Week Three

Tonight is 3 weeks on 3 hours of sleep a night + 3 naps.

It's 11:30 and I am tired, trying to work through the details of a programming tutorial. Trying to force my brain to do disciplined work at an hour when the Monophasics are sleeping is still difficult. I think I may be building up some tolerance to the weariness, and sometimes it is no where in sight, but in the very late or very early hours it is still obvious. But again, it's only been 3 weeks.

The purpose of sleep is still a mystery to me. Everyone seems pre-occupied with the loss of sleep on the body, but my body seems fine--still able to work out, run, ride my bike, swim, day after day. It is my brain that seems to need the sleep, for what reason... to re-organize memories, Vikash thinks it's a hormonal shift, but perhaps the part of our brains that spend all day listening to us pratter simply need us to shut up for a little while, and that is the root of the need for sleep. What if we mastered the thoughts running through our heads, and instead of filling the day with repetitious emotional recalls, we are simply present, maybe then we will have left sleep behind.

And I have managed, of course, to be incredibly busy all day long. It was an act of will to leave work at 7pm, when I knew that if I stayed I would have nothing but space to work on my projects. I chose to come home, with the goal of continuing to work in a more comfortable but distractable environment. The early evening shift was spent talking and eating, and I didn't settle down to do any work until 10pm, where I was OK to read the news (first chance to get to it in many days) but almost conked out while trying to read about programming. I will try to write some code, rather than read about how to do it, and see where that takes me. Previous to this I have been staying at work until 10pm easily.

I have so many projects and goals, that it is too easy to not even notice I have several more hours in the day. The intensity with which I monitor my time is almost the same. Clearly, I need to change some way of going about all this. I have figured out that the workload of my job is infinite, and giving up personal time to get work-stuff finished is not ultimately a fulfilling decision.

So I have gotten an incredible amount done in the last 3 weeks. It is clear that going with so little sleep is possible, sometimes surprisingly so. However, I have certainly dealt with sleepiness, and it continues still at times.

For instance, I was riding home from work, trying to figure out if today was Wednesday or Thursday. Finally I figured out that tomorrow is Friday, and what I would normally use the weekend for when feeling like this is for catching up on sleep, but for me, now, the weekend will not bring rest, it will bring the need for continued discipline. And the hope for a mindset that is not in a rush. And also some time to my self.