The Uberman Mentality

I had not before realized how much effort it actually requires to switch to polyphasic. Sure I knew that it would be extremely hard during the first days. What I didn't expect was that it would require consistent effort for weeks. But now that I've readed much more about polyphasic sleep, I know what I'm up against.

I had only read about Steve Pavlina and his success which made it look easy. Now I didn't think it was, but it seemed like that if you're determined and dedicated, anyone can pull it off and the worst point is over after three or four days - which might be true, but getting to that point without trouble is very, very hard.

I just ignored the failures. There's tons of blogs all over internet about failed attempts in different polyphasic schedules. It was probably good though that I didn't waste any thought on them and didn't let it put me down. All I needed was to acknowledge that there is those. But now that I've failed time and again and seem like adding my blog to the bodycount (I'm determined not to) I need to really read any material that there is. Even about the failed accounts, because they might have something valuable to offer. Those who adjusted with relative ease can't help me now.

Thing is, that when I was aiming to stay on schedule for few days, I should be expecting trouble for at least a couple weeks. I made it about a week with very low on sleep on the third attempt, but even then I had constant oversleeping. I get no closer to succeeding.

In the polyphasic sleep Google group there was said that extra naps for easier adjustment are not necessarily good. They need at least to be consistent and there's no-one who had succeeded with free-running sleep. That would be cool, but I guess I have to go for strict form of Uberman with no extra naps or anything. Pavlina recommended them for avoiding oversleep.. Well, my own experiences tell me now that it won't help to that; as you can read my last nap was extra nap that I described "that nap hit the spot". I felt great after it, yet when I went back to normal nap I overslept heavily. They won't help in that, what helps in that sense is working methods of waking yourself.

It's half about consistency and it's half about resilience. I have the latter, I need to mantain former. I need to have set sleeping times and need to be able to follow through with them. I can strech it a bit, but only a little. I need to wake up to alarm - partly it's not down me, partly it's down my body not agreeing with to whole think and shutting down the alarm while mind is still asleep.

I had a tired moment at couple hours back around 22:00. I realized just now that it was probably because I had already adjusted to certain extent to uberman - my body wanted to go back sleep after four hours awake despite me sleeping 10 hours prior to that. I should've maybe gone to bed then, but it's too late for that now. I'm not resetting completely after all when I do go to sleep. I aim to do it around the same times where my last schedule were settled - 0, 4, 8, 12, 16 or 20.

It's the mentality that I have that I hope will push me through. I had planned to give it up after the last failure. But I find I can't. I just really want to do this. Not because I want to have extra time. Sure, that's nice, but I'll probably waste it anyway. I want to do it for the experience, I want to do it for the lifestyle. It just seems so fitting schedule for me. I don't know, maybe there's some need to prove it to people that it can be done (there has been some can't rants already). All I care is that now I have the true uberman mentality, now I just have to make it count and do this.

I will be continuing with the format I started in the last attempt. I like it and I think it's pretty clear.