Oversleeping and Undersleeping

Both are extremely bad and should be avoided at all costs. Well, the undersleeping and sleep deprivation are kind of necessary evils in order to adapt your body to the Uberman sleep schedule, but I was more specifically referring to trying to cut your nap times even shorter. I haven't been on this experiment for an incredibly long time, so I can't comment on the absolutes of either of these, but I can mention the experience I have with them and how they've affected me. This is most likely a topic that I'll return to later on after I've fully adapted, where I can give a better view of what happens when you are on the full cycle.

Relationship Rules - Sleepy Style

There are a few "rules" that I "choose" to follow when I'm with my girlfriend as appose to when I'm not. Obviously, manners and courtesy are among them, but there are a few other things that I do that concern sleep, or the lack thereof.

Getting to Sleep Quickly

This is something that I struggled with when I was sleeping normally (or what most of the world calls normally anyway). I would lay down in bed at night and let my mind wander. I would think about the current day, what tasks I accomplished, which ones I still needed to do, what I could have done differently. I think about the next day, what I've got planned, what homework I should have done instead of playing video games, whether or not I need to attend class in the morning. I then also think about random things, what should I get my mom for Mother's Day in 3 weeks? What's something special I can plan for my anniversary in 8 months? What would it be like if I could control fire, and had a pet velociraptor? What would life be like if I were a midget that could breathe underwater? You know, weird stuff...

Breakdown of my Day

I want to breakup my day and split it out into it's sleeping/non-sleeping components, and make a few comments on how I feel, how my body is responding to those periods and what I'm doing.

Why the Transition

I get asked this a lot, not by blog readers, as I don't believe I have any at this point, but by my friends and family. There is a, in my opinion, very good reason for wanting to do a transition period prior to jumping straight in, especially given my situation. I believe that this question is best answered in two parts.

Exercise and Sleep

Ask any trainer, and they'll say that the key to recovering from exercise is sleep and rest. The only problem, is that the amount of time my body will be at rest during the day will only be 2-3 hours, as appose to the 6-8 hours that people normally get. This was an issue brought up by Steve Pavlina in his blog, which is something that I'm going to have to figure out how to handle. (The blog linked is his resulting decision)

Transition Period - 5/12

This was originally posted on 5/12/2011 at 2:32 PM, but my phone seems to have deleted it from my blog, so I am reposting it here:


So, I think that I've decided to try to smoothly transition into the Uberman Sleep Schedule, rather than jump straight in head first. I had "accidentally" gotten into the habit of taking midday naps a week ago or so, during my final exams, which, at the time, was very bad for my studying, but I found that after a couple days, I started to really fall asleep quickly, and stay asleep until my alarm went off. I also had a really cool dream a time or two. I'm not entirely which stages of sleep you can dream in, but I know in the fourth stage, REM, you are supposed to have real vivid dreams and such, and when you wake up straight out of that stage, you have a very good chance of remembering them. Now, I'm not saying I made it to REM sleep, but I just find it kind of cool that I was able to dream, having only been asleep for 5-10 minutes...

Disruptive Naps

I'm already beginning to see how having to take naps during the day is going to complicate things for me. There are 3 main areas that concern me with switching to this sleep schedule. My family and friend interactions, my girlfriend and the summer vacation trip that I've got planned. These are not necessarily in any particular order of importance, because I didn't feel liked trying to edit the line on my phone to put them in a specific order, yet typing this has proven to be more of an effort than if I had just reordered the line to begin with. Though, that's how I tend to do things.

Too Busy To Nap

Well, yesterday was quite a busy day, full of problems for my transition into the Uberman Sleep Schedule.

Statement of Objective

So, I had a blog once before, and I made a few posts (like, 4), but I was terribly inconsistent. I think I made the first 2 posts within the same week, and I told myself: "You know, I'm going to start a blog about whatever comes to my head. Nothing interesting ever really happens, but I'll do what I can." Well, that didn't work, but now I AM doing something interesting this summer, and this blog post will be explaining exactly what that is.