Alex Karasyov
Quantum Fantasy
Polyphasic Sleep – 8 Days After (part 2)
Aug 11th
Total read time: 2 Minutes.
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Day 4 – Day 8
It has now been 8 days since I started my Polyphasic Sleep experiment. The past week has been very interesting. I had a couple of nights after my first post where I was struggling to not to fall asleep and was ready to quit on a number of occasions. However during the days I seemed to be fine. The naps during the first part of the week have been somewhat of a rollercoaster ride. Some of them were very refreshing and energizing, and some made me wish I didn’t start this experiment. During the day I didn’t have much energy to focus on work. I did some lower level tasks like sending email and preparing for work to be done. Learning new things did not go so well at first either. I was sleep deprived, but what was very interesting is that I was absolutely calm. Usually sleep deprived people tend to be easily irritated. I have been in a calm and relaxed state all the time. Interestingly enough, a part of this was the fact that I didn’t feel in a hurry to finish anything. Being awake 22 hours a day gives you a different perspective on time.
I tried to watch a few movies for mental stimulation. Success rate 50%. I started meditating, usually before my 9pm nap. The first time I tried I fell asleep for about 30 minutes and woke up very tired. Right now I have more energy and don’t fall asleep during meditation. During my first meditation I had fallen asleep for about 40 minutes and woke up extremely tired. However the nap I had after that was the best nap of all. It made me feel like my body finally stopped resisting. I was also lucid dreaming during the nap, I was fully aware of my surroundings, and I felt my eyes moving really fast. I have finally started reaching REM state during my naps.
Right now I sleep extra 1 or 1.5 hours after my 5am nap. Sometimes right into my 9am nap if I start later. I am hoping to eliminate this in the next few days because waking up from that sleep is not very pleasant and feels like it sucks out my energy. Working out does not seem to be effecting how I feel that much anymore. Only to the point that it did when I was on monophasic sleep.
I also stopped drinking green tea. And I love my green tea, but the caffeine in it seems to be disturbing me when I nap. I also read about this on other blogs. I guess it is good that I don’t drink coffee.
Today is day 8. It is evening time. I got to say that the last 24 hours have been the most productive I have had since I have started. I have done a lot of work that was lying around waiting for a long time. Some of this work I was not planning to do any time soon. One thing that concerns me is that I may have overworked myself, so after my next nap I will try to do something relaxing and fun rather then work related.
Polyphasic Sleep – Uberman (Part 1)
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Polyphasic Sleep – Uberman (Part 1)
Aug 6th
Total read time: 3 Minutes.
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So I am experimenting with polyphasic sleep pattern. Huh, what? Well, most people practice monophasic sleep pattern. That means they sleep once a day. Polyphasic means spreading your sleep throughout the day. One of the most popular patterns is Uberman. With Uberman you take 15-20 minute naps every 4 hours, which is 1.5-2 hours of sleep per 24 hours. The trick is to condition your body to go into REM(Rapid Eye Movement) state much faster during your naps. It usually takes 90 minutes to get to REM state and in monophasic sleep pattern you go into that state 4-5 times a night, and all the other time you go through non-REM cycles. When you are deprived of sleep for a period of time you spend more time in REM state when you finally go to sleep. So the idea is clear: Condition your body to go into REM every 4 hours when you nap by depriving it of sleep.
More on polyphasic sleep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
My experience.
I am currently on my day 3 of the experiment. I started with napping at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, 10pm. And next day I switched to 1 am, 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, 9pm.
Based on the internet material the adjustment process should take 3-10 days.
Day 1 was conditioning the body. I went to bed every 4 hours, although could not fall asleep. The disaster happened with my 6am nap: I slept through the alarm and woke up around 11am. I think this was largely because I did a high intensity muscle training workout on day 1 and my body needed to recover. Might not have been a good idea. I felt burned out most of the day after.
Right now it’s day 3. My naps vary in terms of how I feel after. Sometimes I can’t find myself falling asleep and get up as if nothing happened. At other times I start falling asleep and the alarm wakes me up and I feel very tired but force myself to get up. At night it’s very hard to keep myself motivated. So last night I went to a 24hour grocery store around 2am, and gotten all the ingredients to make some chili. Which I have made today during day time. I keep myself busy with task to avoid falling asleep, but tasks requiring creativity and higher thinking are very difficult to do at this point. In the morning I went to local Starbucks and worked on a web site for one of my clients. Overall I have accomplished quite a bit in 3 hours, but I was very tired after and my 1pm nap really did a lot. So far I spent the other part of the day watching movies, and listening to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done Fast” seminar. I am trying not to overtire myself by doing too many high level tasks in short amount of time.
Overall I feel tired, but every nap refreshes me and I can function. The amount of effort I have to put into things is much higher than usual. I think my blood pressure is up. My appetite seems to grow exponentially after every other nap, but than quickly disappears. I still don’t see dreams during my naps, that means that I am not hitting REM yet during my naps. I also take an extra 20 minute nap at 3am to ease the adjustment process, as recommended by Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/).
I plan to go on until the end of the week, which will give me 6 days in total and then see if I want to continue. The ideal plan is to go through the rest of August on Uberman schedule.
Polyphasic Sleep – 8 Days After (part 2)
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Exactly7 Studios Website Launched
Jul 28th
I have launched my web design project which I have called Exactly7 Studios. I have worked for about a month with different designs for this site and ended up choosing the simplest one. And I love it.
Nevertheless, there are some improvements that can be done. The site has been online for a few days, and I have already found a few glitches. I have for the first time used AS 3 on this website, and a few glitches are bound to happen on the first project.
In the first week after this website has been launched I got 3 new projects to work on. Non of which came from the site, although the site is intended to advertise my services. So I am pretty busy right now, but as soon as I get some free time I fix the glitches on the site.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Smile: “The Face is Like The Penis”
Jul 20th
Total read time: 3 Minutes.
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When I was 18 years old a practiced a technique that would effect my mood. I would force a smile on my face. Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to be fake to people who were surrounding me. What I have learned is that when you make a certain facial expression it actually affects your mood. When you were young, have you ever tried to pretend to feel bad to skip school or to get out of doing something you really didn’t want to? When you pretend, your mood is affected. Actors know it better than anyone. When you pretend to feel something, you really start feeling it on some level. So if you pretend to be happy, you will synthesize happiness on a certain level. If you pretend to be sad, you will synthesize sadness. I found that sadness is more powerful, so don’t try it at home.
Your emotions are expressed in your facial expressions. You ever tried to suppress a smile when you are thinking of something really funny? It’s pretty hard, and sometimes impossible. You are not in control of your facial expression. You are reacting to the emotion that you feel. And that emotion is associated with a particular facial expression. This can work the other way around. When you put a smile on your face it changes your mood, just like when you make a sad or an angry face. The emotion that your mind connects with that facial expression (muscle contractions, etc) affects the way you feel.
Of course I am not trying to say that this is a solution to being happy. It’s not, and I didn’t want it to seem like it is. It is a good way to affect your mood on a micro level. That’s All.
The thing is: The face is like the penis (Silvan Tomkins). What Tomkins meant by that is that the face has, to a large extend, a mind of it’s own. In “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the amazing mind reading skill that Silvan Tomkins had. Years of research on facial expressions have led him to be able to read any emotions from a person’s face. Silvan has shown that if a person has any suppressed emotions deep inside, which they are hiding, those emotions will reflect on the person’s face in micro expressions. It means that no matter how good you are in hiding your feelings, a very careful and knowledgeable observer can tell what you are really feeling. Only a few people can do that, so don’t worry that people will realize that your smile is really fake yet.
Worry about that now.
You can’t fake forever, one day someone will see it.
So what can we take from the fact that very few people can read facial expressions correctly? A lot of people read your expressions wrong! A lot! If you are generally happy and friendly but you are not very expressive guess what? People may not realize it. So be more expressive: it will let people understand you much better. Smile: it will improve your mood. And don’t forget that smiles are contagious. Share your smile with others.
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