Wrap Up

The 4 Hour Core

I have failed at being a blogger. This is because I fell behind and didn't catch up. I have let you down world you have my deepest apologies. As a result I am going to wrap a couple weeks up with very little details.

Once I transitioned to the 4 hour core naps (usually not actually 4 hours as I was waking up around 3:40 naturally for probably the first week) I felt that I was able to maintain both Muay Thai and the gym. If I ever did feel overly tired or worn down I would just toss in another 20 min nap. In this sense I would consider the experiment a success. I feel that a very intense level of exercise can be maintained on a reduced number of sleeping hours with the help of a Polyphasic sleeping pattern.

For those of you who have been wondering how I am able to get out of bed rather than lay there and enjoy the warm beautiful comfort of sleep this will probably help explain. I recently found this and it is going to be my new personal anthem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNL_DAI19_I
so worth a listen.

My naps have gotten super weird (especially my 9am nap) cause I am dreaming almost all of the time and there are many points during my dreams where I am not sure if I am dreaming or not. I even have had this feeling while I am awake sometimes. This is one of the strangest feelings I have ever had but other than this feeling which is just after waking up I am very alert and have easily as much energy as I did before I started this.

One strange thing about the dreams is the fact that I keep dreaming I am driving my car usually when I am napping in my car. This really freaks me out because I am never able to steer so i crash into things. It seems incredibly realistic and sometimes I will wake up numerous times to another driving dream. I have started figuring out whether or not I am sleeping by just slugging someone on the street in the face (its not quite the spinning top from inception but it gets the job done). So far I have not punched anyone in real life to check if I was dreaming but it seems like I am getting closer to this. As a result of this checking if I am dreaming I have had a ton of lucid dreams which is so sweet.

I feel that this pattern may become the regular way I sleep. It allows  me to stay up and work but also get up early in the  morning both of which I enjoy. If I ever feel I am not getting enough sleep I can either extent my core a bit or toss in a couple extra naps to make up for it.

I felt like the tiredness (from excessive exercise and too little sleep) was making me very ineffective at getting done the things I needed. I was still doing plenty of stuff that was interesting and beneficial but it was not things that I needed or originally wanted to get done. It seemed to have shifted my perspective to one of immense procrastination. Once I changed to the everyman 4 hour I felt my priorities come back and I am studying mandarin again and working on my projects.

I think that my cravings for sugar are still there though it is not as strong as it was before. I think this is less due to the sleep now and more because not eating things that are bad for me has become a habit. Hopefully I will be able to maintain this or at least not binge super hard which is my usual problem. I seem to have a mentality like well I ate 1 donut so I messed up already may as well eat the other 11.

Back to "Normal"

I started to get a cold sometime last week. I kept my 4 hour schedule until I started coughing a lot and decided to give it a rest and stop exercising as hard. I went to around 7 hours of total sleep, some of which is naps and sometimes numerous cores other times just one long sleep. I don't think that the sleeping schedule was the main reason that I got sick. I do think it is partially because instead of slowing down when it first started happening I tried to exercise through to the other side. I didn't make the jump :( .

An example of my new sleeping style is yesterday I had 1 twenty minute nap (lucid :) ), a 2 hour and 45 minute core and then a 4 hour core.

Even now when I am getting normal amounts of sleep I still look forward to this 9am nap in my car and it is always my best sleep. I have also managed to continue having very vivid dreams and I have gotten lucid like three times in the last week.