Alex the Uberman, an introduction.

Introduction

Hello guys and gals!

I've created this blog for the purpose chronicling my transition from a Monophasic sleep schedule to a Polyphasic one, specifically the "Uberman" variation.

First a little bit about myself! I'm a professional poker player and I work from home. I juggle my feeble attempts to get in as much "work" as I can with a girlfriend, PC gaming with my friends and some social activities (choir for example ;P, shoutouts to y'all).

I feel like there is enough time to work the minimum, see the gf reasonably often and play a few games but there is no room for learning/taking up new hobbies which can be time intensive without displacing a significant portion of time with things that I enjoy like gaming.

As an example I studied chess for a time and have had a brief stint with Go but wish to return to both of these as I love strategy games in all forms and would love more time to delve into them as well as putting in a few extra hours a day at the tables to earn a better living.


Uberman?


Most people sleep monophasically, or have a single block of sleep per 24 hour cycle, typically 8-9 hours, during which we get 1.5-2 hours of REM sleep which is critical for our brain to recuperate, solidify memories the details of which you can read about online if you're interested.

The idea of polyphasic sleeping is training yourself to enter REM sleep immediately after going to sleep instead of several hours in a monophasic schedule.

The uberman polyphasic plan revolves around taking six 20 minute naps a day, once at the beginning of each 4 hour period.

As an example, my target nap times will be at 2-6-10-2-6-10 with ~3.5 hour awake periods in between. This results in 2 hours of sleep per day and thus 22 hours of awakeness instead of the usual ~16. However

I have read up on other schedules such as the Dymaxion (four x 30 minute naps a day) which are inherently more flexible in terms of an extra 2 hours of awake time per awake period but are apparently much harder to adapt to if you haven't successfully adopted a polyphasic sleep schedule before.

I'm going to attempt to adopt the Uberman schedule then get in contact with others who have transitioned from this to the Dymaxion and go from there as it's far superior in the flexibility of co-ordinating social activities etc. but we'll see how the Uberman goes first.

What you can expect from this blog

I'm going to keep track of my progress daily on here in terms of how alert I'm feeling compared to my monophasic which is pretty good lately as I've been eating healthy a exercising a bit the past several months.

There will be my thoughts on how this schedule conflicts with social situations and how I cope with them.

I'll also put in tips to adapting as I struggle through the first fortnight or so.

I'll leave it there for now, any questions comments or whatever let me know and I'll try answer them asap.

Alex