“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison

Just like everyone else in the world, I’m “celebrating” the end of the year by reflecting on the ups and downs of the past twelve months. Unlike everyone else, however, I’m not sugarcoating anything — in the realm my own life, 2007 was a failure of catastrophic proportions. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

Projects:

• Dream Machine

Of the five projects on which I made any headway this year, the Dream Machine was probably the most successful… though that’s not a major feat given the competition. Beyond my original prediction that the project would take two weeks (it took six), I’ve also failed to attempt any sort of virtualization. Nowadays, I pretty much just stick with OS X. The laptop runs beautifully, but I’m simply not using it to its full potential. Lesson learned — Tweaking doesn’t need a purpose; it’s fun for its own sake. I’m itching to try out the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, though…

• Fitness

Though the Fitness project admittedly wasn’t the extent of my focus on health (more on that in a moment), it’s safe to say that I bombed it. I didn’t exactly get off to a “running” start (get it?), and I eventually got bored and stopped recording my progress. In the weeks following, I noticed a slowdown in improvement (and even some slight deterioration), to the point where I eventually decided that it wasn’t worth my time and I would have to re-work the project. Lesson learned — Health isn’t a project that can be tackled half-heartedly.

• Polyphasic Sleep

This project was a failure only in the sense that I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve — two hours of sleep, every night, for an indefinite period of time. I did, however, master such feats as napping around the clock (for varying lengths, averaging about 90 minutes), waking up drenched, and making my roommates think that I escaped from an asylum. Lesson learned — People have no idea what to do about others who don’t share their sleep habits.

• Resolutions 2007

Last year, I claimed that I would score 20 “productive” hours (whatever that means) each and every day. No, I wasn’t under the influence or playing a prank. In some aspects, I’ve achieved that, but what I’ve truly failed at doing is documenting my time or using any form of accountability. I definitely feel better about myself in this regard than I did a year ago, but I don’t really have anything to show for it. Lesson learned — When it comes to productivity, choose quality over quantity.

• Write, Write, Write!

Write, Write, Write! was never an “all-year” project, but it’s worth mentioning. I wasn’t at all frequent or consistent with publishing (especially during this fall); not usually for a lack of writing material, but for a (perceived ;)) lack of time. I wish to carve out a certain amount of time every day for Don’tASQ instead of waiting until I have “a free minute.” Lesson learned — A great thing about writing is that it can be done any hour of the day.

Areas of Focus:

• Finance

Despite having worked a full-time job for seven months (instead of taking classes), I’m arguably not much better off financially now than I was last year. However, there’s no question that I’ve learned a lot about finance from all of the little things — savvy co-workers and roommates studying business, and even the process of finding the right credit card. Lesson learned — Debt in America is bad news!

• Fitness

In addition to the Fitness project (briefly reviewed above), I’ve made some serious attempts to change my diet. While I’ve had a bit of success, my biggest problem is, once again, not documenting that progress. Lesson learned — Fitness and Finance are mutually exclusive (healthy food can be expensive!)

• Relationships

Compared to a year ago, when I lived alone, this year has been incredible from a social standpoint (living with several good friends). Hermitization is on the decline and procrastination is on the rise! On the romantic side, I decided earlier in the fall that the timing wasn’t right to pursue any romantic relationship; surprisingly enough, I’m glad I made this choice, and it’s actually been kind of a stress relief. Lesson learned — Okay, so maybe not everything in 2007 failed.

Happy New Year! 2008 will be your best one yet!

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I’d prefer to avoid writing constant updates about projects which are personal rather than global in nature (by “personal” I mean those which only directly involve me — currently, all of them). Don’tASQ is not about me but about us, and it’s important for readers to understand where that focus lies. Nevertheless, I also feel it’s important to keep you informed when I virtually disappear for a month without warning. In this roll-up, I address the status of all current and a couple of near-future projects — not to explain where I have been (though that will be answered), but to give you an idea of where we will be going. (more…)

I haven’t slept for a full cycle in three nights… and so far, I’m feeling just fine. This isn’t exactly polyphasic sleep again (yet), but I’m feeling that hyper-awareness state coming on.

What’s this all about? Just another experiment, mostly. I’m using a software-based alarm that plays music and resets itself every 23 minutes around the clock, kind of like an extended snooze button. Even if I sleep through once, it won’t be long until it attempts to arouse me again. And again. And again. I should mention that this music gradually builds up to full volume, and the only way to “hit the snooze” is to wake up and log into the computer; actually shutting the alarm off requires typing commands, something I’m not likely to be able to figure out in a zombie state.

Yes, it’s probably more complicated and geekish than it needs to be, but I thought the concept was worth a mention since I’d never heard of anyone else attempting it — a 20-25 minute snooze button that never gives up! The goal of this would be to first train oneself into sleeping entirely in naps before ever attempting deprivation. Assuming someone could adjust to taking 4-5 naps each day and enduring the constant reawakening at night, it would be extremely simple to cut out that extra sleep at night. The only problem I can foresee would be that simply awakening every 20 minutes wouldn’t be enough to bring someone completely out of sleep (hence immediately returning to a normal sleep cycle rather than “resetting” to a new nap). I guess the best way to test this would be an EEG, wouldn’t it? But where will I ever find one of those…

For the last three weeks, I’ve been deeply engaged in an experiment with a sleep pattern known as polyphasic sleep. What follows is an eclectic mix of my observations, hypotheses, and responses to questions about the adaptation.

The Last Week: I’ve slowly been discovering that my work schedule isn’t quite as fit for polynapping as I’d originally believed. This isn’t to say that I’m giving up the schedule; on the contrary, I’m trying even harder to make it work. (Did you honestly expect anything less? ) Rather than ducking out during lunch for a nap, I’ve been taking a two-hour nap from 3:30-5:30am, and otherwise following the schedule as normal (with the exception of a 6:30 nap right before work, during which I almost never actually sleep). The “core nap” appears to be pretty effective in allowing me to survive the workday - however, it may be short-lived. My supervisors have mentioned allowing me to dial in and work from home, which would probably allow me to return to the normal schedule, at least for a couple of days a week. I’ll post updates on this as I learn more.

Hydro-powered Alarms: I’ve received several questions about how exactly I’ve set up an alarm clock to dump water on my face. It’s really pretty straightforward; I use the Sonic Boom alarm clock with a vibrating disc. Instead of placing the disk under my pillow like the manufacturers would suggest, I like to place it above my head on the edge of a table, then attach a cup of water to the disc (and attach the disc cord to the table with a little slack, so the disc doesn’t smack me in the face). The alarm goes off, the disc vibrates and falls off of the table, and if I’m not quick enough to roll out of the way, then I’m reaching for a towel. If you try this at home, just know that you will spend a lot of time with wet sheets, even if you yourself avoid the torrent. It’s a fact of life. Get used to it.

Blog & Summary Updates (or lack thereof): From this point on, I will only post blog updates when something significant occurs, and I will no longer keep track of the days. To be honest, I’m not even sure what day I’m on now… 22? I stopped updating the summary page last week because I no longer feel that it’s helpful. I’m in a phase where I’m modifying the schedule almost every other day, so keeping track of my progress means little, because the definition of “progress” keeps changing. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the logs of the first two weeks; for now, they remain.

Does polyphasic sleep really work? A resounding YES! Only a few times over the last three weeks have I slept more than four hours in a 24-hour period, and I’m in no way feeling sleep-deprived. Once my schedule stabilizes, I’m confident that I’ll be able to reduce that time to three hours or less, and be a lot more consistent with it. I can’t comment yet on the cognitive benefits; I haven’t personally experienced them, but my adaptation has probably been more erratic than most people who have. Whether or not those benefits ever surface, the sheer amount of extra time I have is more than enough of a benefit to outweigh the drawbacks of sleeping polyphasically.

Have you noticed any physical weaknesses? None at all. One of my main concerns before adapting was whether I would be able to fight off all of the cold-season sickies, but so far, I haven’t had any problems (*knock on wood*). I’ve had cold symptoms off and on, but they haven’t been as severe or as long-lasting as I would expect. So either I’ve been fighting a cold pretty well, or the germs just haven’t been fighting back.

Would you recommend polyphasic sleep to me? That depends. Are you creative enough to make use of an extra six hours every day? Can you handle a zombification period of anywhere from 24 hours to 24 days? (Just kidding. It’s no more than a few days, usually.) Do you have a baby? If so, you’ll be sleeping just like it, only for shorter durations. Do you have a boss who will understand why you want to bring a pillow to work? In short, I would recommend polyphasic sleep to just about anyone who can manage it in their schedules. Actually, I’d recommend it to just about anyone, regardless of their schedules. The way I see it, there are very few conflicts that would be worth passing this up. Not that I’m biased.

It hasn’t been easy or convenient to find time to nap during my lunch break at work, but so far, I’ve managed to catch myself “microsleeping” on several occasions while sitting at my desk. In my last post, I mentioned having a lot of problems with falling asleep for several hours in the middle of the day. Obviously, I’m no longer doing that, but I’ve instead pushed this “core sleep” back until immediately after I get off of work, around 4:00pm. The good news is that I’ve been able to shorten it to about three hours… the bad news is that I haven’t gotten rid of it (yet)!

My goal as far as the core sleep is to get it to at least a controllable level. Right now, the most common scenario is that I’ll spontaneously decide, after waking up from a 25-minute nap, that I want another nap. I will set my alarms (usually only the auditory ones, not the water) another 25 minutes ahead… and inevitably sleep through them. I want to be assured that I can set an alarm and not sleep through it, whether it’s 25 minutes ahead or two hours ahead. This will probably become easier once I figure out how to slip in a nap during work. Until then, I may have to live with this core sleep, but I’m definitely going to attempt to shorten it. The most positive sign of adaptation I’ve seen is that, regardless of how exhausted I am when I lie down or how long I’m out, I almost always wake up feeling that I slept for a long time. There’s never that thought of, “But I just got into bed!” My brain has undoubtedly adapted to the general pattern of polyphasic sleep; the difficulties will now lie in controlling that pattern and reducing the time I’m asleep.

In other news, I’ve also decided to discontinue the Brain Power test until I’m fully adapted. I fear that the reason my performance has improved is not because of the adaptation, but simply because I’ve gotten used to the test itself. If, after returning to the test, my scores are still in the 140’s (or higher), we could probably guess that the adaptation has had some positive effect. Until then, you’ll just have to deal with my sleep-deprivation-spawned drivel.

Yikes! I think I’m regressing. Today was the fourth consecutive day that I’ve been in and out of naps for four to five hours in the middle of the day.

Day 9: I was suffering some pretty bad insomnia up until around 7:30am, at which time my brain decided to go on strike, and never really came back to work until that afternoon. To make matters worse, some things came up and I had to delay my 3:30 nap by two hours. Thankfully, my naps that evening were pretty helpful.

Day 10: Lying down for my 7:30am nap, I felt pretty great. Waking up at 12:30pm, I felt pretty great. So great, in fact, that I almost didn’t realize I’d been sleeping for five hours. I still don’t know how I managed to sleep two alarms (I slept on the couch and didn’t use the water, which probably wasn’t the best idea). At this point, I knew that something had really gone wrong with my adaptation. The rest of the day, of course, I slept well.

Day 11: I took an extra nap at 5:30am in hopes of preventing the inevitable midday grogginess, but it was to no avail. I spent much of the morning lying down for naps, waking up from naps, and immediately deciding that I wanted another nap. My brain finally snapped out of it at roughly 1-something.

So, what happened? I was doing so well there for awhile. Why the regression? I have no answers - only speculation. (It’s times like this when keeping detailed logs really comes in handy.)

On the morning of Day 6, I had an eight-hour oversleep. I seemed to recover well, so at the time, I dismissed it as a negligible mistake. On Day 7, I had a one-hour oversleep between 8:00 and 9:00 that morning. On Day 8, I experienced some grogginess and extra napping beginning around 8:30… and it’s been downhill since then. My theory is that the Day 6 oversleep caused me to kind of “reset” my cycle so that my brain considers 4:30-12:30 as “nighttime”. If you’re experienced in pulling all-nighters (as many college students are), you know that it’s relatively easy to stay up an hour or two past your “bedtime”, even though you may feel a bit sleepy. As the night carries on, though, it becomes more and more difficult to keep your eyes open (unless, of course, you’re drinking caffeine ) - and if you make the mistake of lying down for a “quick nap”, you may not wake up until lunchtime. Considering my recent patterns, this makes perfect sense. Even the insomnia bit can be understood if we realize that, being an “Owl”, I’m at my peak in the evening hours (say, midnight-4am on my current schedule).

The only way I can see to fix this is to essentially restart the adaptation, going through the sleep deprivation of Days 2 and 3 all over again. My body is already used to napping around the clock, so I don’t anticipate any difficulty (except, of course, with the all-of-the-willpower-has-been-drained-from-my-body-at-7:30am part ). I start working on Monday, which I could see working to either my benefit or detriment. If I start falling asleep on the job, we’ll have to make changes, but until then… Carry on!

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been having trouble sleeping during the evening, and I think that’s been causing some extra drowsiness during the early morning hours. Today, I intentionally took several short naps, spaced one hour apart, in a failed effort to dissipate this. I eventually decided to nap for over 90 minutes (the exact times are foggy in my mind), which seemed to do the trick. I think part of the reason for my insomnia was that, once I passed the “zombification” period, I just wasn’t tired enough to find the floor comfortable enough to sleep on. It worked well in preventing myself from oversleeping during Days 2 and 3, but during those days, I could have slept just about anywhere. The couch is inviting enough to put me to sleep even when I’m not exhausted, but not so cozy that I sleep through the alarms. So today, I officially upgraded to it, and the three naps I’ve taken since then have been extremely effective.

Unless something significant occurs (or I just feel like blabbing), this is going to be my last polynapping update for at least a few days. I’ll still keep updating the summary page, and I’ll probably write a descriptive summary at the end of each week, but there’s just not enough happening to warrant daily posts on this topic anymore. (Yes, that means you’ll get real content starting tomorrow. ;)) I feel I’m well past the physical adaptation; the next few weeks will be spent just getting used to the idea of actually living like this. I start a full-time job on Monday, so the real test will come then.

All in all, I don’t have much to report about the polynapping experiment for today. Unfortunately for you, I’m still alive. I’ve been experiencing a lot of grogginess in the morning hours recently, and I’m hoping that will subside. I’m also starting to notice a slight correlation between how well I sleep in a nap and how well I score on the Brain Test preceding it. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason as to why some naps are more beneficial than others, though.

I’m starting to see signs that this morning’s “disaster” actually had a positive effect - or at the very least, no effect at all. The first nap I took since then was at 2:30, during which I slept barely at all and scored a fairly mediocre result (compared to the past few days) on the Brain Power test. My next nap was not until 8:30 (since I had to put it off due to a meeting) and I did get some amount of sleep, but my score still wasn’t quite par. I took a third nap at 11:30 which seemed to finally awaken my brain from it’s slumber…

Performance: 137.78
Reaction Time: 494
Accuracy: 93
Concentration Level: 86

At first brush, you might think this a coincidence, but consider that on a monophasic schedule, many people (sometimes known as “Owls”, as opposed to morning people, who are “Larks”) don’t feel at their peak until late in the day, perhaps late afternoon or sometime in the evening. These people experience a dip in cognitive functioning during the morning hours. I am very much an “Owl”, so it makes sense that my brain would take several hours to get back up to speed after an eight-hour hibernation.

Of course, none of this is hard science. I could just be full of it and end up crashing by the time all of you wake up tomorrow, but it’s an educated guess, right?

As a random aside, due to my upcoming work schedule, I’ve shifted my nap times to 3:30-7:30-11:30. Yes, you’re all going to see me prove (or die trying) that polyphasic sleep is feasible even with a full-time job. Won’t that be fun?

For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t sleep at all during my 2:30am nap, nor did I get much rest during the subsequently added 3:30 nap. Being that I was now on Day 6 of polynapping, and fairly well-adjusted, I thought, “Hey, why not just sleep in my own bed at 4:30? I should be able to wake up just fine, and I’m likely to sleep better, too.” (I’ve been sleeping on either the couch or a makeshift bed on the floor, so that I don’t sleep too deeply.) I was only half right - unfortunately, the latter half was the correct one. I woke up shortly before 1:00, having slept over 8 hours, with no recollection whatsoever of any alarms going off. (I didn’t get to use the water, or that may have been different.)

At first, you may be inclined to think that I’ve completely screwed up the experiment, that I’ll have to start all over again from Day 0. You may be correct, but I’m actually holding out hope that this 8-hour “nap” has simply boosted my recovery period. I just took the Brain Power Test again, less than 30 minutes after waking up…

Performance: 141.54
Reaction Time: 527
Accuracy: 100
Concentration Level: 82

This is my highest score yet, with 100% accuracy to boot. While I was monophasic, 30 minutes after waking up would be about when I started to open my eyes. A study done by Claudio Stampi (I think it’s in his book Why We Nap) showed that polyphasic sleepers, after experiencing one night of monophasic sleep, perform better on mental tests - and keep performing better, even after returning to polynapping. Bloggers have reported similar findings. From Steve Pavlina, Days 12-18: “At 10:30pm that day, I was getting up from a regular nap … Instead of getting up immediately, I remained on the couch for a bit and unintentially[sic] drifted back to sleep (without having set an alarm). I didn’t wake up until 4am the next day, and it felt like I was in a deep, dreamless sleep … I woke up feeling normal, no better or worse than at any other time, and I was able to return to the polyphasic pattern after going back to a more proper nap schedule.”

In short, this oversleeping incident could go either way. I’m going to continue my regular nap schedule starting at 2:30, as if nothing happened, and will continue taking the Brain Power test every four hours thereafter. If my performance remains in the upper 130’s-140’s range (and I don’t oversleep again), then I’ll be ready to declare victory.