The first thing I will be doing is restarting daily prayer. I am Muslim after all and that should (and is) my first priority. Also, it will give me a chance to find either a way to get home or find a place on campus to pray and then nap. Once I am praying 3/5 times a day (sorta complicated, I pray 5 times in 3 sets), I will be taking 3 naps after each “set” and going into Everyman will be a breeze.

And when I’m napping, I will start to decrease my nightly “core” sleep until its down to two cycles. My plan is to drop a sleep cycle at a time until I’m sleeping three less each night. Of course, I’m guessing I sleep 5 cycles, so I might do more or less and I’ll accommodate that. The way I intend to “drop a cycle” is by decreasing my sleep time by a half hour at a time until I notice a significant increase in sleepiness. This increase would be due to waking up in the end of a cycle. Of course, since I’ll be napping, the significant increase won’t cause me to be much less productive, but I should be able to feel the difference if I’m paying attention.

So, to recap for just the Everyman info:

• Start napping at regular intervals during the day.
• Sleep 8 hours at first and starting on Fridays drop a half hour until an increase in drowsiness is felt.
• Sleep an extra half hour than before and wait until the next Friday to start dropping again.
• Once I’m down 3 cycles, my sleep schedule should now have 3 cycles throughout my day and a few at night.

The point of this, to me, is not only to increase the amount of useful time in the day, but to also increase my own self-discipline. If two midterms and laundry can overwhelm me in freshman year, I’m doomed. I can’t let so little stress get to me, so hopefully the Everyman will give me another hint that “I can do it” when I’m thinking I’m not good enough for college.

See ya all in a few weeks! Happy We Haven’t Spread Smallpox Enough Yet Day!

Back when I would stay up during high school, I had realized the key to staying up so late is to eat when hungry in the slightest and to stave off boredom. Of course, I had no boredom and am now suffering the weight of my many added hobbies, so the problem was my hunger.

In less than two weeks, Ramadan will be over and therefore I can retry Everyman. Check back then for how I plan on sliding into Everyman to keep the sleep deprivation to a low, consistent state over a long, long period of time.

Also, I had failed to wake up at 3am, but instead was awoken at 4:30 by my roommate for Soohoor (actually because my computer was playing music across the room and my alarm was going off, for the past hour and a half). I think I’ll have to figure out how long my normal cycle is so that I can adjust my core sleep to include 2-3 cycles.

Game plan for next week:

• Sleep the same schedule all week. That means 11pm-7am.
  Nap at the correct intervals. However, the 6:30am nap is integrated into my monophasic sleep.
• Starting Thursday, shorten my 8-hour sleep by an hour a day, still napping half an hour.
• Once my core is down to 4 hours on Sunday, stay with that until the following Thursday. Then shorten the naps 2 minutes a day to 20 minutes on that next Monday.
• Stay with that until Thursday. I’ll see where to go from there.

As promised, my reason for attempting polyphase sleeping:

I’m a freshman here at UC Berkeley and an Engineering student (Computational Engineering Science, an interdisciplinary engineering that I’ll make mainly into Electrical Engineering and Computer Science). And since I have and plan to have several time-consuming and hard courses, I need all the time I can get. I’m not sure exactly where I learned about polyphase sleep at first, but after reading PureDoxyK’s posts on it and her experiences, along with the Wikipedia article on Uberman/Everyman and plenty of other places, I decided to try it out. For a few hours extra a day, I can handle some sleep deprivation initially.

I did several experiments (all-nighters) during my last two years at high school where I would stay up for at least 36 hours, if not more, and see how far I could go. Of course, the moment I got home and saw my bed, I would conk out, but until then I was very aware (and introverted) if a little incoherent.

I’ve decided on trying out Everyman (core + 3 naps) since Uberman (6 naps) doesn’t fit my busy student schedule. Even with only 3 naps, I can’t have them all at the same time since I have classes at odd times and the only chunk of time in the middle of the day that I have free daily is a half hour block starting at 12:30. I’d have to figure out how to sleep on campus, and I’m too self-conscious to sleep with an eye-blind on some grass in broad daylight.

Now to explain what Soohoor is.

Soohoor:

During the month of Ramadan when Muslims fast while the sun is up, Soohoor is the time of morning where Muslims get up to eat before the sun comes up. Every Friday, the MSA (Muslim Students Association) on campus has a gathered Soohoor at someone’s apartment.

Of course, the brothers and sisters (men and women, but in Islam we are all family) have separate Soohoors, but that is much better in most people’s opinions. Each gender can make jokes about the other without feelings getting hurt (“Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive? Not because she was deaf, dumb and blind, but because she was a woman.” and related jokes: “What was Helen Keller’s favorite color? Velcro.”).

My schedule is 12am 3-hour core nap, 6:30am/pm 20-minute nap with my noon nap altering every other day between 11:50 and 12:50. This is based off my class schedule and Soohoor/Iftar times. Iftar, the nighttime gathering of Muslims to eat after the sun is down, is around 7:30 and usually goes till 10:30 each night (us brothers hang out forever).

Well, as above, it’s almost time for nap #1. Kinda soon from my core, but I plan on exercising outside during this time so I’ll be pretty tired.

This is the first time I’ve had to wear a sweater in years.

Seriously. Well, I’m off to eat Soohoor with the MSA brothers. I’ll write another post afterwards about the reasons I’m doing this, etc.

I’ve chosen to undertake the Everyman (coined by PureDoxyK) schedule. With a 3 hour core and three 20 minute naps through the day, I plan to get an extra 4 hours a day and sleep just as restfully. The white noise from grelly is really useful as it keeps other noises at bay and makes the 20 minute naps really easy (Just play it and go to sleep. It’ll wake you up within 30 minutes for sure).

Basically, for today and Friday, I’ll be taking the extra naps and getting up from my core sleep when I wake up right away. On Saturday, I’ll set my alarm for 3 hours core and see if the sleep deprivation is anywhere as bad as a full night of sleep lost (English papers in high school were time-consuming at the least).

I’ve gone over 40 hours without sleep several times, so this experiment doesn’t seem hard to me. I’ve been “incoherent” without sleep plenty of times and each time I’ve felt more aware of myself and those around me. However, I was way more introverted and unsocial while sleep deprived, so I’m looking forward to seeing if this behavior happens while on Everyman.

I’ll be updating this quite often with the extra hours in the day (night), so stay tuned (you can change the channel, I don’t have any funny adverts for you).