Day 4
Blake
I'm starting to feel like I've made through the worst of things. The whole process is slowly starting to feel a lot easier. It's still takes some epic will power to stay awake between midnight and 6, but it's not near as bad as it was the first few nights.
Last night we had late night/early morning breakfast with a friend at CK's. We did that until around 3 or 4 and got back to the house to wait out the rest of the late shift. I decided to take a 20 minute nap at around 4 to help me through the night. I'm hoping that this will help me transition easily through what is the hardest part of this experiment so far. It should also give me the energy to actually do something productive during the late hours. We still don't have all the kinks worked out with the segment of our day, but I feel like we're almost there.
Other than it being a slow day at work, things went well. I was still focused, alert and didn't have much of a problem settling down for my noon sleep. I did suffer a little ribbing from bosses/work mates, but they've been really supportive about the whole thing. I just pass out on the office couch and thankfully no one has deemed it hilarious to do anything terrible to me yet. I'm not sure how long that will hold out.
My work hasn't suffered at all from the whole experiment. In fact I still feel more productive on the new schedule than I did before. I haven't been getting the mid-afternoon crashes I used to get. As a result, I haven't really felt the need for caffeine to get me through the day which is kind of cool.
Overall, everything is starting to feel a lot more natural. I'm developing a rhythm and getting better at settling my mind down for naps. I really hope this signals an upward trend. If so, then I'd say it's been a relatively painless transition, although I couldn't have done it without a lot of help. I definitely wouldn't recommend doing this alone.
That being said, I'm not going to start counting any chickens, hatched or no. There's still a chance I haven't made it through the worst of it. I'm going to try and stay focused. All of my fingers are crossed.
Caitlin
The good news is that shortly after we published yesterday's post, my headache went away! I was so happy. I was really starting to get very discouraged about everything; headaches just suck life out of me. My midnight nap went pretty well, and the following wake period went pretty smooth for the first part. As Blake mentioned, we went out to CK's with a friend for a couple hours, and we were both doing pretty well as far as feeling awake went.
We made it back home, and we only lasted about a half hour before we both started to get really sleepy. Blake decided to try out one of the unscheduled naps to help battle the drowsiness. When he woke up around 4:30, I decided it wasn't a bad idea, and set my alarm for 5ish, and fell asleep. (Probably wasn't a great idea to do it so close to my next scheduled nap, but I thought maybe an hour of awakeness in between wouldn't cause problems). Turns out that I didn't wake up until around 7:30ish. I looked at my phone to look for any records of me turning off alarms or whatnot, and my 5am alarm was gone, but I had a random 7:06am alarm set. Somehow I completely missed that too, even though I don't remember setting it.
I've been pretty hard on myself about oversleeping naps a little bit, but I'm feeling a little better about it now. I've read from others' experiences that oversleeping totally messes up the transitioning and makes you really sleepy for the next day or two. I could be being optimistic about this, but it doesn't seem like that at all. I've only been oversleeping for a couple hours at a time, instead of some other stories of people oversleeping for the next 12-14 hours catching up on all their lost sleep. So, all of my oversleeps are still just full sleep cycle, including one session of REM. Maybe it's helping instead of hurting. But, who knows. I still feel like I'm making progress, so I think that's what counts.
I didn't actually sleep a whole lot through my naps at noon and 6pm, but I still felt rested after I got up. That might be a result from the extra sleep this morning. Hopefully I can get back on track of sleeping each time.
Like Blake, I've been feeling really productive at work. It's great, because it really makes me feel good about this experiment, that it is not affecting my work life or my personal life. It does feel like we are starting to get used to this cycle. Now if we could only get over the early morning obstacles.
Keep it there and please keep sharing your experience! :)
NaturalEthic - That's awesome! Let us know how it goes. If you have any questions feel free to ask, although you may figure out some good ideas that we haven't thought of yet. Either way, good luck. =)
However what i'm curious about is: Does anyone of you two do any sports? I'm mean if you go for a run, your usually pretty exhausted afterwards.. Also some doctors say you need sleep to recover from sports and to relax your muscles..
Oh and have you considered letting a doctor make some checks to see if your experiment has any negative side-effects?
Following your experiment is fun : )
There's several schedules we could follow. The Dymaxion schedule is actually 4 30-min naps that are 6 hours apart. Another option that we considered was the Everyman, which was a core nap of few hours, plus a few 20 min naps during the day (the more naps, the shorter the core nap).