So… I overslept again. I was wide awake for my first cycle, then quite tired for my second. I kept myself awake at first by practising with my friend’s Poi. The poi (basically weights at the end of strings, that are spun around the body in a kind of dance) were hugely useful for keeping me awake. If alertness were measured on a scale from 1-10, then after mere seconds of starting to spin the poi I could take myself from a 1-2 level to a 5-6 level.
So things were great, but I was still feeling super-tired at one point, and it wasn’t yet 7:30. I went back to my room… and woke up at 9:50. Yeah. I must have crawled in bed out of exhaustion and forgot to set the extra alarm again. I felt like a huge idiot, but still didn’t want to give up, so at noon I had another nap, and continued my schedule. For my next nap, I laid down at 3:31, proceeded to have fairly long dream about my mum and sister coming to visit me at university, then woke up at 3:46! Fifteen minutes, REM-nap.
That really brightened my spirits, as it made me feel like Uberman will actually be achievable. I spent much of the remainder of the day at Canada Day festivities, then spent almost the entire night in a friend’s room watching TED talks. One in particular stood out to us, because of its simplicity and call to action, but I’ve made a separate post about that » How to Add Daily Awesome to your Life in 2 Easy Steps.
During my noon nap, I had another dream, and I was thinking that I must be doing very well, but then around 2pm I became extremely fatigued again, and took an extra nap. I woke up still tired, and have no idea what I did before napping again at 3:30. I also have no idea what I did between my 3:30 nap and waking up at 8. I’m not even entirely positive that I was up, although I’m pretty sure I got out of bed at 4… Edit: I just asked my roommate. Turns out I was in bed from 4-8 (although he’s not sure exactly what happened when my alarm went off at 4). Ugh. I’m going to think about all of this…
This is weird. I don’t like not knowing where my days are going. I’m not going to give up quite yet, but if this sort of thing continues to happen, I think it’s fair to say that my body really does not approve of Uberman. If so, I’m probably going to try some non-monophasic sleep schedule, but it will include some sort of core sleep at night, between 4.5h and 6h.
Will keep you posted.
Malcolm
PS: One of my lines of reasoning for stopping is that I’m thinking that there are some other really cool parts of personal development that I could explore if I weren’t so focused on Uberman. I was hoping that the extra wakefulness of Uberman would give me a chance to do this, but alas I am not as patient as I would like to be.
During my Uberman adjustment, I spent a night watching TED talks with a friend who had just discovered them. If you’re reading this and don’t know what TED talks are, go watch some. You’ve been missing out on a lot of inspiration.
It’s only 3 minutes long, so you might as well watch it, but the summary is essentially that Matt Cutts decided awhile ago to challenge himself to do something daily for 30 days. The idea behind this is that since the time-period is so limited, it’s a much more achievable goal because you can tell yourself, “Okay, 10 more days, then I’m free”. These aren’t necessarily going to be permanent life changes, but they show you how much you can accomplish if you just set your mind to it.
A cool point he made is that the 30-day challenges really raised his self-confidence. I think this is a really subtle way of enacting some pretty awesome personal development. Here are the promised 2 easy steps:
After watching the video, myself and the friend decided when the video ended that we would decide on our own 30-day challenges before we watched another video. After talking about it briefly, I decided I wanted to write a poem or song every day and he decided he’d do the same. While I think writing a full song every day would be extremely difficult for me, I feel that this will be manageable because if I get to the end of the day with nothing written then I can just write a haiku. Haikus are poems.
Many of these poems will be posted to the blog. In some cases, I might not have the time or technology to post a song, or it might be about a private part of my life, but I will make sure to at least post the title of such a piece within a few days.
If it all sounds too hard, start with something easy, like “Take a photo every day”. Like my inclusion of Haikus, that makes it virtually impossible to fail, but you will still feel drawn to taking more interesting photos than you have to.
What will your challenge be?
A haiku, for reasons described earlier…
