Alright, I have been considering making a pretty big switch in my health lately. The polyphasic sleep was one thing to help me increase my energy and time. I actually discovered something today, and that is that my naps should only be 20 minutes, not 30. I’ve only done this twice so far but each time I have woken up feeling GREAT and actually feel myself coming right out of the dream as I wake up. This is even more of a sign that 20 minutes is my optimal number.

Now, I am starting to get the polyphasic sleep thing hammered down…it is time to begin focusing on other areas of my health such as fitness and what I am eating. It has been hard for me to get myself to go out and start running again lately, in large part due to some lack of discipline I think. Also, I haven’t really had the BEST diet going on nor the worst…but I would like to do what is best for my body. After doing much research, I have decided that a whole foods diet consisting of basically nothing but fruits and veggies, and a little bit of nuts will be the best diet for me.

A switch in diet like this will be hard, due to emotional and social conditioning that makes me just want to eat lots of junky stuff like ice cream…which I am munching on currently. I found the perfect solution to help me ease into this new lifestyle today while browsing the stevepavlina.com forums. Fasting. I’ve heard about it before, my friend Paul does it every month and has reported some interesting results…although he has a problem going through with it lately and also doesn’t come off of it like people suggest. I will attempt to do 24 days of nothing but drinking water and possibly a little bit of salt water to help me with my electrolytes. I also read something about giving myself an enema every day. I may decide to do that, not sure.

This will help my body to detox all of the nasty and wasteful things that are residing inside, as well as help to break me of all of my emotional attachments to food that does not satisfy my true needs. Once I come off of this fast, I will follow a whole foods diet. I have a cheap blender right now, but I may invest into getting a VitaMix blender which I have heard some really good things about.

Anyways, I will be sure to post details on my progress here so that anyone in the future may learn from my experience. Wish me luck!

It has been a while since I last posted anything about polyphasic sleep or my attempt at increasing productivity. Well, there has been a few things going on but let me just sum it up.

Well, for the polyphasic sleep… Read the rest of this entry »

Today went well, I didn’t feel like a zombie. What I did was take an extra 2 naps during the 1-5am. This is what Steve Pavlina had to do, so I’ll just keep to it until I get more fully adapted and able to wean myself off of it.

After waking from my naps I didn’t immediately feel that great, I was pretty tired and felt like going back to sleep. Once I got up and got going I felt perfect fine however, (which is actually how I feel after waking up each morning during normal sleep anyway lol)

Some people say that they wake up feeling fully refreshed and energetic but I haven’t gotten that yet. So far I’d say I am not really getting any benefit from Polyphasic sleep, while at the same time I have to say that I’m not actually doing it all completely right (lots of oversleeping etc…) so I still can’t give accurate thoughts on it. It’s getting a lot easier as I go on though, so things should start to work out a bit better by next week for sure.

Arg, I completely passed out this morning after attempting to keep myself awake. I didn’t even wake up until 9:30am. It was my fault however, because I was trying to sit at my desk and do some work. I will really have to get up and move around a bit during the 1-5am period until I am adapted. If I keep this up it will take me forever to get fully adapted haha. Anyway, here we go again!

I skipped the 1pm and 5pm naps since I was really not tired at all. I had a good 9pm nap. I’ll be sure to work very hard at staying up during the 1am-5am here in a bit.

Day 10:

Today didn’t really go well for polyphasic sleep. I suppose I felt a bit off still from what had happened and ended up sleeping through when I got to my 1:00am nap (the part that is the hardest). I did try to do the naps that day, but only fell asleep during 1 of them because of the fact that I had slept so long already.

Day 11:

I woke up today at around 7:30 (after going to bed at 1am) and I feel pretty much like I slept WAY too long (you know the feeling you get when you oversleep) I really wish I would have just woke up, but hey you can’t change the past. The last 10 days were really up and down for the sleep experiment, but I think I made some good progress.

I plan to really get this thing down these next 10 days and really get it to work. I lied down for every nap today, however I did not fall asleep…I just wasn’t tired. I also realize that I have a lot of things racing through my mind. I may need to sit in silence for a while and quiet my mind. I haven’t been meditating lately, not sure why…but I think it is starting to show.

Alright, now that I have all of this extra time by doing polyphasic sleep, I need to find a way to increase how productive I am. It seems that lately I have slipped into not really doing much of anything all day with my time. I’ll spend a lot of time reading forums and articles or playing games but never actually getting anything done. One thing that I know isn’t helping, is the fact that I don’t really have a clear plan or any objectives for what I would like to accomplish for the day. Also, the fact that I allow myself to get distracted with so many time wasters isn’t helping either. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow this is just extremely frustrating. It’s 7:41, I overslept BIG time on my 1am nap. I really have to figure out why I cannot hear my alarms sometimes. I honestly don’t know what to do, my alarm stops ringing after about 1 minute…and I can’t help that. I’ll have to find me a new alarm that doesn’t stop going off. Damn. Well, all I can do is keep trying. I just hope that this doesn’t make things take EVEN longer for me.

I can say that this has so far been very challenging, but a little failure isn’t going to stop me. I’m just going to put even more effort into making sure this all works out. At least I have learned a few things.

End of Day Roundup

Man today was a crazy day. Besides sleeping in, when I went running I started to get real itchy, and then I started breaking out in hives on every part of my body. I was swelling up pretty bad even on the inside of my lips. My mom works in the ER and sometimes tells me about people who get hives like that and their airway gets swollen shut and they die, so I went to the ER as soon as I could.

They really couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, so they gave me a bunch of Benadryl and basically made me stay there for a few hours and sleep (meh). When I was released they put some more in me which pretty much knocked me out for a while when I got home. Overall I’d say today was pretty bad for the experiment, but I will be picking everything back up tomorrow…especially since I am starting to experience REM more and more frequently.

Once again, no problems during the dreaded 1-5am period. In fact I actually recalled having a dream during the nap, (which is a good thing) I just don’t recall anything that happened during it, (working on that)

2:20pm

Oh goody, some progress! I woke up from my 1pm feeling better than I have since any naps so far…and it’s the first time I can actually recall any of my dream. The other times I only remember that I had one, but don’t remember any of it. Perhaps what was happening is before I was just BARELY going into REM sleep and so by the time the alarm went off I didn’t actually have a dream per say, but now I am getting more REM. I will say that the dream was rather short, and it got cut off by my alarm.

I feel even better about this experience, because it does show that although I am adapting…that just because I have entered REM it doesn’t mean I am completely ready yet, because I am most likely not switching to REM right now. That could explain why I am slightly okay, but not completely refreshed each nap. It would also explain why I felt like hell during 1-5am and ended up oversleeping for 1-2 hours twice during the past few days. I suppose my body just forced me to catch a little bit of extra REM to get up to speed.

Let’s hope this trend continues!

9:30pm

I wasn’t able to fall asleep during this nap, I think because I drank a Red Bull earlier. Not a smart choice. Hope it doesn’t mess anything up later.

Okay, everything worked out great today! I did not have any problem during the 1-5am period, besides feeling a bit drowsy. Overall there was not too much to say about today, just the usual.

5pm nap:

Well crap, I somehow slept through all of my alarms on this nap. That was totally unexpected. I slept until 7:30pm. Not good. Oh well, I’m only human. On the other hand, I have a funny story! I was sort of getting up and doing a few things..and at about 7:55 I get a call from my mom. At this point I totally freaked out because (for some reason) I thought it was 7:55am instead of pm. The reason this would normally be a problem is that I usually take my sisters to school in the morning, and so I figured my mom was calling to figure out why they weren’t up yet. I ran into my sisters room and flicked on the light. WTF! SHES NOT HERE! So now I am freaking out because my sisters aren’t home. I don’t know what is going on! Oh hell, I realize it’s just 7:55pm. Haha, the days and nights just meld together now.

Anyway, I am slowly feeling more normal. Hopefully I don’t sleep through on any of the next few days. Also I still haven’t really felt the whole “rejuvenated” feeling yet that some people report having after a nap. Every time I wake up it takes me a couple of minutes to get adjusted. I usually get up and stretch and jump around a little bit to get myself fully awake.

1:30 – 5:00 am:

This had to be an absolute nightmare. I could not stay awake no matter how hard I tried. I took 3 extra 30 min naps here just so I could pass the time…even the time I was awake was almost painful, I tried moving around but I was so tired that my head hurts. This sucks bad. I tried to just sit in a chair and veg for a while but my head ended up falling over and I slept for about 10 minutes in a very painful position now my neck hurts. I wonder if I am just not getting any REM at all during this time. I don’t recall having dreams at all.

Rest of the day:

Well the rest of the day was fine. I felt pretty much normal. I also had a dream during my 5pm nap, although before I could write it down I had already forgot it. *shrug*

Final note:

Okay, time to get prepared. I am about to go into the hellacious 1 – 5am stretch. Can I make it? Omg I hope I am more adapted this time, I don’t want to go through another stretch like this morning. Well, I’ll just have to keep myself active and away from the computer if it happens again. I’ll try doing some exercising and I’ll jot down thoughts on my whiteboard until it is over with.