Currently my eyes are refusing to focus, so this post may be interesting and/or grammatically laughable. Day 3 has definitely been the hardest, but still nothing terrible. We expected day 3 to be tough. Blog guy, Steve, crashed on days 3 and 5. He wrote that he spent 90 minutes sitting on the couch staring at a blank wall. Maggie and I approached this level of tiredness at two points in the day. Last night, shortly after our last blog post, we were zombies. It took every effort to keep or eyes open. In fact, at one point Maggie was falling asleep on my couch. I pulled her up onto her feet. My plan was to spout words of encouragement, but nothing came out. I couldn't think beyond, "Must not succumb to sleep...help keep Maggles awake!" We stood there for a few moments, Maggie tried to sit down again, and I just pulled her up. There was little else I was able to do other than force ourselves to stay awake.
Surprisingly though, from around 10am to 2:50am we were fairly alert. During the day at school I felt no tiredness and had trouble sleeping in all my daytime naps. The days and nights have continued to be enjoyable. Last night we went grocery shopping for a weeks worth of fresh fruit to make 2am smoothies and we spent at least 1.5 hour perfecting our binuraul rhythm playlists. Now we have a continuous 30 min track that gently leads us through Beta, Alpha, Theta and then finally Delta waves. Around 20 min are spent in the Theta proportion, which is where REM supposedly occurs in 20 minute cycles and then we finish with a 5 min section of deep Delta sleep. I am surprised that this seemingly pseudoscientific beat thing works, but there is no arguing, they definitely help. Even if it is all placebo, I always fall asleep or at least enter a close sleep-like state when listening to my beats.
Main success of the day: we both had our first true REM nap. I've had at least two. The first one was last night and I don't remember much of the dream other than it happened. The second REM nap I had was just in this last nap cycle. This one I remember most of the details of the dream and it was quite long with a pseudo plot line and separate segments. In part of it, I yelled at an MBTA official for giving me a hard time while getting on the train. This clearly originates from my frustrations at now living in Allston and waiting 20 min for a bus, only for two to arrive at the same time. In Switzerland, all buses and all trains run precisely on time. Down to the second practically. I feel like this is definitely a solvable problem and am mystified that some statistician hasn't come in and predicted the route times more accurately at various times during the day. Or perhaps it's just a general lack of work ethic and apathy toward punctuality. Regardless, it annoys me to no end during our 45 +/- 25 min commute to work. What the US needs to do relax immigration requirements for Swiss nationals ....
Due to our extreme tiredness we napped between 3am and 6am at 4:15-4:45 am. As long as we are only sleeping in 30 min segments, we should be still depriving our body of it's comfortable 90 min sleep cycle and therefore training it to drop into REM quickly. Interestingly, I find I am much more groggy after a nap with dreams than one without.
Ideally, our naps should be unflinchingly rigid though I pushed the limits of that today. In preparation for tectonic plate diving in Iceland, I went again to a pool SCUBA session to just re-familiarize myself with the equipment and skills. Though the extra SCUBA session was exceedingly useful, I completely missed my 9pm nap and didn't get home until 10:30pm. I unsuccessfully tried to sleep for 30 min then before our midnight nap. I am not sure now whether my tiredness is due to this missed nap or due to my body craving more REM now that it understands 30 min. naps are all it can get. Maggie reports having a non-sensical conversation with me after my midnight nap. I remember trying to explain something to her that I wanted/needed, but I am pretty sure it was all in my head and she couldn't even make out my words let alone their meaning..
Overall, today has been hard, but not nearly as much as I would have imagined. I normally can snap myself out of groggy states by activity of some sort. A lot of the groggyness battle is now mental. I have to convince myself each time to wake up, to get up, and to stay up. Otherwise today we ate fondue (mmMMmm), made smoothies (filled with peaches, plums, apricots, blueberries, strawberries and raspberries), played DDR when we were really desperate to stay awake, and finally wrote in our novels and in this blog.
- Daily Summary -
Health: Surprisingly still great.
Energy Level: Good, has it's low moments, but definitely still functioning.
Daily Functioning: In general ok, unless talking to Maggie right after I wake up.
Academic Performance: Less productive today than normal due to late arrival time at CFA. Also I noticed on my terminal shell from last night that I spent a good portion grepping FG0 instead of PG0 which explains a lot of my frustration of grep not working late last night.
School Performance: Social? Do I have a social life other than hanging out with my awesome roommate?
Maggie's more tired story:
Today we started out exhausted and ended up exhausted but were strangely wide awake in between. After waking from my first REM induced nap at 6am it was a serious struggle just to keep my eyes open - which is how I also feel now at 4am today. But once I finally got out of the house this morning I could barely feel any effects of sleep deprivation and failed to fall asleep during my 12pm, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm naps. I think that we are now reaching REM sleep near the end of the late night naps and when we get up we interrupt it it which is part of what makes us so tired. As to why we aren't tired during the day? No idea.
I do think the binaural beats are working though, I can now sense the changes in beat frequency as changes in my mental state.
Update on cafeteria lady -- she took the nap room at 3pm again to today but I think she has a legitimate purpose of needing the room to pray. I am not totally sure but we accidentally walked in on her today and she was wearing a veil in the middle of the room and failed to look up when I entered. Awkward!
Health: Pretty good. No problems.
Energy Level: Can't keep my eyes open between 3 am and 9am but otherwise wide awake.
9pm, a little dazed.
Academic Performance:Low productivity due to only 3 few hours spent working at the cfa
Social Performance: Missed BBQ due to rigid sleep requirements.
No comments:
Post a Comment