Yesterday was spent packing, moving, and unpacking to school. At this point Uberman has completely fallen apart. None of my afternoon naps were productive because I was traveling or with friends, and there’s stuff going on all the time. I woke up from my 12:30 am nap at 6:00… d’oh! I tried setting my alarm to go off through my headphones so as not to awaken my roommate, but it’s pretty easy to rip headphones off your head and continue sleeping.
I’m done beating myself up every time I mess up. It’s going to take a bit to find a rhythm that works with my environment, and right now it’s more important that I be awake enough to understand what’s going on. I know that this time around, it’s possible to make the adjustment while staying pretty coherent, so I can step it up later without too much of a decrease in academic performance.
Looking at my schedule, I can shift around classes so that I can do my naps half or one hour later. I’m thinking the 1:30, 5:30, 9:30 would work best with outside activities.
It’ll definitely take some experimentation to figure out how and when to take my naps… perhaps I can bring a loud alarm to the study lounge and sleep on a couch. I’ve kind of accidentally fallen into an Everyman pattern, where I get some core sleep at night and a few 20-minute naps during the day. It’s a much more flexible pattern, because you pretty much take the daytime naps whenever you feel tired, but there isn’t nearly as much hardcore awake-time as uberman offers. On Everyman, you end up squandering about 4 hours of sleep a day.
Well… we’ll see what happens. I’ll keep taking naps and setting alarms, but I’m not going to get too worked up over sleeping through my alarm. Maybe my body is best at adapting to something like this in short bursts. In that case it might be better to rest monophasically for a day or two, and then try again full force.