Ok, to keep you posted, here’s a summery of the last days.

Monday and tuesday went really well. I had mostly REM sleep when napping! And I also was getting tired shortly before nap time and fell asleep easily. Here’s proof for my REM naps:

I felt quite well rested. Not many signs of sleep deprivation.

But my cold was getting worse. On tuesday evening, I felt really sick. I was sneezing all the time, felt very cold and perhaps even had a temperature. I don’t blame this to the adaptation. Some of my colleagues at work were ill before, and also my girlfriend was getting sick last weekend. So what I was experiencing most likely were symptoms of an infection.

So on tuesday evening, I decided to grant myself a bit more sleep to cope with this illness. I slept 7 hours in the night from tuesday to wednesday.

I was staying at home on wednesday and and thursday, continuing naps during the day. The night to thursday, I granted myself 1.5 hours more sleep than my normal core, sleeping 4.5 hours in total.

I’m feeling that my body needs more sleep now since I’m ill. I overslept my last nap by 1.5(!) hours. Until I’m fit again, I will deliberately sleep a bit more than my schedule allows for. I’m planning to continue to strictly follow the schedule afterwards…

Day seven wasn’t very different from the ones before. Except that at this point, it somehow worked already. I was tired sometimes but far away from tired like I-only-slept-half-of-the-night-tired.

I bought a pillow and a blanket to leave at my workplace. I’m still in need of a sleeping pad. Sleeping while sitting at a desk isn’t really relaxing. Also, in order to fall asleep, I need a place where I don’t have to expect someone to enter the room and wake me up or at least wonder why I am sleeping on my keyboard.. Today I will try the basement of our building…

In order to get more REM sleep when napping, I tried to do Naptation during the weekend. That is, I didn’t sleep on friday after I got up at 6 a.m. No naps and no core sleep during the night between friday and saturday. Then, the plan was to double the naps on saturday but don’t do core sleep. Well, after being awake for 25 hours, the first nap at about 7.15 a.m. on saturday went fine. After breakfast with friends, I did the second nap at 12. But this one I overslept. Woke up somewhere between 1.30 and 2 p.m. My girlfriend told me I got up when the alarms started ringing at 12.30 to stop them all – even the one I had to get out of bed to reach – and then came back to bed again. I must have been falling asleep instantly. I can’t even remember being awake during this “nap”. My girlfriend was also napping with me, being woken by the alarm. But she didn’t get up either and therefore could not prevent me from oversleeping..

The naps during the after-noon and evening were fine. But I overslept again on the one at night. I don’t know if I went to bed at half to or half past 12. Nevertheless, I set my alarm clocks to ring at 12.10. Either I did not hear any of them or I went to bed at 12.30, 20 minutes after the alarm (falsely setting the alarm to a time in the past).. Well, I woke up at 8 a.m. and can’t remember this right…

After this, I broke up Naptation and I am now back to normal Everyman. Hope this does not throw back my adaptation efforts to much. It would have helped a lot if I have had someone who stayed awake and checked after me to prevent oversleeping the naps..

But, as an excuse, I got sick during or perhaps already before this weekend, having a cold now. Because of this, it’s maybe better that I got a bit more sleep last weekend. This week, I will continue with the Everyman schedule as planed…

Yesterday, on the 5th day of the Everyman adaptation, I overslept by two hours in the morning. Initially woke up with the alarm at 6 a.m. and took of the Zeo but I didn’t get up fast enough and fell back into sleep until 8 a.m.

Again, I had problems falling asleep for the 12 o’clock nap. Slept for 5 minutes at most. Because of work issues, I had to defer the second nap until 7 p.m. and then overslept by 24 minutes.

It is not that easy to time the naps and the alarm clock right. Sometimes, I’m hardly falling asleep, so that I just started sleeping when the alarm already starts ringing. But setting the alarm to far in the future may result into oversleep if I fall asleep right away. What I really would like to have was an app that reads my sleep phases as Zeo does but will activate the alarm exactly 20 minutes after I fell asleep… Is there a SDK for the Zeo headset?

Third nap was from 12.09 to 12.23. Again, most of it was light sleep.

At 3 a.m. I went to bed for core sleep:

In the morning, first thing I did was going out for a run. When I returned I took a shower and again did Kapalabhati and Anuloma pranayama. I felt quite energetic today until after-noon. I think, it was since the first nap which did not really work (again only 5 minutes) that I got really sleepy. Was very tired and almost fell asleep when I was in a meeting.

Had the other naps at 6 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. The first was a typical almost-only-light-sleep nap, the second one looked like this:

Needles to say, after waking up from deep sleep, I feel very tired right now. I’m really looking forward to core sleep, that I will get in an hour. Writing theses words feels very cumbersome..

Extrapolating the trend of my tiredness, I may be approaching real sleep deprivation. Hope this will trigger phase repartitioning and therefore adaption…

Here’s day 4, first productive workday on Everyman. But first, last night’s core sleep diagram.

Almost exactly 3 hours of sleep, one hour of REM, light and deep sleep each. But I was very tired this morning after I got up. And the most annoying part was that I was freezing all day. Almost felt as if I got a cold. Well, maybe I am getting one.. But having said this, there were some hours when I felt quite energetic today.

Well, ok, here’s what I did, to fight the fatigue: before I left home, I did Kapalabhati and Anuloma pranayama, also a bit of power workout and I took two cups of coffee. When I arrived at work, I wasn’t very tired.

On the contrary, I had problems falling asleep for the first nap at 12. I only slept for 5 minutes but at least those were REM sleep. Since I wasn’t really tired before that nap, I used Gnaural (a tool for generating binaural beats) and a track I designed myself to enhance low alpha waves, hoping to get more relaxed, more REM sleep and also not to be disturbed by my colleges. (I’ll post that track later on…) I think, all those effects did occur, but I’ll still need to improve on my napping situation at work in order to fall asleep better and faster. Perhaps another room and a sleeping pad? Today I just kept sitting in my chair in front of my desk and used my in-ear headphones and an eye mask.

After that nap I had lunch and an energy drink that I forgot having kept in the fridge for a few months.. (it contained 150mg caffeine and also some taurine and guaraná). I was productive till after 5 p.m. deferring my after-noon nap. When I got home at about 6 p.m., a friend called and it got even later. Tried to nap at 6.45, but again I wouldn’t fall asleep right from the start. Here’s a sleep diagram showing the naps in the evening:

I’m attributing this negative effect to the caffeine intake.. Of course I’m not adopted to Everyman yet! So, it will probably stay hard without caffeine for some days, but I will try to get productive without coffee or tea during the next days..

Also, I’m wondering when I will be having REM sleep only naps. Perhaps I still need to be more sleep deprived to get a REM rebound and a repartitioning of sleep phases…?

Last night’s core sleep looks not bad, I think. 

The primary alarm clock did not wake me up, so I overslept by 15 minutes. I was very tired when I got up. Was not productive till after the first nap. Thank god it was a sunday and I didn’t have to work! Got a bit of a headache during the afternoon.

All three naps lasted about 20 minutes (20, 18 and 21) but mainly consisted of light sleep:

When being woken at 22.50 p.m. from the last nap, I was terribly tired. But as soon as I started doing something, it was bearable. I am really looking forward to my core sleep now that I will get in a few minutes.. This day was definitely harder then last one. Hope it won’t be too hard to concentrate on my job tomorrow.. Maybe I’ll need to fallback to extensive use of caffeine.. During the last two days, I reduced my caffeine intake to one cup of coffee.

Ok, here is my second night. The diagram isn’t valid in the end because I lost the headset during sleep.

I went do bet at 3.30 and got off at 7 a.m., 30 minutes over schedule. This day, I definitely felt sleep deprivation. Except from being tired, time seemed to be running faster than normal. Every now and then I wondered, what I did the last hour.

After breakfast, I took a walk to the post office (about 1 km distance) to fetch a parcel. In fact, I had to go there twice because I forgot my id card. It wasn’t too hard to stay awake after that. For my first nap at 12.30, it took me about 15 minutes to fall to sleep and I slept 18 minutes most of which was light sleep. There were no problems getting up from that nap.

I had planned to do some studies for my psychology courses during the after-noon but I was too tired to concentrate. In order to stay awake, I spend a few hours playing Deus Ex  on my PS3 which was in that parcel I got earlier (very good game btw.. best to stay awake..;D).

Had quite similar naps at 5.30 p.m. and in the evening from 9.45 to 10.15 p.m. After the last one, I felt stressed out some how. My girlfriend arrived and woke me up after 14 minutes of sleep (according to Zeo: 5min REM, 1min SWS and 8min light sleep) and we instantly went out clubbing. I wasn’t really tired after I got up, but I was definitely in a bad psychological condition. It was hard to concentrate on something other than my raw audio and visual sensations. I found most sounds and loudly speaking people somewhat annoying.. Was kind of in my own world.. We stayed out till 3 a.m. On the way home, I was REALLY REALLY tired! Came home, went to bed and instantly fell asleep at about 3.40 a.m.

So, this is my first day on Everyman schedule.

I prepared myself a little bit by getting out of bet at 7 and 6 a.m. the last few days. I also tried to nap at work yesterday and the day before, but could not fall asleep. I did nap yesterday at 11 in the evening but already overslept by 20 minutes because I misconfigured my new wake-up light. I was awake from 12 till 3 a.m. and then slept until 6 a.m.

I used my Zeo Sleep Manager to keep track of my sleep stages. The following picture is a screenshot from my iPhone running the Zeo app. It shows last night’s log.

Red bars represent times when I was awake, light green is for REM sleep, gray for (unhelpful) light sleep and dark green is for deep sleep (or SWS). Oversleeping my 11 p.m. nap resulted in deep sleep which should only occur during the core sleep, when doing the Everyman. So this is bad.

Getting out of bed surely is easier with that wake up light. In the morning and during the first half of the day, I was feeling much more well-rested than I expected after only 3 hours of sleep. Ok, maybe that’s because of the overslept nap.

Today I did sleep during my napping times. Here is the Zeo log for my noon nap:

So I was sleeping 14 minutes from which 13 minutes were REM sleep. Nice thing is 92% of sleep time was REM sleep. But my main problem seems to be falling asleep for naps. With the evening nap, it was even worse.

Although I was quite tired, I could not manage to fall asleep most of the time that I planned for the nap. But perhaps that’s a problem I won’t have during the next days as soon as I will be more sleep deprived.

Nonetheless, I will have to learn napping to survive the next days…