Everyman Spamayl Adaption - Days 3 to 4

The day before yesterday, day 3, went without a hitch. I ended up missing a nap in the early morning due to being distracted on msn, (always social networking ruining our lives, right?) and although I went to take it a little late at 3am I couldn't seem to get to sleep, my mind was just too active. I got really tired though, just unable to fall asleep, despite quieting my mind. It didn't seem to affect me though, no problems with oversleeping for my core.

The problem came yesterday, day 4, when I decided to do two naps back to back in the afternoon and skip my evening nap. Everything was going dandy until 3am. Up to this point I wasn't feeling anymore tired than usual, except the fact I took an extra nap back to back with my night nap to make up for any sleep I may have lost from skipping my evening one. Come 2:30am I decided to take my last nap of the day, which went fine, I woke up nice and dandy. The problem comes after. I seemed to have blacked out around about 3am when searching for some Misfits to start watching, before waking up again naturally at 4:30am. I really don't know what happened there because I didn't particularly feel tired, but I was a bit bummed that I had to take my 3hr core straight after having a blackout. This wasn't a particularly healthy behaviour, but I didn't know what else to do, I was frustrated and just wanted it to all go away. Needless to say I had no problem waking up after my core from light sleep.

What's interesting though is that when I look at my sleep graph I seemed to have gone through four 15 minute sleep cycles before finally settling into a normal 1.5hr sleep cycle. I don't remember this exactly but it does go to show how well my body is accepting my 15 minute naps. I feel like the quality is improving every time I take one. In fact now I pretty much always wake up in low frequency stage 2 sleep or deep sleep. The way I can tell the difference is that waking from stage 2 sleep is like waking up in the morning and feeling lazy, wanting to do nothing more but sink my head back into the pillow for the sake of comfort. Waking from deep sleep usually ensures disorientation. Also, waking to my alarm from deep sleep seems to take a gradual process of about 15 seconds as my senses become more attuned to the world again, rather than when being woken from stage 2 sleep when I tend to jump up startled from my vibrating alarm.

I've been pondering on why I always seem to blackout at 3am and after some research I've come across the reason why. What happens is that the body's cortisol levels are naturally lowest at 3am, cortisol being the hormone that regulates the endorphins in your body that keep you awake. This is followed by the body's naturally lowest occuring dip in tempurature at about 4am. Add the two together and of course it's going to be extremely difficult to stay awake between the hours of 3am to 5am. After that time period, the body's cortisol levels and body temperature rapidly increases, to the point that by the 5am, the tired dip that naturally occurs there is equal in frequency to that of the mid afternoon.

Considering this I've decided to move my core back to 3am, and replace the nap that would usually be there in the late morning at around 7am instead. However, my body at 3am can only seem to manage sleeping 1.5hrs at most at the moment due to the core sleep at 4:30am being too deeply imbedded into my system. I've decided to use this to my advantage and use it to convert to an Everyman 1.5 schedule instead, where I'll be taking about five to six 15 minute naps, one in the morning, one or two in the afternoon, one in the evening, and two in the night/early morning. It'll look a little like this:

 This may or may not work. I'm especially worried about the large gap in the morning, although if I adapt properly this shouldn't be a problem. I'm hoping though that when I wake, my body's naturally increasing levels of wake hormones will be sufficient to pull me through without blacking out so easily for at least the first 6 to 8 hours, although I don't doubt it will be hard. Also, as I become more sleep deprived my 3am core will probably want to lengthen to make up for my lost sleep, either that or my morning nap will try and revert back to my old core. I'll give it a maximum sleep length of 2hrs15mins though, nothing more. I expect to be very sleep deprived, maybe I'll hallucinate like on when I tried Spamayl, although my naps are better quality now so it might not hit me quite as hard. I think it's worth a try though, moving my core to a more suitable time, as this would ensure I really would be getting the best quality sleep I can get.

It'll be a little weird to sleep at 3am and wake up at 4:30am, but I'll start tonight and see what happens. I guess not updating till the end of this week failed again, I'll start updating this daily again.