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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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I Got My Watch!

I got my watch today! I’ve read it and have set my alarm for 5:25 (5 min­utes before my wife gets up) and I have set it with a 40 minute win­dow (which allows the watch to wake me dur­ing that time if I am in an ideal sleep stage to wake up).

I’m not sure if this is true with all the mod­els of the watch, but to get the watch to start record­ing your sleep (for down­load to a Win­dows com­puter via USB) you must tell it at what time you will be asleep. They set it up so that you can just press the lower left but­ton on the watch down for 3 full sec­onds to tell the watch that in 30 min­utes you will be out for the night. I sus­pect that when I’m tak­ing short sleep spells that I will have to make this 5 or 10 min­utes after I get into sleep posi­tion because in 30 min­utes I’ll be done with my sleep spell.

The watch is big­gish and has an accelerom­e­ter inside which mea­sures fid­get­ing fre­quency which is an indi­ca­tor of my sleep stage. If I fid­get a lot then I’m closer to being fully awake. If I don’t fid­get or hardly fid­get at all, then I’m in deep sleep and hope­fully in REM sleep.

But the watch is really not much big­ger than my medium-sized Iron­man watch. The other day when I bought my Iron­man watch (for inter­val tim­ing because I use the Gal­loway method of marathon train­ing for work­ing out), they had a big­ger Iron­man watch which was big­ger than my Sleeptracker.

Any­way, I’m delighted to let you know how things go in the morning.

By the way, I set the alarm to vibrate and beep and I think that by the next day I’ll be able to just put it on vibrate to wake me.

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What Are You Waiting For?

I’m actu­ally wait­ing for my Sleep­tracker watch! I’m look­ing for­ward to test­ing out my the­o­ries on this!

UPDATE: My watch is on its way!! Woohoo!!