Day 14 - Naps 1, 2, & 3

Nap 1 - Alarm: 3:50am

Ah... nothing beats a perfect nap. I'm not sure exactly what that bump-without-noise is at 3:42am, but I don't think it affected my nap at all.

Nap 2 - Alarm: 7:20am

Another perfect nap! What away to end this 2-week adaptation period!

Nap 3 - Alarm: 12:50pm

After having lunch with my brother, then dropping seeing him off back to the mainland at the airport, I needed to take a bus over to a car shop to pick up a repaired car for a friend that had just deployed. Luckily it was a 45 min bus ride that should have started at 12:15pm, however buses are always late. 

I was in a comfortable window seat by 12:25, when I realized that if I could quickly fall asleep on that nearly-no-seat-left bus ride from the airport, that I wouldn't even have to change the alarm for Nap 3 and would still wake up within 10 minutes of my ETA.

So I did and it was brilliant. The graph is all over the place with movement and sound (as expected), but as that became the "norm" my body/mind found peace and I merrily drifted off into a comfortable dream about the new Elon Musk idea, the Hyperloop. 

I was a bit stiff after waking, but I totally avoided all symptoms of sleep loss until about 8:00 when I began to feel the slight pressure behind my eyes again.

Day 11 - Pre Core

In bed by: 8:15pm

A great ending to an interesting day. 

Feeling sleepy, yet no-longer abnormally so, my wife and I were able to get to bed a bit early after eating a scrumptious meatloaf dinner while finishing up a contraption on which we were collaborating in Minecraft, an auto harvesting wheat/carrot farm.

Lesson Learned:

Perfect naps and/or a recovery schedule can salvage even the worst days, ensuring that you don't have to suffer those nasty sleep-deprivation symptoms that you experience on a fluctuating/interrupted schedule. Oh, and exercise makes a big, positive difference too.

Day 11 - Nap 4 (Recovery)

Alarm: 3:30pm (smart)

By 1:30pm, I no longer felt the symptoms that convinced me to switch to the recovery schedule, so I decided to keep working a bit in the yard with my wife; we are preparing a tree for planting at a neighborhood park tomorrow morning.

At 2:45pm I decided that I should nap again anyway, but instead do so under a smart alarm, one that would monitor when I exited REM. The result was I only slept for 18 minutes, so my wife and I could still make our plans to go swim laps at the neighborhood pool. After swimming, I experienced near-perfect freshness.

Day 11 - Post Nap 3

Alarm: 10:50am

Ahhh... a perfect recovery nap was exactly what the doctor ordered; I'm already feeling so much better. I had just a slight headache when the alarm sounded, but a just little physical activity was enough to assuage the pain. I can't wait until after the next nap, its a big, whopping 1 hour kind!

Day 11 - Post Nap 1

Alarm: 3:55am

My wife got in bed late, so I pushed the alarm back 10 minutes to ensure that we still got 20 minutes of sleep in, however, she tells me that she didn't fall asleep at all, but myself, I still slipped right down into a lucid dream where we were swimming in the ocean so I convinced everyone to lose their clothes because skinny-dipping is more fun.

It was difficult to get out of bed (and not just because of the good dream), the headache is still here and obvious, my eyes feel tight, and I'm not in the best mood (neither is my wife!). 

My concentration is still faring pretty well though, surprisingly; and in fact, I installed CGMiner on our two Linux _ nVidia machines, our Windows 7 + nVidia machine, and am now working on adapting it to our Windows 7 + AMD machine. If you're wondering, the problem is because CGMiner utilizes the CUDA cores which aren't typically accessible; nVidia makes them available by default but you need to install AMD's APP SDK to get access to theirs.

I checked out http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/overviews/everyman/ to discover a good schedule to recover from that horrible Core sleep this morning. I'm going to try out what they suggest, which is:

Which equates to this on our schedule:

Start	Stop	Duration
20:30:00	0:00:00	3:30:00
0:00:00	3:10:00	3:10:00
3:10:00	3:30:00	0:20:00
3:30:00	6:40:00	3:10:00
6:40:00	7:00:00	0:20:00
7:00:00	10:10:00	3:10:00
10:10:00	10:30:00	0:20:00
10:30:00	13:30:00	3:00:00
13:30:00	14:30:00	1:00:00
14:30:00	20:30:00	6:00:00

*I'm pretty sure that the site was intending those .3s to mean 20 (not 18) minutes, which makes those .2s more like 10 minutes to balance out the rounding error.

Day 11 - Post Core

Alarm: 12:00am

Core sleep did not completely successful and I fear that today's requirement of SWS (slow wave sleep / delta wave sleep) may not have been fulfilled. 

Upon waking, it was extremely difficult keep my heavy eyelids open and when I did, I was punished with a strong sensitivity to any light. That was followed by a medium headache, some pressure behind my eyes, slight dizziness, and a vague discomfort overall. 

I found my self pacing from the living room to the bedroom, waiting for myself to "really wake up", which didn't happen until at least 12:10am (but it sure seemed 10x that long!).Depending on the severity of sleep loss symptoms, I may attempt an extended nap later today to ensure the integrity of my sanity.

According to SleepBot, I was physically active at 9:20, 10:15, and 11:30. My phone had found its was under my pillows, so even though no there does not appear to be much noise, there still could have been sounds coming from outside that caused me to wake up (even higher probability given that it is Friday night).

Day 8 - Post Core

Alarm: 2:20

I remember waking up early twice, neither in a good way. I think that it was some kind of subconscious anxiety about sleeping through my alarm. Reviewing SleepBot, I can see that happened at 1am and 1:25am.

Waking up was fairly difficult this morning; I nearly fell back asleep as I laid in bed after turning off my alarm. After finally getting up I had some pretty intense, sharp pressure around my temples not unlike caffeine withdrawals, that and a severe sensitivity to light.

Most symptoms were gone 30 minutes later, but now that it is 1 hour later, there still persists a very faint, tunnel-vision-esque headache that I really hope disappears after Nap 1.

Speaking of Nap 1 and schedules, we are not adjusting any of the naps times because our core was off by so long. This is because I am beginning to recognize think that schedule consistency will be the key to success in this endeavor.

Lesson Learned:

A consistent sleeper is a happy sleeper.

Changing Our Schedule

My wife and I agreed to change our schedule. Our initial schedule was based on a "good" version of the Everyman 3 for "nine-to-fivers" which we modified to accommodate when she left for work. However, there were a few wrinkles in that plan, specifically: our morning wake periods were too short and felt frantic, the periods between Nap 2 and Core were too long and difficult to stay focused for their duration, and getting ready for work before a nap wasn't working for her.

I am aware of the recommendations to not change one's nap times, especially during the transition phase, however we're going to do it anyway. With this change, my wife will be napping in the parking lot before work and taking a later lunch, but otherwise, this should be more sustainable.

Here is a link to the Google Calendar version: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=od1ikvf1438gmvkpokn4o501kc%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Pacific/Honolulu 

Our initial schedule:

• 0000 Wake  - 2.5hrs
• 0230 Nap 1 - 20mins
• 0250 Wake  - 2.8hrs
• 0540 Nap 2 - 20mins
• 0600 Wake  - 5.2hrs
• 1110 Nap 3 - 20mins
• 1130 Wake  - 9.0hrs
• 2030 Core  - 3.5hrs

Will now be:

• 0000 Wake  - 3.5hrs
• 0330 Nap 1 - 20mins
• 0350 Wake  - 3.2hrs
• 0700 Nap 2 - 20mins
• 0720 Wake  - 5.2hrs
• 1230 Nap 3 - 20mins
• 1250 Wake  - 7.7hrs
• 2030 Core  - 3.5hrs

Day 1 - Let's give it a go

After a few days of research, my wife and I have decided to try out a polyphasic sleep regimen. Most advice seems to point beginners to some version of the Everyman3 schedule as it seems the most forgiving and sustainable.

We initially chose to begin with this work friendly schedule based on guidelines found at polyphasicsociety.com - everyman:

• 0000 Wake  - 3.0hrs
• 0230 Nap 1 - 20mins
• 0250 Wake  - 4.8hrs
• 0540 Nap 2 - 20mins
• 0600 Wake  - 8.5hrs
• 1110 Nap 3 - 20mins
• 1130 Wake  - 9.0hrs
• 2030 Core  - 3.5hrs

We have also adopted a new puppy, a English Stafordshire Terrier tentatively named Hula Girl by her previous owners. Otherwise our current lifestyle can be characterized by: living on our property near the beach, my wife working nearly full time as a HIANG guardsman, me working as an free-lance software engineer/web developer, very frequent participation in Mensa events, and not as-frequent-as-we'd-like exercise.

We will need a simple way of closely monitoring the effects of this life changing decision, so until I can build a sustainable form to poll ourselves, here are a few sensors that we'd like to capture:

• Awake-ness 1..10 (1 = dead tired)
• Creativity 1..10, n/a (1 = dull)
• Sanity 1..10 (1 = insane)
• Concentration 1..10 (1 = scattered)
• Mood 1..10 (aggressivly bad)

It is about time for me to take my first nap after my first core and I am:

• Awake-ness 6
• Creativity 8
• Sanity 10
• Concentration 9
• Mood 9