Week 3

Week 3 started out much more difficult than I anticipated. Not that it was nearly as bad as the first week. Before the problem was staying awake. Lately, however has been a series of serious oversleeps. Beginning on Monday at my 5:30am (right after I had blogged earlier about how great a day it was), I succumbed to temptation by reasoning that I could sleep a few extra minutes by just waiting for the next alarm to go off (remember, I have a series of staggering alarms). So I hit snooze and thought an extra five minutes wouldn't hurt. Next thing I know it is after 12pm. I slept through all of my alarms, several phone calls, and several emergency pages (very very bad thing). When I did wake up, I realized I seriously screwed up, and reasoned that "oh well, I might as well enjoy the sleep", and proceeded to go back to sleep for another few hours. Tuesday, not suprisingly went quite well, since I no longer had any sleep dep in my system. I didn't sleep for a couple of the naps, but I was surprised that I was able to sleep for any of them.

Wednesday morning...I did the exact same thing as Monday. Slept till noon. Same exact issue as before - I thought it would be fine to sleep for just a couple extra minutes. It seems that the snooze button is your ultimate enemy when adapting. You get one chance to get up. If you miss it, you go into an ultra deep sleep for which nothing will wake you.

I knew that the oversleeps were going to set me back quite a bit, and not knowing how much is very agonizing. Because of both of these incidents, I was seriously tempted to quit and try again maybe a few months later. The stubborn side gave in though and insisted that I continue to keep to the schedule. Thank goodness I did. As of early Sunday morning, I have been on nearly perfect schedule, and feeling pretty great for most of it. The first 3 or 4 cycles after the oversleeps I got really tired, but wasn't really that bad. I had one small oversleep (1 hour) simply because I slept through all of the alarms. I was lucky that my wife woke me up, and I got up right away. All of the days I've been pretty good to go during my circadian low points (5:30 am - 13:30pm). I've been tired very little of the time. I surprised myself a couple of times, because I was forced to skip naps a couple of times, and there were a few other naps where I just laid there not sleeping at all. Afterwards I am usually tired (the times after I skipped a nap I was very very tired, but not zombie tired). I am very excited because I finally feel like I'm close to being adapted. My productivity has been pretty decent - by far the best since I started this.

I instituted another alarm on the computer in addition to the existing 4 alarms I already use because of Saturday's oversleeping incident. This one plays techno, and to turn it off I have to switch on the monitor and manually shut it off. I also started sleeping with the lights on in the morning naps.

A few of the latest naps I've noticed have been very refreshing. I feel very good and well rested after waking up. In fact the last one I took, I woke up before any of the alarms went off and felt quite nice. It would seem that the oversleeps from earlier in the week didn't really affect my adaption that badly, thank goodness.