run at least three times a week, I am eat­ing a largely raw food diet and my only seri­ous nutri­tional flaws are caf­feine and shar­ing a bot­tle of wine with my wife at least one day a week (with the intent to only have it one day a week) and per­haps the monthly or bi-monthly fast food visit. I’m cer­tainly not at the right weight as I am tech­ni­cally over­weight but not obese; how­ever, I’m track­ing my progress to lose the extra weight using our new Nin­tendo Wii.

But wait a second…

I’m using the Wii to track my weight loss and my wife uses it for exer­cise (as do I on occasion).

When I go run­ning, I use an inter­val timer on my Timex Iron­man watch.

This means that I am not only using tech­nol­ogy to get less sleep, but I am also using tech­nol­ogy to improve my health.

Based on every­thing that I have read, I can’t see that get­ting less sleep is as much of a prob­lem as not exer­cis­ing, so I think I’m going to be just fine doing this.

Thanks for listening.

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My Wife’s Experience With the Sleeptracker Watch

I needed to wake up early on Sun­day to com­plete an assign­ment for the uni­ver­sity. Joseph offered to let me use his watch to wake up. So he pro­grammed the watch for me and gave it to me with some clear instruc­tions: Wear it snug, not tight. I was a lit­tle rest­less try­ing to fig­ure out how to do my home­work (yes I do that some­times) and woke up at around 4:00 am think­ing about it.  I thought to myself, “oh great! this thing is NOT going to work now that I’ve woken up and it’s too early for me to get out of bed” so I decided to try to get som eztra zzz’s and wait for the alarm to go off and see what hap­pened. Well, it woke me up at 6:04 am. Joseph had pro­grammed it for 6:30 and had given it a 40 minute win­dow to wake me up. I got up, my body was still tired but my mind, sur­pris­ingly was pretty sharp. Slowly but surely, my body started to wake up as well and I was able to fin­ish my assign­ment and turn it in on time (and get an A+)

This thing really works and I was pretty surprised.

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Starting the Dymaxion Schedule

Last night I set the alarm for 5:30am with a sleep win­dow of 30 min­utes and was awak­ened at 5:04. Very nice. Felt good. Felt a bit tired since we went to bed last night at 12:15 catch­ing up on Tivo (just love 24).

I started my first Dymax­ion nap today at 9:15am. Nor­mally, this will be at 8am, but I got started a lit­tle late on that plus I woke up from last night’s sleep at 5:30, so I fig­ure I don’t have to start at 8 today. I will nap again at 2pm. Then nap again at 8pm. Then I will start cut­ting my reg­u­lar sleep short by an hour.

I think I will keep doing this each day until I’m sleep from midnight-ish until 2:30. Then I will start cut­ting the bed time at mid­night in favor of going to be later such that I start sleep­ing from 2–2:30 each night.

It’s look­ing good so far. I just love the watch.

For my nap just now I lay down at 9:30, set the To Bed time at 9:45, sleep win­dow at 30 minute and alarm at 10:15. Well, I actu­ally was awake at 9:43. If I had set my watch to 9:30 for the To Bed time, it would have woke me up at 9:43. So, I went “back” to sleep know­ing that if I started sleep­ing deeply that it would wake me before 10:15 which is what I wanted. Well, it woke me at 9:52. Per­fect. I got in two sleep pat­terns. I’m think­ing that get­ting in two sleep pat­terns is pretty ideal. I still felt a lit­tle tired when I woke at 9:43. When I woke at 9:52 I felt more rested. I’m so glad I have such con­trol over these things. This watch makes this all possible.

Oh, and by the way, I’m drink­ing cof­fee just fine, thank you.

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First Sleeptracker Nap

So today I thought I would exper­i­ment with using the Sleep­tracker watch while tak­ing a nap.

It worked really well but there is a bit of a trick to it.

I had set my alarm for 1:30 with a 30-minute win­dow and I started my nap at 12:45; my To Bed time was 1:00. My alarm woke me up right at 1:08 which wasn’t really enough time to nap. I had fallen asleep by 1, but got less than a half hour of sleep.

So, I decided to try some­thing different.

I set my alarm To Bed at 1:30, gave myself a 60 minute win­dow and set the alarm at 2:30. The result? I was woke up at 1:40. So I ended up get­ting two naps and woke up feel­ing rested and fresh. What’s nice is that I feel phys­i­cally refreshed as well as men­tally refreshed on this one.

My Dymax­ion sleep times are going to be at 2/8/2/8. I think what I’ll do is to try my To Bed time at 2:30, alarm by 3:00 and have a 30-minute win­dow. That way I will go to bed so that I’m asleep by 2:00 and will sleep at least a half hour and then wake up between 2:30 and 3:00. After a while, I will adjust this so that the To Bed time will be 2:25 and maybe 2:20 or 2:15 and see how that goes.

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Rough Sleep

Every once in a while, I don’t sleep so well.

Last night there were high winds that came in with heavy rain with a drop in tem­per­a­ture, there were neigh­bors yelling at each other last night and my day wasn’t the usual happy-go-lucky day as I nor­mally have.

Out of some sort of con­flu­ence of all these events, I didn’t sleep so well.

In fact, when my watch tried to wake me at some point before 6:30 AM, it couldn’t. It woke me up just like a reg­u­lar alarm clock because I finally got some deep sleep dur­ing the last part of my sleep but I didn’t go into light sleep (where the watch would wake me up) dur­ing that time.