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.



The first part is timing. Right now is a bad time for me to do the full transition. Being super excessively sleep deprived would make driving dangerous, and and I'm with my girlfriend in Roanoke, Virginia, which is a 3 hour drive from my apartment in Raleigh, NC. I drove up this past Friday, and will be staying until Wednesday. Trying to make the drive while even slightly tired is dangerous. So, doing this while adjusting to the Uberman Sleep Schedule is completely out of the question. My plans for the "right time" will be after I get back to Raleigh and get whatever job my boss wants done completed, which hopefully won't take more than a week. Also, I'll have to visit a grocery store and stock up on everything I'll need for at least a week, and possibly emergency rations for another week (thankfully, cans of ravioli last forever, and I could never get tired of eating it). This way I'll be prepared, and not have to drive for a while if necessary. That all depends on how sleep deprived I get, and how quickly I adapt my naps to give me REM sleep. Other than that, I want to adapt as early into the summer as possible, that way I can really settle into it and have several weeks to see how it works out for me. If I like it, I'll stick with it into the school year, else I'll try to fall out of it quickly, so it doesn't interfere with my school work. But, we'll have to see what happens when that time comes.

The second reason for this transition phase is because of my past sleeping habits. I am a very deep sleeper, and have not trained myself to get up when my alarm goes off. Actually, I've trained myself to turn off my alarms without even realizing the fact, until I wake up 2 hours later and curse myself for sleeping in. There are 2 methods that I am using to help combat this problem of mine. The first is redundancy, and the second is conditioning.

With redundancy, I try to make sure that I'm as consciously awake as possible when I want to get up, through the use of multiple alarms. In the past, I would have an alarm go off every 5 minutes until I woke up and realized how late it was. I quickly realized that within 5 minutes, if I'm tired enough, I can fall back asleep. The next alarm would do nothing more than the first alarm, and would get quickly shut off. I've since changed my alarms to go off every minute, with sleep mode enabled. This let's me set 6 alarms, which will ring every minute forever (when I quickly disable my alarm, it snoozes for 7 minutes, then rings again, so the 6 alarms just repeat themselves). I've also got the alarms all set in the same order for my different naps, the theory is that when I hear the first alarm, I know that its time to get up, and as I become less tired after naps, the first alarm will work just fine. This works fine and all, but what's to stop me from just repeatedly turning off alarms for hours on end, which I've been known to do? Well, that's where conditioning comes in!

With my conditioning, I get completely ready for bed, including everything from getting into my pajamas to filling up the bottle of water I keep sitting on my desk. When I climb in bed, I usually set my morning alarms, just in case.

I then set a single alarm timer to go off in 3 minutes. I set it and forget about it, snuggling into my bed like I was trying to fall asleep, until it goes off, when I instantly jump out of bed, cut on my lights, take a few swigs of water and shake my head to clear the sleepiness. The reason for using a 3 minute timer is that you can get into the mindset of waking up while still maintaining your full consciousness, as appose to the subconsciousness that usually tells you that you need more sleep in the mornings.

I then reset everything, but set my timer to 5 minutes. This gives me a couple minutes longer to forget about my timer, and focus on falling asleep. I repeat the same procedure when the alarm goes off, and increase the timer to 10 minutes, then 15 minutes. Usually, by 10-15 minutes, I am tired enough that I start to drift into sleep, and theoretically start to slip out of consciousness. I usually try to repeat this 4-5 times until I decide to let myself sleep until morning. I think it's an excellent way to gradually condition your subconsciousness to wake up when your alarm goes off. While I prefer to do this at night for the added tiredness effect, this can be done at any point during the day, and should be treated as exercising, where you should do multiple reps at a time, and a couple sets a day.

I used to do this every night for about 2 weeks, and in that period of time, I'd say that I've improved my ability to get up to alarms by 500%. I am usually pretty good at quickly siting up and starting to wake myself up, but I'm a little "slow" to getting out of bed. I say slow here, as my second alarm usually goes off as my feet hit the floor, which means it's been a full minute of me laying in bed before getting up, however, compared to the 10-20 minutes (or hours if I fell asleep again) that it used to take me, the single minute is nothing.

I haven't done any conditioning for the past week or so, which I probably should be doing. I've already achieved my goal of being able to get up quickly, but a little more positive reinforcement wouldn't hurt, and there is always room for improvement. As soon as I get back to Raleigh, I'll try to head to bed around 12:45, then spend the next 45 minutes working with getting up to my alarm. Its a little too inconvenient with my girlfriend and her roommate here. I don't particularly want to bother them, anymore than I already do...

So yeah, for now I'll be working on minimizing my nightly sleep as much as I can, while continuing to get as much sleep during my naps as possible. I think I've made great strides already. I'm able to quickly get to sleep (though, I've discovered that I still am not able to sleep very well through distractions of others in the room, etc...), I usually stay asleep until my alarm goes off, I usually have a (very weird) dream, and I wake up feeling refreshed, or at the very least, no longer as tired. For the past several nights, I've gotten very little sleep, but I don't feel like I'm running on this little sleep, and I usually only get tired if I miss my nap time, which should be normal/expected. Everything that I can think of so far seems to point to a very successful transition, and I have a feeling that when I stop sleeping straight through the night, I'll adapt to that much faster than expected, but we'll have to see. I don't want to lower my guard incase it's a rough road.