days 30 through 45
July 24, 2006
Nap-sloppiness…
On Saturday, July 15, I forgot my first nap; just worked right through the 3pm target. I realized it about 5pm when my partner picked me up from work. I thought I might take a nap in the car on the drive home (in passenger seat!) and count it as a late 3pm, pushing the 7pm back to my limit of 8pm. But one of our teenage sons wanted to go out to dinner with us, and after recovering from the shock of that info, I just decided to take the car nap, internally counting the 3pm as skipped and taking the 7pm early. Normally my ‘start’ limit for the 7pm nap would be 6pm, but given the skip this felt like an ok make-up approach. Keep in mind that whereas many ‘pure’ polyphasic-ers describe needing to rigidly adhere to a schedule to keep functioning polyphasically, my big core-sleep of 4.5 hours feels like it gives me lots of flexibility.
That skipped nap was symptomatic of an increasing ‘sloppiness’ in my attention to napping, and I’m not sure what to make of this. The first aspect of the sloppiness is that in the previous 2-3 days before that forgotten nap, I had nearly forgotten a couple of naps, but remembered still within my ‘window’ (starting within an hour of the target-time).
The second aspect of the sloppiness has been around nap-planning. Before the past few days it had become an easy internalized habit for me to roughly plan out in advance when I’d take my next nap. An example situation: Target nap at 7pm — Weekend dinner-plans for 7pm — Restaurant where I’ll meet my partner and friends is a half-hour from my house where I’ll be beforehand. So I internally plan to leave the house around 6, find a parking lot near the restaurant, take the 20-minute nap, and I walk into the restaurant at 7pm. Smooth, easy, no problem for me, no stress placed on my partner about whether others will have to schedule things around my polyphasic schedule. I had gotten good at this. But in the last few days I’ve been slipping a little.
I *think* the sloppiness is because this experiment is no longer ‘new’ and ‘exciting’, but rather simply a great integrated part of my life now. The fact that I’m no longer blogging about it daily also undoubtedly allows it to slip from the attention-priority queue. The sloppiness is also in some way a testament to the success of this system for me, in that I don’t go through the day tired, *needing* or desperately looking forward to my next nap. Still, though, I’m going to work on giving the napping a bit more attention. This has been a great enough addition to my life that I don’t want to mess it up.
A possible night-time shift
For various reasons, I may be shifting my core-sleep time from starting at roughly 10pm or 11pm to roughly 12:30am or 1:30am. If I kept my current 4.5 hour core, that’d mean I’d awaken at 5am or 6am. That’s a bummer; I do not liking the idea of missing out on my ‘free’ wee-hour morning time. I know it’s all the same amount of time, but I have two teenagers that sometimes stay up late during the summer and it’s just not as relaxing. So… I’m considering shifting to a 3 hour core, which I’ve wanted to experiment with anyway. In the past I’ve often thought of knocking a half-hour off the core for a few weeks at a time until getting down to 3 hours, but with this new schedule I might just jump right in.
Monkeymind and naps…
A recent thread on the Uberman list discussed techniques people use to focus the mind to foster sleep. I’ve been doing this thing for a while in which I count breaths, up to four (then I start at one again). On ‘one’ I visualize a point; on ‘two’ a line; on ‘three’ a triangle; and on ‘four’ a square. I don’t do this all the time, just when I recognize my mind is either flitting around or focusing on thinking about something. This is a bit related to the nap-sloppiness paragraph above, in that I was for a long while very conscious of relaxing and calming my mind to ‘invite’ sleep. I got so good at getting into levels of sleep quickly that I began to get careless about going through a calming process, instead allowing myself to mentally flit about or think about some issue. Sleep still came; my body has gotten nicely accustomed to the naps — but I missed the process of clearing my mind, and so developed this little ritual. I usually don’t do the cycle more than two or three times before I sink into some level of sleep. I’ve found the visualizing also helps. I can’t really clearly visualize the shapes; but the visual intention seems to help the centering process. And the reason I only count to four? Partly there’s a dimension / number-of-sides simplicity to the shapes I envision, but mostly it’s because the repetition itself is helpful; when I’ve tried counting sequentially, I found it somewhat distracting to be aware of how high the count is. Also, since the process is designed to gently return my monkeymind to a calm state, little failures which are a normal part of the process are exaggerated if the count has to start over from a high number.
