Switching Gears...Nutritionally

Going primal was an eye opening experience.  I had to give up eating all grains and beans to make it work.  The easy part was eating meat.  It's very convenient to cook up a bird and eat it for the rest of the week.  The hard part was adjusting to hunger timing.  At first I thought I was giving up a great source of energy by giving up bread, but after I got through the initial week, I realized that the bread was using more energy than it was giving.  Bread is filling, and by using it as a staple, I measure hunger by how full my stomach is.  When I cut bread out of the diet equation, I had to use my energy level to determine my hunger.  The body processes meat, vegetables, and fruit much faster than grains and beans.  Also, when I eat primal, I can access the energy from food more readily.

When the Primal Blueprint worked for me, I thought that meant that vegetarian/vegan was not the answer.  Lately, I have been reading some about the raw food diet (since Steve Pavlina keeps talking about it on google+).  The parts I like about primal eating are also the strengths of the raw food diet: no grains and no beans--just lots of fruit and vegetables.  The thing that really intrigues me about the raw food diet is how it provides constant energy.  Ultimately, the holy grail I am searching for is a more steady energy flow that doesn't interfere with my ability work and live.

The down side to eating primal is I need lots of sleep.  Naps just don't cut it.  When I sleep, I'm out like a light for hours on end.  This would be fine if I could keep my energy and attention up all day, but after lunch, I get extremely tired.  While I may be awake, my attention span is shot.  I have been thinking lately about trying polyphasic sleep again since spring is here.  Polyphasic sleep is an excellent way to stretch out a season.  I tried polyphasic sleep last fall, but I had problems with dehydration which is exacerbated by the cold of winter.  One of the benefits of the raw food diet is that it would allow me to not need as much sleep.  In fact when reading about Pavlina's success with polyphasic sleep, he attributed a big chunk of sustainable energy to eating raw.

I realize that going raw means giving up meat and essentially becoming vegan, but I really can't put much stock in the vegan opposition until I've tried raw for myself.  I have talked about raising chickens and rabbits for food in previous posts, but I haven't invested in livestock yet.  So it seems there's no time like the present to try going meatless.  I can still get a garden rabbit to help improve my garden's soil.  I think the raw food diet is worth a shot because organic, ethically raised meat is extremely expensive, whether I raise it myself or buy it from someone else.

Water is the Best Drink

Water is my favorite drink.  It's free and readily available.  It's easy to store and will last much longer than other drinks even after the container has been opened.  It doesn't need any additional ingredients to be drinkable (unless you are camping, then I would recommend adding tiny amounts of chlorine if the water is from a natural source).  It's no calorie (in fact it burns calories to drink it if the water is cold) and goes well with any food.

During my week trying polyphasic sleep, I had to drink lots of water just to stay awake since caffeine would have interfered with my ability to nap on time.  Getting less sleep caused me to be even more dehydrated since I didn't have my nightly hibernations to warm up under a blanket.  I found that once I started eating more fruit and vegetables, I was able to stay better hydrated.  

About a week after returning to monophasic sleep, my skin started breaking out.  I was also really tired all the time.  It finally occurred to me that I had stopped drinking much water at all.  The same day I noticed the break out starting, I began drinking lots of water.  As soon as I noticed that my glass was empty, I would refill it.  I noticed a difference by the end of the day.  The blemishes stopped getting worse, and I did not get any more of them.  

Winter is a very dehydrating time of year.  For starters, the cold and wind dry out my skin.  My muscles get stiff from shivering.  The idea of going outside is unpleasant.  The idea of drinking a cold beverage is not much more appealing.  During the warm months, it is easy to drink all the water I need because it feels good to cool down.  I get really lazy in Autumn because I lose all motivation to exercise and eat right.  I just want to curl up under a blanket and go to sleep until Spring.  

It is not until I decide to feel warm in spite of the cold that I feel able to exercise and drink lots of water.  I find that by drinking cool water, I actually feel warmer.  The warmth is caused by burning calories to heat the water to body temperature.  Once I make the conscious choice to drink more water and follow through on that choice with action, the rest is easy.  The cool water warms me up, improves circulation, and makes me feel ready for anything.  

Polyphasic Sleep Conclusions

Polyphasic sleep is not for the weak willed. I've been trying the Everyman 4 sleep schedule where I take 4 naps roughly every 4 hours and then have core sleep that is longer than individual naps in the early morning. I have succeeded in failing. I could not get a handle on the midnight to 4AM stretch of time. I can get up at 5AM just fine, but when my body wants sleep, there's no reasoning with my brain that 4AM is not too early.

I was really on a roll after the first day. The novelty of being awake at times when I am usually asleep was all the motivation I needed to stay awake those extra hours. But my plan to slowly migrate toward the Uberman sleep schedule was flawed. I am able to motivate myself to do something that I know is difficult, but when I'm asleep, I am in an entirely different context than reality. What I decide is urgent in reality had no impact on the motivations of my dreaming mind. When I am woken from a pleasant or urgent dream, my only goal becomes to stay asleep so I can continue to chase my dream quest.  Reality loses all importance.

Here are some other problems I encountered. My household consists of my spouse, cat, dog, and me. Everyone was accustomed to being in a certain place at certain times. The cat hates the dog. I had to let the dog stay out of his crate longer at night because my late night cooking and cleaning woke him up and made him noisy. When he was allowed to roam the house, he used his freedom to sleep peacefully on the couch. Even with him being practically comatose, the cat refuses to occupy the same room and protests by using inappropriate places for a litter box. This in turn made my husband cranky. Dealing with this much chaos while undergoing sleep deprivation is not fun. Granted, those problems can be solved with patience, something I had in abundance.  However, with so much time spent at work and so much  at home time spent with everyone else being asleep, I can see the dissonance between my perspective of reality and others' perception of my chronic napping.  I can see that it may seem like I was abandoning trouble at every turn without a care since I had more time to for leisure.  The polyphasic adaptation would be a lot easier without the stress of daily obligations.

Another issue I had was a problem with dehydration. My hands can get do dry in winter that they crack and bleed. One of my remedies is wearing moisture gloves at night after caking my dry patches with Neosporin. I found it hard to do that since I never stayed down very long. I had to drink lots of water to stay awake which resulted in more trips to the bathroom, hence more washing my hands. My eyes were always extremely dry, too. I see this as more of a problem with my diet than the sleep schedule. However, cutting back on delta stage sleep does seem to increase dehydration. I believe that's part of why we sleep so long at night - it's a daily hibernation to cut down on resource demands.

I do not regret trying polyphasic sleep. I gained a massive amount of insight from this trial about myself and about existence. I also found time to jump start some other habits which I intend to keep, even if it requires that I miss out on a little sleep to keep up with them. I find that a few minutes of Pilates in the morning, a long walk in the early evening, and yoga just before bedtime is very rewarding. I found it easier to eat healthier since high sugar foods and caffeine would make me crash before my scheduled nap time.  Really the past week of polyphasic sleep was like a boot camp that pushed me to extremes so that I had to consciously make every choice instead of just following a routine.

I do not consider the experiment of polyphasic sleep to be over. I am not going to try to sleep deprive myself in the near future. I can already see reasons that my current course of action will not get me to the goal of a 22 hour day. I will try this again in the future after I work on developing my self discipline into a less flabby state.

Night Bread

Now that I'm operating on a polyphasic sleep schedule, I am following my instincts on what to do in the late hours formerly filled by sleep.  I find the easiest thing to do is clean and organize.  My attention is more focused on what is at hand as opposed to what I'll be doing tomorrow.  I notice things around me and things that need attention much more than I used to when I only slept once a day.  While cleaning out the pantry the other day, I found a yeast packet with a bread recipe.  The recipe was very simple, and I already had all the ingredients.  Last night I made bread from scratch.  Cooking is very easy to do in a clutter free kitchen.  My problem before was I never had time to both clean up the clutter and prevent new clutter from immediately taking its place.  Now that I have lots of time and the patience to deal with clutter, I could clean up my kitchen and have space for baking.  Baking the bread gave me something to concentrate on so that I would not get bored and then tired.

I used the extra activity to try to push past midnight and reduce my core sleep.  I stayed up an extra two hours from what I've been doing, but then I slept an hour later than I planned.  The problem with waking up during time which I previously only used for sleep is that my mind does not recognize any pressing need to stay awake.

When I did awake from core sleep, I tried the bread, and it was delicious.  I know that eating bread (especially wheat bread) is not part of the Primal Blueprint plan to eat mostly meat and non-grain plants, but the fact that I made it myself is enough reason to enjoy it.  This bread was much thicker than bread from the store.  It is something I can eat over a long period of time instead of within two or three days as meat and vegetable dishes require.

Even though I overslept a bit (no Pilates this morning), I still feel like I made progress toward the Uberman sleep schedule since I found something to do in between midnight and 2am.  The challenge I face with the sleep reduction is not fatigue, it is finding a use for the time.  I started this plan to see if I could manifest more time for pursuing my interests.  Bread baking is certainly something I would do more often to increase my homemade food supply.

Polyphasic Sleep

Polyphasic sleep is a brain hack.  The goal is to spread sleep out into naps throughout the day while decreasing the time of the nighttime core sleep.  The pinnacle of success is the Uberman sleep schedule in which you only sleep for 20 minutes once every 4 hours for a total of 2 hours of sleep a day.  I had heard about the ability to sleep a mere 2 hours a day from various sources such as history (Napoleon Bonaparte, Leonardo Da Vinci, Ben Franklin) and yoga which claims that meditation and proper diet can reduce the need for sleep.  It was not until I found Steve Pavlina's blog about his experience with polyphasic sleep that I thought it was either possible or practical.  He stressed that starting a polyphasic sleep schedule would be easiest on a vegan diet and a schedule more flexible than the standard 40 hour work week.  I became intrigued by the benefits like having more time and being better able to focus waking time.

I first thought about the time gained from trying polyphasic sleep.  What would I do with an extra 6 hours every day?  Would I be able to find enough worthwhile activity to fill a 22 hour day, or would I be better off working on my standard 16 hour day time management?  The real first step to sleeping polyphasically is to assess how you spend your current waking hours.  I started becoming more conscious of how much I really could do with my time.  I often fall into the trap of becoming anxious about running out of energy.  It frustrates me that I consistently get sleepy throughout the day even after getting plenty of sleep at night.  Just by changing my perspective to imagine life from a polyphasic view, I gained incredible insight on how I could take conscious control of my time and make it work for me instead of just being an obstacle to pass through.

I have been working my way through an adjustment period of polyphasic sleep.  I started by napping in the day time.  I set my watch timer for 20 minutes and give myself the freedom to check out of consciousness for a while.  At work, I worked harder during normal working time and used my lunch break to try napping.  I can close the door to my office for privacy, but the thought of sleeping at my desk still seems wrong.  However, the alternative of getting so tired that I spend about an hour a day just staring into space seems a much greater waste of time.  I have since learned that I can easily spend my half hour lunch break on a 20 minute nap and 10 minutes of eating.  I always bring my own lunch since I view going out for lunch every day as an excessive waste of time, money, and gasoline.

My sleep schedule is a cross between Uberman and Everyman schedule.  Everyman is the warm up to Uberman that allows for a longer core sleep at night in addition to multiple day naps.  I set up times to sleep every 4 hours: 4, 8, and 12 o'clock intervals, give or take a half hour.  At midnight, I stay asleep through the time of the next nap, but if I wake up early, then I stay awake and continue the same nap-wake cycles.  I go to work early to account for an afternoon break nap and stay until my regular time.  So far, I feel really refreshed by the naps and miss long sleeps less and less.  A good set of adjustment schedules can be found here.  I don't feel constrained by an adjustment deadline so migrating from a siesta schedule to Uberman seems a feasible plan.

One of the advantages to more time awake is that I no longer have the excuse that I don't have time to exercise.  I can do a few minutes of a workout video in the morning, take a walk in the evening, and still have time to do yoga at night.  The exercise keeps me alert and makes me feel better about being awake.  I plan to continue this sleep pattern for a while longer, and maybe break up the core sleep into 2 distinct naps.  I find the challenge of controlling my sleep invigorating and feel that I am learning so much about myself and existence in the process.  I have had a huge leap in creativity, and I take advantage of that by spending a lot of time writing.