Day Zero

Started 2005-11-07

I was aware of the existence of the "Polyphasic sleep" (I will occasionally abbreviate it PL) since I was very little, I remember my father telling me about this peculiar sleeping technique. He told me he had a friend who used to do it during his years at University, and how this person was exceptionally satisfied by the Uberman Sleep, and the beneficial effects that this had in his life.

Even though I knew about it, I never got myself involved into this experiment, since I did not feel the urgent desire to have 21 useful hours per day, and also I did not have any medical evidence that this method was reliable and not self destructing. I ignored its possible usage until I crashed into a Wikipedia article about polyphasic sleep, where I came to know about Dr. Claudio Stampi, one of the leading advocates of polyphasic sleep research, Founder and Director of the Chronobiology Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a surprise to see that one of the most eminent persons in the world about this topic was Italian, I discovered that he initially graduated at the University of Bologna, and then moved to the States.

In his book, "Why We Nap, Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep" he explains his studies about the nature of sleeping, dividing the usual 8 hours into 5 phases, and only one them was indispensable for survival, the REM (Rapid Eye Movement), in which you dream. He formulated a theory by which one could just reduce his sleep solely at the REM phase, gaining productive hours every day.

One of the things that really gave me the interest is that several famous people applied catnapping to a large extent. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison and Buckminster Fuller. Other figures said to be associated with polyphasic sleep experimentation include Nikola Tesla, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill, just to name a few.

Enough with the explanation, for which I am not the most competent person to talk about these topics, therefore I shall redirect you to some useful links where the whole argument is explained in a satisfactory way.

Links

• Wikipedia
• Outside way
• Healthology article
• Claudio Stampi's article

Among the blogs of people who are currently doing the PL, I found this one to be reliable, complete and well documented.

Steve Pavlina

N.B. One of the reasons for which I decided to write this document in English is that, despite my limited linguistic capabilities, the audience that could possibly read my "adventure" would have been bigger if I acted this way.

In any case, here I am, in my day zero, Uberman sleep. After reading lots both official documents and real experiences through blogs, I decided to use the 4 hours method. It basically consists in sleeping about 30 minutes (24 would be optimal, according to NASA link1 link2 ). Leonardo slept for 15 minutes at each interval. Bucky slept for 30. 10 minutes is the *absolute minimum* time required for a nap to benefit you. NASA says that 24 minutes is the optimal nap time. Claudio Stampi did a few studies with the 4hr intervals. He tried 15 and 30 min (1.5 hrs sleep vs 3 hrs sleep) and determined that both worked and both are viable. However, he ran the 15 min study for 19 days and the 30 minute study for 49 days. So... combining this with common sense, I'm inclined to say that a nap in the 25 minute range is probably ideal, but variable to person to person (Source).

Now let us do some calculation, if I am going to take the risk of a breakdown the benefits are better be significant. With an interval of 4 hours between each single nap, in a single day that makes it 6 intervals, at 2, 6, 10 respectively. That would be 02 am 06 am 10 am 14 pm 18 pm 22 pm and so on. Assuming that I will not be able to respect the schedule perfectly, let's make a plausible prediction: 3-4 hours of sleep per day, that will mean and increase of 4-5 hours of productive time, 120 hrs/month, 5 days/month, 2 months/year. Yes, in a year, if everything goes right, I will be living 2 more months, since they would have been unnecessary sleep.

Kind of cool, uh? People often try to find a way to prolong their life through the most extravagant methods. To me they are just prolonging the oldness, they should try to find an algorithm to maximise the available time they have, as I am humbly trying to do, not sure it will work though.

According to these "revelations", I developed a new Study Time Schedule. My Economics teacher, Simon Foley , used to tell us how the best algorithm for studying during exams period was the 45-15, so here it is my version.

        45" Study | 3 times
        15" Break |
 
        30" Study | Once
        30" Sleep |

4 Hours Cycle, 6 times/day.

Suppose I will do only half of those, either because I am doing other activities, or because I'm just relaxing, watching a movie, talking with my friends, playing the bass, drawing, writing, surfing the Internet, programming, working, dancing, doing push ups or whatever I am doing, the idea is that I will not be studying. In that half I can manage to produce approximately 7-8 hours of studying per day, which leaves me mostly the same for spare time.

Study Time Schedule

TOTAL BREAK TIME: 4 ½ hrs

TOTAL SLEEP TIME: 3 hrs

TOTAL AVAILABLE TIME: 16 ½ hrs

AVALILABLE TIME FOR STUDYING: 8 hrs

AVALILABLE TIME FOR SPARE TIME: 8 ½ hrs

Of course that will be flexible according to my needs, I do no intent to become a machine ^_^

The real reason that made me want to try this whole thing is that I could not manage my time very easily. I did not find enough time to study AND continue my activities, so for the law of the opportunity cost, I had to give up something. Since I did not want to eliminate my human side, I opted for the third way, the unspoken one.

Food

I made some arrangements about the food supply and the diet to follow. Doing some researches I reached the conclusion that for a man of my size and physical activities I need about 2,500 Kilo calories. Since the Uberman Sleep means that I will be up and working for prolonged time, I will need to increase it up to 2,800 at least. I am usually quite careful about my alimentation, but in this situation I have to be even more. I will need plenty of water, orange juice, fruits (kiwi, apples, bananas), and more vegetables, maintaining the same amount of meat. One peculiarity that I encountered is that many feel the need for grape juice, I will see if that happens to me as well.

End results for Day 0. (levels from 1 to 10).

Physical vigor: 8

Given that this morning I had a logic partial exam and that I studied day and night, it's still surprisingly high.

Need for Sleep: 2

This section will back backwords compatible, in the sense that the higher the number, the worse the situation is.

Mental activity: 8

Quite receptive and alert, nothing special though.

Daily Functioning: 8

Good, no problems encountered.

Academic Performance: 6

I forgot a couple of passages in some demonstrations and a definition was incomplete. The overall performance was not satisfactory, but that is due to the extreme difficulty of the subject with this teacher. There are legends in the school about him, some students (not the dummy ones) tried more than 10 times his exam before passing, they had all the other exams done ancd clear, and often people waited him to go away from the school in order to graduate, true story. When he took a two years off to go to Argentina, instead of the usual 100 people, there were roughly 300 students attending the logic course with new teacher, hoping to pass before the the old one came back.

Social Performance: 9

Very good, both with my roommates and with my friends, no problems at all. My roommate Goby accidentally (yeah, right) tried to kill me with a screwdriver. LOL, just kidding, he put it in a hole of our table, I did not see it, and as a result it perforated my right leg (nothing tragic, just a scratch after all).

These numbers should be considered as a base for the coming days, since I started the Uberman Schedule at 18:00, even though I slept approximately 3hrs in the night, and yesterday I had a nap at 19:00. I am looking forward to see how it will develop.