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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.

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My Wife Tried Sleeptracker Last Night

My wife Veron­ica has been really inter­ested in my results with Sleep­tracker since she has been watch­ing me wake up with much more men­tal energy. I have been describ­ing to her the dif­fer­ence it has made for me just in terms of being more alert and cre­ative and such and so she was inter­ested in get­ting her own watch.

I told her that I wanted her to try it out first before we con­sider buy­ing it to make sure that she gets some results.

She has had some dif­fi­culty with sleep and it has made it dif­fi­cult for her since she likes to wake up at 5:30 am to start work. She does over-the-phone inter­pret­ing and early morn­ing is the busiest time to do it; if she sleeps in, then earn­ings are not being made.

Right now she is work­ing on her col­lege work and I’ll post what she thought when I get it.

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Dymaxion Sleep Schedule

One of the more chal­leng­ing sleep sched­ules is the Dymax­ion sleep sched­ule. It was cre­ated by the first real polypha­sic sleeper Buck­min­ster Fuller. The guy was a genius. He invented the geo­desic dome and had a num­ber of ideas to ben­e­fit soci­ety. He wrote bril­liantly as well.

Here are some of his quotes:

“Every­one is born a genius, but the process of liv­ing de-geniuses them.”

“Faith is much bet­ter than belief. Belief is when some­one else does the thinking.”

“God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.”

“I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremen­dous bun­dle of experience.”

“If human­ity does not opt for integrity we are through com­pletely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”

Well, I won’t be the first or last per­son to quote Bucky or use his ideas, but he is the one who invented the Dymax­ion sleep schedule.

I know that among polypha­sic sleep­ers that it’s been tried and has been found dif­fi­cult, but I have really put a lot of thought into the time that I need for this and that and found that this will work best. This will have fewer sleep peri­ods (4) com­pared to the Uber­man Sleep Sched­ule (6) so that is more appealing.

So I plan to get sleep breaks at 2am, 8am, 2pm and 8pm. I might find that I will take a dif­fer­ent sched­ule as time goes along, but this is what I will be prepar­ing myself to do. I think the key to this sched­ule is going to be to get a short nap between 2am and 8am or when­ever the sched­ule isn’t work­ing so well.

For today, I plan to get in a nap at 2pm, 8pm and then go to sleep as nor­mal from mid­night (or ear­lier) and then up at 5:30 again.

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Creativity Boost

I just wanted to share that yes­ter­day morn­ing I really had a nice stroke of cre­ativ­ity and invention.

Just for the record, I am an inven­tor in addi­tion to the other things that I do for a liv­ing. I’ve got this amaz­ing board game that I cre­ated and I have a pro­to­type; what makes it a patentable inven­tion is that the board game design is unlike any other. It costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to get the patent done and about that much to get the first run of pro­duc­tion made, so one of my rea­sons for doing this is so that I can get more done at night so that I can focus on that project and some other projects as well.

So the really nice cre­ative boost that I got was when I was putting together my daughter’s lunch for school. She likes Mac N Cheese, but it’s not my first choice to give her for school (and I would only buy the organic ver­sion). One of the rea­sons it’s not my first choice is that it’s got no pro­tein. So, I got the idea that if I boiled an egg, chopped the egg whites to be the same size as a mac­a­roni noo­dle and mixed it in, she shouldn’t really think that it’s not good to eat.

Well, we did hear that she didn’t eat much lunch, so I don’t know if it worked, but I love the idea and there are other things here and there where my cre­ativ­ity came out to play.

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Second Morning With Sleeptracker

I had got to bed just a lit­tle bit after mid­night and so I had to set my time to bed at 12:30 still with the wakeup time at 5:30 and a 40-minute window.

My watch woke me at the right time, but it was still pretty early and I felt tired, so I snoozed it and got in another 10 min­utes and then got up.

This watch is great. I’ve been busy as a beaver with no one else up at this time. I’ve been get­ting things done and get­ting a lot of work done.

This is great. I’m going to start get­ting naps dur­ing the day to get my body accus­tomed to nap­ping and then once that is done then I will shorten my sleep peri­ods at night.

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First Morning With Sleeptracker

I just woke up at 5:22 with my Sleep­tracker. I had set my alarm to 5:25 with a 40-minute win­dow. I think it’s inter­est­ing that it woke me 3 min­utes before.

And I thought it would buzz AND beep to wake me but it buzzed for a few sec­onds and then start beep­ing and I hit the but­ton and it was off.

I was very awake. My body was still a bit tired, but my mind was awake.

I began to think about how much I just LOVE sleep­ing. Oh man, do I love sleep­ing.

I have really become very angry at peo­ple who inter­fere with my sleep. I don’t think that this is going to be an issue going for­ward though.

My mind is very active when I woke so I’m ready to work.

I did make some cof­fee and I really hope that’s not going to become an issue. I know it’s not the health­i­est thing in the world for me so I’m more will­ing to give it up while I do polypha­sic sleep, but I haven’t even started doing that just yet.

I’ve been doing a men­tal gauge on what hours I will sleep and I need to write it out and post it on my com­puter. We’re buy­ing ink today for the printer so I can just print that out and put it in front of me.