After the 3 hour core sleep, I woke up at 7 am. The process of waking up was quite difficult but eventually I forced myself out of bed and took a shower. 30 minutes after waking up, I started to feel better, almost as if I have had enough sleep. This feeling continued until it was close to my 11:30 am nap time. Unsurprisingly, I fell asleep right away during my first nap, and felt refreshed after waking up. After the first nap, I did not feel tired at all and continued to function well until my 5:30 pm nap time. In fact, it didn't even feel like I only had 3 hours of sleep the night before. A similar feeling applied to the 5:30 pm nap and it was definitely a good feeling. I was having a really productive day since I had 4 extra hours the night before to do my work!
What happened at the next nap time at 10:30 pm was a little weird. First, I was not able to fall asleep right away, which was still OK considering that it was a time of the night where most normal people would still be awake. Second, when I did fall asleep, it was as if I was still conscious. I knew I had fallen asleep but at the same time I was aware of my surroundings. Although it seemed like I did not get much of a nap, I definitely felt alert and awake after the nap, which further corroborates the speculation that I had actually fallen asleep.
You can imagine what happened next.... 5 hours of being awake! The gain of an additional 4 hours is definitely a HUGE bonus since I'm able to do a lot more things that I would otherwise not be able to incorporate into my busy schedule. I have recently re-ignited my passion for piano playing and so I was able to spend a couple of hours practicing, which would've been impossible with my regular schedule.
Approaching 4 am (my scheduled core sleep), I started feeling very sleepy and had to struggle to stay awake until then. I succeeded eventually and this ends Day 1 of awesome extended hours.
I forgot to mention that during the day we were telling our labmates about our 'crazy' sleep schedule and some were curious to know how long we can keep it up while others are skeptical that this schedule will even work. There were lame excuses such as "I like my sleep too much to give it up" to which I will give you reasons to prove the absolute uselessness of that statement:
1) You like your sleep when you feel fully recharged from sleeping. Under my old 'full sleep' schedule, I got 6-7 hours of sleep per day and definitely felt like crap for some parts of the day. I would say that if this Everyman schedule works out, I will like this new sleep schedule better because I won't feel tired from sleeping a little less than 8 hours!
2) Physically speaking you are not giving up your sleep. Instead, you are enhancing and even gaining useful hours of sleeping. The everyman schedule allows one to enter the useful phases of sleep, the REM phase, quickly whereas during a normal 8-hour sleep, you waste your time on hours and hours of 'useless' sleep. As an analogy you can imagine someone who made a burnt cake. Half of the cake was burnt and you spend half the time eating useless, tasteless crap but when you actually hit the middle of the cake you find that the core of the cake is actually delicious and you end up feeling satisfied. You can see where I am going here. Why not be a good baker (sleeper) by making a delicious cake (getting productive sleep) rather than being a bad baker (sleeper) and making burnt cake (mixing useless and useful sleep)?
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