01

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!

2

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

While My Watch Is Coming

I’ve had lots of thoughts about get­ting started on my new sleep sched­ule and using the Sleep­tracker to do this.

I just thought I’d let you know what I’ve been think­ing about. For example:

1. From every­thing I’ve read on other blogs (pri­mar­ily Steve Pavlina but I have also been read­ing from the orig­i­nal polypha­sic sleep mas­ter Pure­doxyk) is that I should not drink cof­fee or oth­er­wise ingest caf­feine. Uh-oh.
2. I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how I’m going to get sleep con­sid­er­ing that I am mar­ried and my wife and I are very accus­tomed to sleep­ing in bed together. If I sleep in the liv­ing room, will it feel like I’m doing it right? If I sleep in the bed, will my Sleep­tracker work right?
3. Will I be able to pull this thing off?

Only time will tell on all these fronts, but it should cer­tainly be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment none-the-less.

I am mak­ing a com­mit­ment now to write every day even though my watch is still on its way and is not expected to be here until Fri­day in two days.

I haven’t quite fig­ured out if I’m going to start nap­ping before I get the watch just to accus­tom my body to get­ting in some nappy time or not. Also, I’m really won­der­ing if it’s a good idea to go full-bore or to ease into the a new sleep sched­ule. I am think­ing I’d like to get accus­tomed to the Sleep­tracker and down­load some of the sleep data to see my sleep­ing pat­terns and use that to fig­ure out how to set it so that it will wake me up at the right time.

TTFN