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After going through day 2, I realized that getting on this sleep schedule is going to be much more difficult than I first thought. Numerous times, as I woke up from a nap, I was begging my conscious to let myself go back to sleep. Luckily, minus one mishap, I was able to get up promptly after a 15 to 20 minute nap without giving in to temptation. Unfortunately the one mishap happened to be a 3 hour snooze at 11 am where I somehow slept through 2 alarms and 3 phone calls. The thing that scares me the most is that if this happens during the regular school year, I could very well sleep through an important test or presentation. I need to figure out a way to make sure that I wake up on time otherwise I might have to abandon this project.

I ended up taking 7 naps today - 1, 4, 7, 11, 5, 8, and 11. Like I said earlier, my 11 am nap stretched out for 3 hours which probably has something to do with the jetlag and the fact that 11 am PST is 3 am in Japan. Either way I’m not going to kick myself too much for it.

After going through a bunch of these alarms I think I have a new scheme for how to set these alarms in a way where I’m guranteed to wake up. There have been times where I’ve turned off the alarm because it was within arms reach without never full gaining consciousness. What I’m going to do is to set 2 alarms that will both require me to get out of bed to turn this off. I figure if I have to actually sit up straight I’m guaranteed to shake off any temptation to fall back asleep. The only problem I can see with this is that I have a roommate, and I imagine that having 2 alarms go off at 5 am can be pretty annoying. During these early morning naps I’ll probably have to sleep in the living room in order to keep my annoyance to a minimum.

Officially it’s day 3 right now, but I feel like my adjustment period might take a little longer with all the extra long naps that I’ve accidentily taken; During day 1 I took a 2.5 hour nap at 3 pm, during day 2 I took a 3 hour nap at 11 am, and just before I wrote this I slept through my alarm and took a 1 hour nap at 5. Hopefully the 1 hour nap I just took is the longest slumber I’ll have in a while. I might just have to go and buy some more alarms. I don’t think my roommates are going to look at me too kindly when I have 5 alarms going off simultaneously in a few days. :/

I officially started my Uberman Sleep Regimen on Wednesday, September 17 at 3:40 pm PST. The strange time is because I was still in Japan at the time, just waking up at 7:40 am Japan Time and ready to go to the airport to fly back home. As a result Day 1 actually spans more than 32 hours from when I woke up in Japan to the end up the 18th Pacific Standard Time.

I’ve come up with some rules and guidelines for which I am applying to my Uberman Sleep Schedule:

1. Flexibility. Making a system where you have to sleep every 4 hours at rigid times is extremely unpractical, but if I’m making a system where I can stay awake for 5 hours during one session and then 3 hours in the next session the schedule becomes a lot more appealing.
2. Taking 6 naps is not set in stone. If I feel like I really need to I’ll add in an extra 15 minute nap or two during days where I’m extra sleepy.
3. Sessions must be at least 2 hours long. Anything less kind of defeats the purpose of the plan. Also I’ll try to avoid staying up for more than 7 hours at a time.

So anyways, I wrapped up the extended version of Day 1 hours ago and I have to say I feel pretty good. I took naps at 5:15pm, 11pm, 3am, 9am, 3pm, and 9 pm. I think being too uncomfortable to sleep for more than 10 minutes on the 10 hour flight back home really helped during the late night hours on the plane. I haven’t been getting solid REM sleep yet but I have woken up a couple of times minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off. I think just having that mindset as I go to bed that I’m going to wake up in 15 minutes really helps my subconscious mind set an internal trigger to not oversleep. I did however have one little mishap at 3pm after I got back home to Irvine. I was pretty exhausted from sleeping only 30 minutes in the past 16 hours because of the long plane flight. As soon as I got home I set one alarm, plopped onto bed, and soundly slept through the alarm all the way until 5:30pm. I’ve adjusted though by setting 3 alarms 3 minutes apart starting from 20 minutes after I first lie down. Overall though that’s 4 hours of sleep in a 32 hours period. From what I hear though days 3-7 are the real killers so we’ll see how it goes.

Although I haven’t mentioned it in this blog, anyone who knows me can tell you that I’ve been talking about going on the Uberman sleep schedule for a while. For those of you who don’t know, the uberman sleep schedule is a form of polyphasic sleep in which you take a 15-20 minute nap every 4 hours. In total you end up sleeping about 2 hours a day. If you sleep 8 hours a day, that’s 6 more hours per day and 42 more hours per week. Just imagine how much more you can get done with those extra hours. Hell, you could get another full time job with all that extra time.

95 percent of the people I talk to are skeptical that it can be done and 99 percent of people I talk to believe that it’ll have devastatingly negative health consequences. I hope to prove both of these concerns wrong once I go on it in September. From what I’ve heard of people who have done it successfully, you’re actually less tired throughout the day. That 15 minute nap every 4 hours keeps you at your optimum level more often. Usually, after a bad nights sleep most people become useless for the next day. On the Uberman Sleep Schedule you’re only 3 hours and 45 minutes away from your next nap, so at most a bad nap can only hurt you for the 3 hours and 45 minutes.

The first time I hear about the sleep schedule was probably 6 years ago back in high school. It didn’t really appeal to me at the time because there weren’t enough things to fill those days as it was, and going to school from 8 to 3 would make the sleep cycle impossible to do. These days however things are different. I have so many things that I want to accomplish and so little time. Also, the college schedule is extremely flexible and there might not be another time in my life where I’ll be able to do this.

What really propelled this far fetched idea to become an obsession was reading Steve Pavlina’s blog. Steve Pavlina is a very famous self-help guru and blogger. Although I had no idea who he was before I found his uberman posts on a random google search, apparently he’s one of the most popular bloggers on the net and makes almost 6 figures doing so. Anyways, he was able to go on the uberman sleep schedule for almost 6 months and realistically could have gone on much longer. He documented this time period in his life, giving vivid details of what it was like from day 1 to 180. The toughest part of the whole routine are the first 10 days. Going from monophasic to polyphasic is a huge adjustment, and it takes a while for your body to get attuned to it. Once you past those first days though, it becomes much easier, and you’re even able to get up from your 15 minute naps without an alarm.

Anyways, I’m going to try the sleep schedule when I get back from Japan on September 18. Starting it right away will probably help ward off the jetlag as well as give me some breathing room before school starts. I’ll write a few more posts about it before I go on it and then document how it goes day by day. Stay tuned.