Haldo!

Today actually went rather well.  Physically, I feel just fine, although I am a slight bit foggy, it’s certainly nowhere near where I expected it would be.  Overall, I was just fine for today, and I nearly accomplished my goal with the morning- I took one nap immediately after waking up and one nap an hour after.  Hopefully, the trend will continue and over the next few days, I’ll be able to eliminate that extra sleep easily.  Not much new to report, really…..

Haldo, everyone,

Just a quick update – I’l post more tonight.  I’m not feeling nearly as groggy as I thought I would, but based on my tests above, higher brain functions may not be working as well.  The typing speed test was slow because I had to keep going back and correcting mistakes…I feel fine, though.  This morning, I did get a slight false start, but nowhere near as bad as yesterday.  I woke up from my core and had a quick nap, then another an hour later.  I actually fell asleep for both!  We’ll see if that helps things any.

Check again tonight for another, longer post!

-Netopalis

1:33 AM, Wednesday, December 17

Reaction time:  .238 – Interesting – a rather significant improvement, actually.

Typing Speed: 100 WPM – Par for the course.

Short-term Memory: 12 – Slightly better than normal, but not amazingly good.

Tetravex: 1:23 – Marginally improved

I’m actually feeling pretty sluggish right now, although my test scores don’t show it.  Yesterday morning, I wasn’t able to wake up without taking another nap immediately, then another…I ended up taking 2 20-minute naps after my 3 hour core, and I think that I need to set a more realistic goal for tomorrow.  Perhaps just one nap.  We’ll see.  Regardless, it is an improvement – a little under 4 hours as compared to the previous day’s 6 and the day before that’s 7.

During the day today, I actually felt really fantastic.  Admittedly, the latest grade reports may have had something to do with that, but I felt physically pretty good as well.  Even before I got those reports, I was doing very well, and I actually set a new personal record at work for the number of cases I processed today.  (I work as a paralegal and am currently doing some legal secretary stuff – the office is in a bit of a crunch time on billing.  I don’t mind, though – it’s good to know how the secretaries operate, because once I actually finish law school, I’ll probably have a few working for me and I’ll better know how they go about their jobs…)

Back to Polyphasic, though, this is encouraging.  I feel like my current schedule is actually fairly realistic and would give me quite a bit of extra time during law school.  After Christmas, assuming that all continues to go well with this schedule, I may try Uberman again, or perhaps a fascinating new twist on Uberman that was hinted at today on the Google groups.

Right now, aside from the core sleep issues, I do have two major problems, though.

1) I’m quickly running out of things to do.  While I enjoy video games, I’m not one to binge on them unless I get really, really into it and I’m not, currently.  Likewise, the same goes for books or whatever.  I’ve been watching a lot of videos on Hulu, but there’s only so much video that you can watch in a day without getting tired of it.

2) I’m still not getting any serious sleep in the naps.  For both of the regular naps that I took (one, unfortunately, had to be in a car and I wasn’t able to get the full nap in), I was able to achieve that stage-1 tingly feeling that I described yesterday.  I think that if I can learn to get relaxed enough going into a nap, I’ll be able to succeed much more quickly.  I think that will also open the doors to trying more stringent schedules.  We’ll see.

As a side note, my eyes are  horribly dry during the evenings, and the eye drops don’t seem to help after a certain point.  That’s a bit concerning, but it’s not a major worry.  I tend to get dry eyes anyway, and I think that they’ll clear up in the future.

I’ve noticed that I tend to be a lot calmer on this schedule, at least I have been so far.  I don’t think it’s due to a lack of energy, because I have more than enough energy to get through the day and do things well – maybe it’s due to a lack of stress due to having more unwinding time, I don’t know.  It’s interesting, though.

I’m expecting tomorrow to be pretty rough.  I hope that I’m wrong, and it’s entirely possible…But at the same time, I know that I’m already tired and that I’ve not gotten much out of my naps today.

I’ll let everyone know what happens – the next two hours are gonna be pretty tough – I feel droopy already, but I think I should at least manage until 4 PM.  I may take an additional nap here, though.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. – I just noticed that the comments were accidentally set to moderation.  I’ve turned moderation off, so please, feel free to comment as much as you’d like!  I encourage comments, criticisms, suggestions, ideas or just plain tomfoolery in the comments.

Current results:

Reaction time: .25 (Oddly enough, though, my 5 scores were wildly disparate – this may point to attention problems)

Typing speed  – 100 WPM (No mistakes, though, which was cool)

Simon – Chain of 10 – fairly average

Tetravex – 1:21 (fairly easy puzzle)

I feel surprisingly good.  I had a bit of a false start with Uberman – I may try it again later on during the break, but I don’t really feel that I’m mentally prepared for  a schedule that demanding right now.  As such, I’ve reverted to an Everyman schedule that I did pretty well with previously.  This is a 4-7 Core nap, with standard naps at 1, 6 and 11.  Admittedly, I’ve not been 100% stringent on this schedule, and haven’t actually slept for any of the naps (Although I do think that I entered stage 1 sleep a few times, with the tingly sensation that people often feel when starting this).  I am optimistic, though – I feel great, even though I haven’t had much sleep. I am gradually reducing the core nap over the next few days – I started out just cutting down on my normal sleep a bit, and tonight is going to be the change to a stringent 3 hour mark.  Here’s hoping that it works out!  I am throwing in extra naps here and there to help compensate for the lack of *good* naps and the general difficulty of transitioning, and I think that it is helping.

While transitioning, I’ve been playing Tales of Symphonia on the GC and reading House of Leaves (Which I highly recommend!)    If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments section and I’ll be happy to address them!

-Netopalis

During the adaptation period, I will be attempting to take a scientific approach to determining how well I am doing.  After waking, in each phase I will be doing a number of tests to check my progress.  Below are the tests and my average monophasic times:

Reaction time – .25 sec, tested by http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/rttest01.html

Typing speed – 90-120 wpm (although it should be noted that, on my monophasic schedule, my typing speed greatly slows when I first wake up) http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php

Short term memory – 9-10 points using a game of Simon

Tetravex Puzzle – 1:30  (included in my distribution of Linux, using a 3X3 grid)

Long-term memory – At the end of my 1 AM nap, I will memorize a list of 10 random words and see how many I can remember on the next day.  I have yet to test this on myself, but will be doing that tomorrow.

If you have any other tests that you can recommend for me, let me know!

A bit about myself, incidentally – I am 21 years old and a senior in college.  Next semester, I will be taking only 14 hours worth of classes and working part-time as a paralegal.  I am hoping to adapt to a polyphasic schedule this semester to make work in law school significantly easier, and to hopefully silence a sleeping disorder that I have.  On seemingly random nights, I will wake up and start screaming and running around the house – as I am moving out on my own next year, this could be dangerous.  My thought is that I really won’t have time to do that in the 20 minutes that I would be sleeping, but that is of course dependent upon adapting to the schedule and, after adaptation, showing comparable scores on the above tests.

Additionally, I will be working on something that I’ve long wanted to do.  I call it the Renaissance Man project.  During this, I am hoping to read books from every field of inquiry, in order to gain knowledge greater than just general knowledge, but not quite an expertise.  I’ll be posting on here as I read, although it will be somewhat incoherent early on, I imagine.  After a few days, I hope to read for at least 15 minutes per phase, ideally reading a total of 60-90 pages per day on the project.  To ensure comprehension, I’ll also write myself out tests and quiz myself in the subsequent phase.

Factors that may affect my adaptation:

The aforementioned night terrors

Currently, I do not smoke, drink and am cutting my caffeine out this week.

I am not a vegetarian, although some people have argued that this does help adaptation.

I usually do fairly well on little sleep, although if left to my own devices, I will sleep for long hours.

I will be testing what I call an associative song – this is a theory that I’ve had for some time.  Basically, every time that I nap, first I will listen to this song, with the hopes of associating it in my subconscious with taking naps, making me fall asleep more quickly afterwards.

I think that’s everything.  I will be cutting out the caffeine and preparing to undertake the experiment – I start on Saturday and will go from there.

If you have any suggestions or comments, would like to know more about me or would like to suggest another test for me to run on myself, please let me know in the comments!

-Netopalis