Today has simultaneously been the most and least successful day during the adaptation. This morning I felt so fantastic I worked out a little more enthusiastically than usual and beat my all-time high score for push-ups by five. Notice, that this is objective evidence that uberman is actually giving me more energy, rather than just the delusion of energy, as many skeptics suggest.
The day went smoothly; I did quite a bit of physical labor, helping my mother outside with some garden chores.
Perhaps the physical exertion of the day was too much. At 3:00 am I felt spirit-crushingly exhausted so I opted to take an extra nap. I slept through the alarm (don’t remember it going off) and woke up at 5:00, still tired. I got up for a bit, then took my regular 5:30 nap, but I still felt groggy. I’m going to have to be more careful about my nighttime naps now. I’ll probably have to set multiple alarms and keep the light on. It didn’t seem that decreasing my nap-time to 22 minutes helped at all. It probably made me more tired. I’ll switch back to 25 minutes for the time being.
The funny part is that I slept twice as much today as necessary. Four hours asleep; I am SO lazy! C’mon!
Optimistically, the nap may have caught me up to a level of less sleep-debt. The idea of taking extra naps occasionally was to reclaim some of the lost sleep due to the adaptation. I can already feel my mind getting clearer.
My guess is that at night I’m more conditioned to have long-term-energy sleep, so I may quickly click into one of the deeper states of sleep, which are much less alarm-clock friendly.
Even taking into account that I’m only about half-way through the adaptation, I already have a total level of energy and productivity higher than that of a typical monophasic sleeper, because I’m totally in the zone from about 10 in the morning until 2 at night. Instead of sleeping at night, I still have 6 hours that I can spend on less mentally challenging activities.
I really hope to achieve yesterday morning’s level of energy all the time, even at night. I wonder how much longer until I can eliminate the night-time drowsiness.
The other thing I’m most looking forward to is the elimination of the alarm. I still haven’t experienced automatically waking up after the REM cycle before the alarm goes off. On several occasions, I’ve woken up after only 9 or 10 minutes of lying down, feeling somewhat refreshed. On these occasions I get back to sleep and then usually have a dream. So far these have been the best naps of all and have easily left me with enough energy to get to the next nap. It’s funny that I “wake up in the middle of the night”, so to speak, even when my “night” is only 20 minutes long.