eight-month reflection
February 27, 2007
Been a while!
Background info
My usual schedule is to have a core-sleep of 4.5 hours at night, and then 20-minute naps at around 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm. If I start the core-sleep particularly early or late, I may add a 3am or 11pm nap. A primary goal of mine is flexibility, so although I never skip naps, I’ll take them anywhere from an hour before to an hour after the target time. And although my core-sleep is always 4.5 hours, it can start, these days, anywhere from 10pm to 2am.
The above background summary is nearly identical to the one I posted at the two-month update. This has been and promises to continue to be a great long-term schedule. The main difference is the word ‘usual’. That’s because roughly every other week I ‘sleep in’ on a weekend morning resulting in roughly a 6-hour core sleep (I try not to set an alarm). I like doing this for the variety and for a bit of lazy morning partner time. I’d even consider doing this sleep-in once a week, but it’s so common for me to stay up late on a weekend evening that the usual 4.5 hour block just fits.
Conferences
In October I went to a multi-day conference. I was curious about how the naps would work in that kind of setting: structured, with predictable break times, but unpredictably flexible in terms of a compelling ebb-and-flow of conversations and meal-meetings. The normal day was structured with a half-hour morning break, a lunch break, and a half-hour afternoon break. I initially tried my 20-minute naps during the morning and afternoon breaks, but that felt too rushed given the time required to get to and from my nap-spot (a slightly out-of-the-way chair in a hotel lobby-hallway that I had scoped out ahead of time) and to be able to enjoy brief interactions with people at the beginning and end of the breaks. The solution that worked for me was simply to take a 15-minute nap during those breaks. Hard to believe that a small 5-minute change could ‘fit’ so much better, but it did.
I was so intrigued with how refreshed I felt after those 15 minute naps that I tried switching to a 15 minute nap schedule permanently. Over a two-week period, though, I just felt a little too rundown, and switched back to my standard 20 minute nap schedule. I have since attended another conference that had the same half-hour morning and afternoon break-schedule, and the 15-minute nap worked fine for those slots.
Reflections
Since August when I last posted I’ve made one cross-country round trip, and again was struck by the fact that I had no jet-lag issues. From that trek, and from a whirlwind vacation to DisneyWorld, and my conference experiences, I suspect that my body does feel the wear of travel, but simply has numerous opportunities throughout the day (the naps) to adjust and adapt.
A moment the other day at work made me think more along these lines — that I do experience aspects of ‘normal’ patterns of body-stress and weariness, but that these are generally much less intense and are moderated by the naps. One late afternoon of a workday that started early, I had just finished a good piece of work, and had a feeling of wanting to just sit back in my chair and stretch and watch mindless tv (that was the odd feeling; there is no tv at work and that’s not something I tend to do anyway). I did *not* feel like starting another piece of work. I realized it was time for a nap; took it, and upon waking felt ready to tear into the next piece of work that 20-minutes previously I didn’t feel like doing. That’s kind of striking, and variations of this occur with some regularity. My sense is my pre-nap feeling was part of the ‘late-afternoon work-day slump’ that is so well-known, but given my nap schedule, it couldn’t get any traction.
Summary
As I noted in my last post, I expect to continue doing this indefinitely, probably experimenting with tweaks and variations over time. I think my success with this is attributable to a few main factors: pretty firmly adhering to a flexible schedule; having things I look forward to doing during the times when I arise hours before dawn; feeling to my bones how centering and humane the brief zen-naps make my day; and appreciating the things this schedule allows me to do as I swing ever-closer to 50 than 40. Two examples of that last factor: I saw Patti Smith in concert a couple days ago (stunningly impressive), got to bed near 2am, was up before 6:30am, and felt physically great throughout that workday. Very cool.
