Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Forty Winks
    Forty Winks
    Forty Winks
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    Forty Winks

    By Jeff Mathews

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "Forty Winks" chronicles Steve's life as he prepares to embark on a journey to reinvent the sleep process. The idea behind this monumental undertaking is to sleep or nap through out the day at regular intervals instead of getting all your sleep in one chunk. So a good night sleep is simply out of the question. How long can one person endure such a sleep cycle? And what kind of a life could you lead only sleeping 2-3 hours per day? Follow along as “Forty Winks” takes you on entertaining journey into the unknown.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSpectrum Ebooks
    Release dateMar 8, 2014
    ISBN9781311719904
    Forty Winks

    Related to Forty Winks

    Related ebooks

    Wellness For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Between The Sheets

      Dec 23, 2022

      Between The Sheets
      4 min read

    • Article

      Health Intelligence

      Jan 7, 2020

      Health Intelligence
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Snooze Paradox

      Jul 17, 2022

      The Snooze Paradox
      4 min read

    • Article

      Are You Getting Enough Sleep?

      Feb 21, 2023

      WOMAN’S GP DR PHILIPPA KAYE ON HER TOPIC OF THE WEEK We all know that amazing feeling of getting into bed at night, as your body relaxes and you melt into the covers… But, then what? Do you sleep well? The average adult needs between seven and nine

      2 min read

    • Article

      Family Matters

      Jun 23, 2020

      Family Matters
      3 min read

    • Article

      Get Your Newborn To Sleep Through The Night

      Jul 8, 2019

      I am sure as a new parent, or even if you are pregnant, you constantly find yourself thinking about this. And you’ve probably heard a number of stories from family and friends, that you can say good bye to sleeping through the night once your baby is

      3 min read

    • Article

      BLUE Light

      May 13, 2022

      BLUE Light
      7 min read

    • Article

      Hush, Baby, Hush

      Dec 9, 2019

      Hush, Baby, Hush
      2 min read

    • Article

      What Will Calm Your Sleep Anxiety?

      Sep 27, 2022

      Tick the answers that most closely apply to you, then add up the symbols. Read the section, or sections, you ticked most, to find the root of your sleep anxiety 1 You most associate sleep with 2 Achieving optimum health 3 Your usual bedtime rou

      3 min read

    • Article

      From Start To Finish

      Feb 16, 2024

      From Start To Finish
      3 min read

    • Article

      Slippery Sleep Slope

      Jul 16, 2021

      Slippery Sleep Slope
      3 min read

    • Article

      Sleep Easy

      Dec 21, 2021

      Sleep Easy
      3 min read

    • Article

      What I Know About Sleep

      Jul 20, 2018

      What I Know About Sleep
      7 min read

    • Article

      Could You Live On A Microschedule?

      Aug 25, 2020

      When it comes to our routines, most of us have a rough idea of what we need to get done during a day. Perhaps you’ll make a to-do list, and tick things off mentally as you go along. Inevitably, you’ll get distracted at least a couple of times and ite

      4 min read

    • Article

      Diary Of An EARLY RISER

      Mar 17, 2020

      Diary Of An EARLY RISER
      4 min read

    • Article

      Your Questions...

      Feb 20, 2020

      Q I’ve never had a problem sleeping, but since going through the menopause I’ve spent my night’s tossing and turning. Is there anything I can do? Louise, Stoke-on-Trent A The menopause has a massive impact on sleep, and I often find it’s more diffi

      2 min read

    • Article

      Adrienne Herbert: ‘Don’t Underestimate The Impact Really Small Changes Can Have On Your Life’

      Jan 7, 2021

      Adrienne Herbert, better known to her 70K+ Instagram followers as Adrienne LDN (@adrienne_ldn), exudes infectious energy. Spending just a few minutes with her is enough to persuade you to *attempt* whatever it is she does to look and feel as well as

      5 min read

    • Article

      Catching Up On LOST SLEEP

      Aug 13, 2020

      Catching Up On LOST SLEEP
      5 min read

    • Article

      How To Stop The SCROLLING

      May 14, 2023

      How To Stop The SCROLLING
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Forty Winks

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Forty Winks - Jeff Mathews

      Forty Winks

      Copyrights 2014 Jeff Mathews

      Published by Jeff Mathews at Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

      INTRODUCTION

      DAY 1

      DAY 2

      DAY 3

      DAY 4

      DAY 5

      DAY 6

      DETAILS & OBSERVATIONS TO DATE

      DAY 7

      DAYS 8-11

      DAYS 12-18

      DAYS 19-20

      DAY 21

      DAY 22

      DAYS 23-24

      DAYS 25-30

      DAY 60

      DAY 90

      I AM A MUTANT

      DAY 120

      THE RETURN JOURNEY

      AN INTERESTING OBSERVATION

      ONE YEAR LATER

      ABOUT JEFF MATHEWS

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

      I would like to thank Steve for letting me tell this remarkable story. I should also thank him his generous economic stimulus package. Getting this story and ebook together has been a comical and entertaining experience.

      To my lovely wife, I thank you for standing behind me on all my endeavors. I expect there to be many more to come and it is a source of strength knowing that you are backing me at all times.

      INTRODUCTION

      This sleep experiment I am about to embark on involves taking multiple short sleep sessions throughout the day instead of getting all my sleep in one big chunk. It is called Polyphasic sleep. There are various ways to go about this sleep schedule but one of the more popular forms of polyphasic sleep is the Uberman schedule that suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you’re only sleeping 2-3 hours per day. I’d previously heard of polyphasic sleep, but until now I hadn’t come across practical schedules that people seem to be reporting interesting results with.

      Under this sleep schedule, your sleep times might be at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and 10pm. And each time you’d sleep for only 20-30 minutes. This is nice because the times are the same whether AM or PM, and they’re consistent from day to day as well, so you can still maintain a regular daily schedule, albeit a very different one.

      How can this sleep schedule work? Supposedly it takes about a week to adjust to it. A normal sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and REM sleep occurs late in this cycle. REM is the most important phase of sleep, the one in which you experience dreams, and when deprived of REM for too long, you suffer serious negative consequences. Polyphasic sleep conditions your body to learn to enter REM sleep immediately when you begin sleeping instead of much later in the sleep cycle. So during the first week you experience sleep deprivation as your body learns to adapt to shorter sleep cycles, but after the adaptation you’ll feel fine, maybe even better than before.

      It requires some discipline to successfully transition to this cycle, as well as a flexible schedule that allows it. While you’ll be sleeping a lot less, apparently it’s very important to sleep at the required times and not miss naps.

      It was interesting to read some about some people who’ve tried this sleep cycle. They reported higher alertness and energy, more vivid dreams and more lucid dreams, and of course lots of extra free time. I also read of failures, but in each case the person wasn’t strict about the nap schedule and overslept on occasion. A side effect of this sleep schedule is that you need to eat more, since you’re spending more time moving around. It appears that the long-term health effects of this sleep pattern aren’t well known. That’s irrelevant to me though because I find that being a long-term vegan, I can’t rely much on long-term studies done on non-vegans anyway. Some say that hormones in animal products negatively affect sleep patterns, and more restful sleep is commonly reported after making dietary improvements. So long-term studies on people eating average diets wouldn’t be of much use to me personally.

      The downside to this sleep schedule is that it can be inflexible. I’ve read that you can delay naps by an hour if necessary, but missing a nap can cause a rapid crash that takes a while to recover from. This means you only have about 3.5 hours of waking time between naps, 4.5 hours if you push it. So this can restrict your options a bit. Of course, you have to balance that sacrifice against the gain of many extra hours per day, every day. It is a very interesting trade off. It reminds me of something you’d find in The Book of Questions. Plus it’s just plain weird. So naturally I wanted to try it.

      Since I work from home and have control over my schedule, I have decided to test polyphasic sleep to see what it’s like. I’m already good at falling asleep fast (within a few minutes), and I often have dreams during 15-20 minute naps, so I wonder if I’ve partially conditioned myself to enter REM rapidly. This test obviously requires a bit of adjustment, but I’ve managed to work things out to make it practical enough. Since I’ve read that energy and alertness plummet during the first week, I kept the first week’s schedule very light mentally (no meetings, speeches, or major projects). Depending on how functional and coherent I am during the adjustment period, I’ll be doing mostly domestic projects like organizing the garage. I will be doing nothing involving power tools.

      I’m starting this polyphasic sleep schedule today, so last night was my last night of normal sleep for a while. I still got up at 5am this morning, and then I’ll begin doing the naps every 4 hours starting this afternoon. I’ll use a countdown timer alarm set for 30 minutes, so I won’t oversleep. I’ve decided that my sleep times will be 1am, 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, and 9pm. My aim is to continue at least until Halloween or death. We will see which comes first. If it seems to be going well and I retain basic functionality, then I’ll decide whether I want to continue with it.

      My main motivation for trying this is curiosity, and it seems like it would be a fun test of self-discipline. Plus it meshes nicely with my own general weirdness. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, it should be an interesting learning experience.

      Of course I’ll be sure to write and document this experience, but if I start making notes about seeing dead people, then you’ll know I’ve become delusional due to sleep deprivation.

      DAY 1

      I’ve completed my first day on the polyphasic sleep schedule, napping for 20-30 minutes every four hours. It’s been almost 36 hours since I last awoke from a full night’s sleep. Day is a relative term on this schedule, since the daytime sleeping schedule is no different than the nighttime one. I’m not sure whether to think of today as ‘day 1’ (the day after my first night of sleep deprivation) or ‘day 2’ (the second day after I officially started this sleeping pattern). I opted to call it ‘day 1.’

      No serious problems thus far aside from some fatigue, lower concentration, and occasional sleepiness. I’ve stuck to the plan, always beginning my sleep periods within 10 minutes of the target times and never oversleeping.

      Yesterday seemed tougher than it should have been, as I experienced some tiredness even though I was initially getting more sleep than usual by beginning the nap schedule after having a regular night’s sleep. It could have been that the naps were interfering with my usual daily rhythm, but I suspect the effect was largely psychosomatic. I think my mind was getting a head start on this experiment and inducing feelings of sleep deprivation early in order to get on with the show. Supposedly it’s the sleep deprivation that brings about the adaptation.

      Last night was semi-difficult, with lots of sleepiness and fatigue between the 1am and 5am naps because 5am was my normal waking time. I was only semi-functional both mentally and physically during this period. I spent some of this time catching up on my backlog of magazines to read (all caught up now). I also did some food preparation by chopping veggies (carrot and celery sticks). I also think making a bunch of interesting recipes would be a good way to pass the time when I’m most fatigued, since cooking is engaging but not overly fatiguing in short bursts (mentally or physically). My wife and I have many gourmet cookbooks so I have

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1