Compared to my previous attempt at “abstaining” from something where a friend Paul and I just ate fish / fruit / water for about 20+ days (we broke before 30 days), I can actually say this has been easier, less work on my part. The thing I have noticed from these type of trials though is that it really gives you a lot of perspective on life, and a lot of discipline towards many other things. I believe that in my journey now to find discipline, god has been sending me answers…and this being one of the big ones. It’s actually funny now to think about it. For a long time I was searching for energy and motivation, and I was finally given the answer through me quitting my life as a Cutco salesman and starting into the world of online business….programming, blogging, etc..

Now that I am very happy and content that I have found my calling, or at least jumped on the train and am exploring the world of it, I have found that my search has now turned to that of finding great discipline. As I have found, once motivation and energy are discovered it does require some great amount of discipline to carry out our plans of action. So, in that search I have found many resources for helping me. So far I have discovered the power of recording everything I do and evaluating it (I’ll write a blog on this soon). This has helped me really discover where I am at, and what I need to work on. Knowing this key information is probably one of, if not THE most important steps in the process to fixing anything I believe.

Now I have discovered just how powerful fasting can be to QUICKLY developing that discipline muscle. It’s like super training in the gym…or like as if I were just pushing myself to the limit every single day at the gym. I guess that metaphor applies to what TYPE of fast I am on, since I consider this a bit easier than maxing out each day at the gym. Anyway, my point is that if you really want something, and you commit to it’s discovery then god, or the universe, or whatever you believe in will give you that answer. It may not always be immediately clear, and you may even find it without even realizing until months later, (like me) but the point is you WILL find it.

Yesterday was pretty rough on my stomach. It hurt quite a bit, but not TOO much. It was bearable, just a bit uncomfortable. I did some more research on fasting and after reading up on some articles I decided that I think I want to do a combination of water and juice, and try to extend myself to 30 days. This may have been very difficult with a pure water fast, but from what I read if I do a 30 day juice fast I will get very amazing results anyway. I imagine if I do this with a few days of just water also I will get even better results. I went to the store and got some pure Orange juice (not from concentrate) and drank it, I felt fantastic! I actually felt full, and then IMMEDIATELY got a rush of great energy and felt super happy and productive. Also I had to pee like 5 times in about 3 hours, I probably drank too much…maybe? I don’t know. I drank what I felt was right so I am not worried about it, plus it’s orange juice so that cannot be bad

Let’s see…also I have noticed that this really nasty abscess that I had on my gum is now pretty much no longer there as far as I can tell and I’ve had it for several months and it just sits there and fills with puss and busts every day (sorry for that visual). I am glad to be rid of that! Also I usually have some tooth pain throughout the day on one of my two cavities, however I have not felt any discomfort dentally at all. You could argue that this is because I haven’t been chewing on anything…but who knows, perhaps my body is already healing itself of these infections. I also have Myoclonic epilepsy (small seizures lasting no longer than 1 second, but I can have hundreds in a day) and usually have a few seizures each week, however this week I have only had one VERY small seizure that I can recall. This is a huge improvement. I am hoping that after 30 days I won’t even remember that I ever had epilepsy. Perhaps I can start taking showers standing up again

My breath has been pretty damn nasty too, and my mouth has been coated with some thick mucus. My face also seems to be a bit greasier / bumpy and I have a red trail around my sinuses. This is all to be expected, as I have read from other people’s accounts that this is simply a sign of the body expelling toxins through any means available to it and since the skin is the largest organ…well yea. Also EVERYONE reports really bad breath on a fast, I suppose that the mouth is a pretty big way to expel things for our body.

Umm, I haven’t had to go #2 since the first day of the fast…which seems a bit odd. I figured I would at least be letting something go. I may have to try giving myself an enema as was suggested by a large number of articles on fasting that I read, as I imagine my insides need a good cleaning out. I actually looked for one in Wal-Mart the other day but was not able to find one. I’ll be sure to try a pharmacy next time I go to town.

Well those are my observations so far. From the way I feel right now, I would recommend that everybody go on a fast because I simply feel on top of the world. Perhaps a 30 day water fast is not for everyone, but I would say try something else like fasting from TV or fasting from…something. I will be sure to write more as I go along…

Good luck to you all on your path to discovery! If you enjoyed this post, be sure to send it to your friends and Digg / Stumble / etc…

What I have come to realize after oversleeping yet again last night… is that my single biggest mistake was the fact that I decided to allow myself to take extra naps during the 1-9AM period where I am usually super tired. I thought it would be okay, since I had read on stevepavlina’s personal account of it that he would sometimes get in an extra nap during his 1am – 5am period.

I didn’t really think about it until now, but I realized that virtually every time that I have overslept has been during this “extra” nap that I decide to take. In a lot of cases because I allow myself to simply fall back asleep without resetting the alarm or something similar to this. I have a renewed desire to get this done now, as I am tired of losing so much time. February wasn’t a very productive month for me, and I plan to make some big changes starting now. I assume the first week will be quite dreadful, due to my fasting AND trying to adapt to polyphasic sleep completely, however I have made the decision to do it whatever it takes.

I will no longer allow myself to take an extra nap just because I am extremely tired. When I say extremely tired, I do it mean it too. It gets to a point where I am literally falling over in my chair. My best advice for anybody attempting polyphasic sleep, or anything mentally and emotionally challenging like this, is to NOT allow yourself to get by with exceptions to the rule like I have done for myself. Lesson learned.

Technorati Tags: Polyphasic, sleep, lesson, nap, discipline, adaptation

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!

Well, for the polyphasic sleep…I haven’t been doing it lately. I had a few oversleeps and stuff so I recently decided to try and go back to normal sleep and then start over. I think this may have been a mistake…now I feel like I am getting WAY too much sleep and I pretty much feel like crap. I also keep getting really tired ANYWAYS and end up taking another nap but since I was trying to go normal they end up being like 3-5 hours long. This is very bad and I wake up feeling much much worse than before. Today, as of writing this I will definitely go back with polyphasic sleep and STICK with it. I am considering writing an alarm clock application that will play on my computer to help wake me up so I don’t have to keep setting my alarm clock each 4 hours.

Now, for increasing my productivity…I’ve tried a few things, but most recently I believe I have found something which will help me out a lot. Well, for 10 days I kept a detailed log of EVERYTHING that I did every 15-30 minutes. This really gave me insight into where all of my time was being spent. I have set up some things to help keep myself focused now. Here is what I have done and so far it has been working for the last 2 days:

• I will work ATLEAST 8 hours a day (whether on freelance, or on my game)
• I will keep a “To-Do Later” list of all of the blogs, articles, etc… that come up during the day that I feel the need to spend time on. If I still feel I should check it out later, AFTER all of my work is done…then I will get to it.
• I will take forced breaks / lunches during my 8+ hour period of working…just to keep myself at peak performance.

Well, that’s about it really. Sometimes the best solution is the simple one. So far this has kept me in check, we will see in about a week from now how this works out.

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.

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.

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.

I am going to use the rest of the month of Feb as sort of a “30 day” trial. They say it takes 21 days to break a habit, so in order to cut down on my time wasting I am going to completely cut out all games, forums, online articles, etc… from my day. This is actually going to be pretty hard, as I have come very used to going through all of these things each day. Basically, I am going to act as if I do not have the internet…save for posting to my website here.

That leaves me with a clear plan for the day. I really tend to suck at following schedules, and I’ve tried many many different time management ideas and planners. Really, the thing has works best for me is to just have a clear goal of what I want to get done…and break it down to as many smaller parts as possible, and then just start knocking out each thing.

In broad terms, what I would like to do over the month of Feb is:

• Finish my next game
• Write several articles for this website
• Get fully adapted to polyphasic sleep
• Get into the routine of running each morning

I’ll leave out how I break those things into smaller parts, as that tends to change as I get through it.

I’ll be sure to keep updates on this in my daily log.

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.

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.