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.




5:00-5:30 AM

Right now, I wake up at 5:30, to simulate waking up from my 5 AM nap, but I would really like to work that back a little to shorten my nightly sleep period.

Waking up tends to be relatively easy, and sometimes effortless, as my body wakes me up before my alarm and I just roll out of bed. If my alarm dies go off, I can usually work myself out of bed by the time my second alarm goes off. Not the best, but I've never accidentally fallen back asleep... yet.

For the first few days during this time period, I used to go out to McDonald's and order breakfast. This would get my body moving and my mind moving, as I'd use both to drive to and from McDonald's. I never really felt tired enough that I felt unsafe to drive, so that hasn't been an issue thankfully. However, I quickly came to realize that despite how delicious bacon, egg and cheese biscuits tasted, they were probably not the best breakfast, especially since I'm making it a point to eat healthier to improve my chances with this experiment. So, I've decided to switch from McDonald's to having a fruit/veggie breakfast, which includes a handful of grapes, a banana, 3-4 carrots (the full sized ones, not the precuts) and sometimes I'll have a fruit cup. I also want to try to have a cup of milk or get some juice to go along with breakfast.

After collecting my food, I'll crank up my computer and hop on for a few games of League of Legends. The beautiful thing about this game is that it's instant PVP action keeps me completely mentally engaged, and it's free to play, which keeps my wallet happy too! Click the link, signup and give it a try, you'll love it. It's a game that's based on Defence of the Ancients (or more popularly known as DotA), which is a custom map for the game Warcraft 3 by Blizzard (they're the WoW creators). Because of the limitations of WC3, the DotA creators split away and formed their own company and game. Anyway, if you're interested, check it out and find me in game as MarkField13. The point is that this game keeps me awake for most of my morning, and I have a feeling it's what I'll be using all the time while trying to fully adapt.

Because I usually get up and get active as soon as possible, I generally don't feel tired again until 9 approaches. However, these past few mornings spent at my girlfriend's dorm, unable to play LoL (League of Legends), have been a bit more tiring than those where I immediate hop in a game. Instead, I've found myself working on my blog or responding to forum posts about random nonsensical things. Because these activities require less thought, I have been feeling a bit more tired than usual, but this could also be because my naps have not been nearly as restful as they are back in the comfort of my apartment. With a roommate and a very social atmosphere, the room is pretty noisy constantly. This is good and bad: bad because my quality of nap has declined, but good because I need to be able to sleep through anything if its time for my nap, with the exception of my alarm clock.


9:00 AM

It's now time for my nap, and I've just begun feeling tired again. It usually isn't up until now that I start feeling exhausted. This nap is usually quite a relief and is highly looked forward to. It's also the nap that I'm most prone to oversleep on, so I've got to be extra careful.


9:30 AM

I (hopefully) awaken from my nap feeling slightly refreshed, but still very much tired. The first thing I usually say when my feet hit the floor is that 1 PM can't come soon enough. At this point, I'm just exhausted, worn out and don't really feel like doing anything. Thankfully though, this is when most places are open by, so I usually try to get an early start on the things I need to do for the day. This includes stuff like picking up parts for my car that was, until recently, broken, or doing research on how to fix it myself, which didn't turn out too bad really.

I will also pick up some grapes or a carrot to snack on as soon as I wake up, just to give me something to do really. When I'm not out running errands, I will usually be playing more LoL.

As I figure out stuff to keep my mind and body at least somewhat active, I slowly begin to really wake up and lose my tiredness. This usually doesn't occur until around 11 or 11:30. By this time, I'm starting to feel hungry, another reason for the snack earlier, and much less tired and sleepy.


1:00 PM

By the time 1 rolls around, I feel fine, but as it approaches 2 or so, I begin to get a little nudging feeling. It's not so much that I feel tired, but it's some sort of pushing feeling, some invisible force suggesting sleep. I think it comes later than 1 in part because I haven't been completely strict with my sleep times, as is evident by my Twitter feed (@ChrisOrwin). I know that this will become extremely important once I try to adapt to the full Uberman sleep schedule, but until then, I figure this is just a trial run, and the main goal is to get myself comfortable with napping and trying to take advantage of my short sleep times. Once I fully convert, I will be very strict with my timing, and I will probably transition into that as well, where I start the strict times a few days before I make the leap.


1:30 PM

I usually wake up from this nap feeling pretty refreshed and awake. There have been very few times that I wake up and I'm groggy or tired in any way. Also, depending on when I fall asleep, it feels more or less relaxing. The later I wait, the more relaxed feeling I get, sort of like being really hungry and sinking your teeth into something deliciously juicy. When I finally get to lay down in bed and close my eyes, it feels like I'm offloading a huge amount of stress, or maybe that's weight, and it's just a great feeling!

At this point in my day, I'll usually start by grabbing lunch, as I'd prefer to wait a tad later than eat right before a nap. Supposedly, the extra work your body has to do for digesting food can have an affect on how well you sleep, and considering I'll be sleeping very little, I'd like to maximize the efficiency of the sleep I am getting anyway I can. I have a feeling that my eating habits will be a little off for a while, until I adjust to a more rounded out schedule. My lunch is usually a light to normal sized lunch. I've never been a real big fan of lunch; I love me some breakfast, and dinner just makes sense because that's when I'm hungry again.

This is the "main" part of my day I believe.  This is the most "day" part anyway. I'm usually out and about, running errands, hanging out with family or what have you. I'm usually not tired or sleepy in the least, and everything just feels fine.


5:00 PM

By this time, I start to get that nudging feeling again, and I can start to tell its time for a nap. Actually, more realistically, I can tell when I've missed a nap more so than when I'm supposed to lay down to take one. Either way, this really isn't a nap that I look forward to, nor is it one that I dread. Its kind of just here to make sure I get sleep at some point.


5:30 PM

I usually wake up feeling refreshed and renewed. There is no groggy feeling or any tiredness to speak of.  This is what I would consider to be the start of my night, which usually begins with dinner. I think that I'll try to push back dinner one cycle so that I'll have a meal every other waking period, with snacks on the off periods. Hopefully this will keep me fed well enough that I have energy to burn and am not starving all the time.

After my meal, there isn't much that I can do. Most of the shops are closed, and whatever light there is, is quickly fading. This time is usually spent playing LoL with my brothers after they've eaten dinner. If I'm not playing with them, then I'm off by myself in some match with random people.

There really isn't much to say for this time period. I try to keep myself entertained and engaged with whatever I can. That doesn't necessarily mean that I need to be engaged, as I don't feel tired or sleepy, but I just want something to do.


9:00 PM

I really don't feel all that tired by this time of night, unless my naps have been unusually horrible. Anything that disrupts my nap, such as a phone call, or even something like my room being too hot to comfortably sleep, can have an effect on how my 9 PM nap goes. The worse the day, the worse the night, generally speaking.


9:30 PM

This entire period is pretty similar to my 5:30 - 9 PM schedule. I'll usually grab a snack and a glass of milk, then turn on my computer and play some video games. This is my evening period, which is normally spent on the computer right up until bed time. I think that the video games help to keep me distracted from 1 AM as it rolls around and how tired I become as it does. This, however, causes a bit of a problem.

On one hand, my games keep me mentally focused and engaged to what I'm doing. This effectively removes my tiredness, as I am unable to concentrate on how sleep I am when I'm too busy beating everyone down online. The excitement and/or rage that I experience has a somewhat lasting effect on me, which is cool to help me during the downtime between matches, but it makes falling asleep that much more difficult when the time comes around. After a particularly exciting match, when I lay down and close my eyes, the only thing I can see is a replay of my match, as well as other scenarios and how I should handle them next time.

To help counter this, I've setup a rule that I plan to stick to for the duration of this experiment, although it may be tweaked later on. The general idea is that I want to prevent myself from 2 things:
1) I don't want to push back my nap due to a video game - that's just lame!
2) I don't want to be playing games right up until I have to take a nap - that's just distracting!

The idea is that I have to have at least a full hour before my intended nap time in order for me to "have enough time" to play another round of LoL. Most matches take anywhere from 30-50 minutes, but can occasionally stretch out to 70-80 minutes (but the long ones are pretty rare). 45 minutes is pretty average. By that time you'll know whether or not you're going to win or lose, and a surrender is usually called by the losing team to shorten the length of the game. This will give me anywhere from 10-40 minutes of downtime, during which I can do any number of relaxing and calming things. I will usually type out a few paragraphs of my latest blog post, but I've recently picked up Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card and will start reading that. I've read Ender's Game, which was absolutely amazing, and so I figured that the sequel would be an excellent choice to both calm down my gamer's nerves, as well as get me back into reading, as I really don't read much.


1:00-1:30 AM

It usually isn't until 12:30 or so that I start to get tired and worn out. I have been aiming to get to bed at around 1 or so for the past week or so, which should help me get used to napping at 1. More recently, however, I've been pushing that back as late as 1:30 in order to further reduce the amount of sleep I get during my longer sleeping period.

Because I'm used to playing video games until odd hours of the night/morning, I usually don't have a problem staying awake until it gets close to bed time. I do apply the same "cool down" rule I described above to this sleeping period to help prevent myself from going to bed and just lying there for hours on end, which is something I used to do before starting this experiment.


1:00-5:30 AM

This is currently the largest time frame I have for solid sleep with my current schedule. For the past week or so, I've gotten no more than 4.5 hours of sleep per night, with up to an additional 2 hours of sleep via naps. Recently, however, I've been playing with these times and have worked it down to where I'm usually getting 4 hours of consecutive sleep per night. For the most part, this change has had a very minimal impact on how I feel during the day, but I think the combination of very little nightly sleep and poor nap quality has caught up to me and is slapping me in the face this morning. Its Sunday morning at 8:25 AM and I am about to die from exhaustion. I'll be taking an early nap for 2 reasons, the first of which is because I am struggling to stay awake to type this, and the second is because my girlfriend and I have plans at 10, and if I can wake up at 9, we'll have plenty of time to eat and get to wherever we're going.

For the most part, this sleep period goes undisturbed and ends up being quite peaceful, relaxing and rejuvenating. After a week or two of only getting 3.5 hours of sleep per night (1:30 to 5:00), I am going to change around the times a bit to help my transition into the full Uberman sleep schedule. The idea is to transition from my transition period into the sleep schedule one step at a time.

The following is my tentative plan of action:
1) Set annoying alarm to wake myself up at 3:15
2) Get into habit of at least getting out of bed briefly at 3:15
3) Change alarm to 3:10 and remain out of bed for 10 minutes
4) Change alarm to 3:00 and remain out of bed for 30 minutes
5) Change alarm to 2:45 and remain out of bed for 1 hour
6) Change alarm to 2:30 and remain out of bed for 1.5 hours
7) Repeat as necessary...
8) Change alarm to 1:30, while getting to sleep at 1 - Full Uberman Schedule!

Reasoning:
1) This should disrupt my current sleep schedule and start to train my body to take smaller naps. Instead of getting a 3.5-4.5 hour nap at night, I'll be trying to transition into 2 back-to-back 1.75-2.25 hour naps instead. The idea is to break up the time so that my body has only half as much time as before to get into the REM sleep stage. Also, this is the first in a series of steps that is supposed to create an "awake wedge" that will force its way into my long sleep cycle, effectively dividing it into 2 smaller sleep cycles.
2) I don't think my body will fully adjust to what I desire for number 1, so this stage is to help create a micro waking-period during the middle of my normal sleep cycle. This should help with multiple areas, including working on my ability to wake up to my alarm, despite being extremely tired, the conditioned response of physically removing myself from my bed, and it should also help get my body use to the next few transitions.
3) This is the next step, where I'm tried as hell, but I've got to struggle to remain awake for a while before I am allowed to crash.
4-7) I will gradually force the wedge into my sleep cycle, forcing myself to take shorter naps. I'm sure that I'll become pretty exhausted and sleep deprived, so the idea is to continue on as smoothly as possible for as long as necessary.  If I find that once I have 30 minutes of an awake period I am feeling great, I may jump up to 2 hours of being awake to see how I handle that. If all goes well, I continue the pace and work my way to the finish, otherwise I can just fall back to 30 minutes, then work my way up to an hour, and continue on from there.
8) This is the final step, where I'll have successfully transitioned over to the full Uberman Sleep Schedule!



So yeah, this post has taken a couple days of observation, and another couple days to type it up, so I hope you've enjoyed it. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. After another week or so, I may type up another one of these for comparison purposes.