Dan on May 24th, 2006
Don’t you hate it when you spend 10+ minutes typing something and accidently delete it all? That’s what just happened to me. I had a pretty long entry written out and tried to hit Ctrl+T to open a new browsing tab. Instead I hit Ctrl+R and reloaded the page. I lost the entire entry. Now I have to retype it. Grrrr…
Anyway, this summer is looking like it could be the best ever. My first month of trading went extremely well. I have very few obligations which means I’ll be able to do what I want: relax, workout, trade, and drive. I’ve settled into what I believe will be my daily summer routine. Go to bed around 12:30, wake up in the 6:30-7:30 range. Make breakfast then eat it will checking out market futures and overnight news releases. At this point I plan on working out once I join another gym. Then I’ll come back, shower, eat my second meal, and review how the market is doing. If I feel the need to trade I will. If not I’ll have the day to do whatever I want.
I’m researching some trading strategies that will give me plenty of free time. Instead of being glued to my computer or a TV I’ll be able to watch the general market movement daily and still make a nice return. I’m waiting for some money transfers to go through so that I can open another brokerage account. This time it will be with TradeStation. Trade station’s fees are SIGNIFICANTLY less than my current broker, optionsXpress. For example: If I sell a single covered call the total fees including buying and selling the stock would be $3 with TradeStation and $45 with optionsXpress. That can make a big impact with covered calls and other small transactions. Also, optionsXpress has a $25,000 requirement to trade futures. TradeStation does not have this requirement. I’m not planning on trading futures right now but it’s something I may do in the future (pun not intended). I’m still keeping my optionsXpress account for autotrading with the First Class Advisory service. The FCA strategist has been offering this service for over a year and a half now and has never had a losing trade. His overall results from 8/2004 are well over 100%. He also issues a daily newsletter detailing his options about the market. If you’re interested in the service contact me. The price on his site is about 3 times as much as I can get you signed up for.
I’m developing my summer workout routine. I plan on hitting the gym 6 days a week. My actual workout is still being developed but it’s going to involve focusing on a different muscle group each day of the week. On Saturday I plan on hitting the rowing machine for 15-20 minutes (increasing as time goes by). The first thing I want to do is reduce my body fat. I’m in the 13-15% range right now and have some love handles showing. Once I bring that down I’ll begin bulking again. I’d like to gain at least another 5 lbs of muscle. I also plan on biking and hiking a lot this summer.
One thing I haven’t been focusing enough on is my eating habits. I’ve been straying from my meal plan quite frequently. Not only is it setting me back in my plans of losing some more fat but it’s setting my wallet back too. I think the problem is that my meals don’t vary enough. I have been having frequent cravings for sugar. I’m going to be adding more fruit to my diet in the hopes that it will reduce or eliminate the cravings. I also started getting sugar free mints. Those help quite a bit but not enough.
The autox racing season started a few weeks ago. Taking a year off hurt me. My driving skills have declined significantly! I’ve lost the little smoothness I had and my overall ability has seemed to suffer. Add to that my lack of experience racing a turbo car and the results are sloppy, slow runs. I’m slowly improving but I’m not expecting to place this year. I have a driver’s school at Watkins Glen race track next month. I’m hoping to improve my smoothness and figure out how to drive a turbo car. While significantly different than an autox, a driver’s school on a real track helps every aspect of driving. I learned so much from the one I did in 2004.
Now that I have the time I’m hoping to increase the frequency of my updates. Hopefully I’ll get it back to daily posts soon!
Dan on February 13th, 2006
Ever have one of those weekends when you know you have stuff to do but just aren’t motivated to do it? That’s how this weekend has been. I’ve acomplished a few things, like listing an item on Ebay, writing up ideas for my new website, and cooking some new foods. Other than that I blew through the weekend without acomplishment. No laundry washed, no cleaning of the apt, and no polyphasic sleep. Sleep plays a big part of it since life is shorter on monophasic sleep. Days fly by much quicker when you are missing 5 hours.
I also ate pretty poorly this weekend consuming candy, cake, and snack foods. My appetite has been through the roof this week. I’m constantly hungry and crave snack foods. I’m not quite sure what is causing this but I don’t like it. I’ve gone for 3 months now on my nutrition plan without incident and I don’t want to change it now. It could be a combination of sleep changes and eating pattern changes. I’ve been moving my meals around to different times everyday due to sleep patterns. I’m hoping that once I re-adjust back to polyphasic sleep my appetite will slowly return to normal. Between monophasic sleep, working, school, and general apathy life has been quite different this month.
Dan on January 28th, 2006
Between my new job preparing taxes, school, and monophasic sleep I’m so much busier than I’ve been in years. I’m hoping to maintain daily blog posts but I may end up skipping a few days here and there when I am very busy.
I’ve had cut back on the time spent watching the market. I’m still continuing research into forex and options. I just picked up an indepth book about the math behind options. I’ll post a review once I’m done with it.
It’s interesting how quickly my sleep reverted to monophasic. I’m back to waking up at 8AM. I still get tired at times when I would normally take a nap. We’ll see how this turns out. I’m still not sure what I’m going to end up doing. I’m 100% sure it won’t be monophasic.
Dan on January 9th, 2006
Ah college. That place where too many people waste away drinking alcohol, staying up too late, and pursuing a piece of paper to get a job. At least that’s how I perceived it when I was in school. Get good grades, graduate with a diploma, get a “good” job, etc.
I’ve since realized that college should have nothing to do with getting a diploma or a job. If you think the way I used to then you’ve fallen into the rat race trap. The original intention of higher education was to expand the individual’s thinking and reasoning. It had nothing to do with getting a job and everything to do personal growth.
I’ve decided to attend a local community college (Monroe Community College) for the sake of learning whatever I want. Right now that’s Business Administration. I don’t intend on ever working for someone in the traditional sense again so the diploma is of little meaning (that and it’s only an AS degree). I simply want to learn more about running a business.
Have you considered taking classes at a local college for personal improvement? The prices are low and the quality of the education is usually underrated. I know that MCC has many very good professors and good classes. The only downside is that you get stuck in a class with people who don’t belong at any college. They ended up going to the community college because society made them feel it was something they needed to do. If you can get around that then you can take a lot out of a class or two! Who knows, maybe it will lead you to a $1,000,000 idea.
Dan on January 3rd, 2006
The past two weeks have been very interesting and educational to say the least. I now know more about sleep than ever before. This article is me sharing that knowledge with you in hopes that it can help you improve your sleep as well.
For me, slowly adjusting to polyphasic sleep just made more sense. Your body doesn’t like rapid change. Slow adjustment can make adaptation much easier and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past 2 weeks. It has made adjustment take much longer (and I’m still not 100% there), however I believe that it has made it much easier.
Here’s a full day-by-day summary of how I slept with notes below. Each line is a day.
8h core (normal)
6h core, 1h nap
6h core, 30min nap
4.5h core, 2 30 min naps (driving 400 miles to visit parents)
4.5h core, 2 30 min naps (optomitrist appt, didn’t know how lack of sleep would effect eyes)
6 28 min naps (first full 6 phase day)
2 90 min naps, 3 28 min naps (Christmas day)
6h core, no naps (visiting relatives)
6h core, 1 27 min nap (driving 400 miles back home)
6 30-26 min naps (playing with different times)
6 27 min naps
5 27 min naps, 1 90 min nap (decided I needed extra sleep)
6 27 min naps
6 27 min naps (New Year’s eve, 2 naps taken at friend’s house resulted in little to no sleep)
8h core (New Year’s recovery)
6 27 min naps, 1 3h nap (added extra and then overslept the next one by 2.5h)
6 27 min naps (Today)
As you can see, I have yet to stick to the entire 6 phase cycle for more than a few days straight. Had it not been for New Years I would have made it almost a week. Between the two naps with no sleep and a bit of drinking I decided a “normal” 8h night would suit me well. One of the most interesting results from this is that I now feel tired in a normal way. As I posted before I hadn’t been feeling a normal tired state and wasn’t yawning. Since New Years I’ve been yawning when tired and I have returned to my normal tired state with microsleeps. I don’t know what caused this but I find it quite interesting. Also, I am back to my normal mental state. I feel that I am at 100% again and the pressure in my head is gone. It seems that taking a monophasic day in there may help adjustment.
The cold feeling still remains. I still feel colder than before changing my sleep. I’m hoping this will go away after adjustment has been completed. Speaking of adjustment, I think that I’m almost there! Last night was a bit hard in the 2-6AM range. I ended up taking an extra nap. It didn’t seem to mess me up like on Christmas (see other blog entries) but it did mess up my sense of time. After waking I forgot that it was an extra and showered as if it were my normal 6AM sleep. By the time I was done showering and whatnot it was 6AM and I realized what I had done. I hopped back into bed and proceeded to sleep 3h. My first major oversleep! I’m not sure if I slept through the alarm or if I shut it off and fell back asleep. I’m going to put a new battery in it today and move it father away from my bed. I’m so close to adjusting, I just need to keep these minor screwups in check.
Watching 24 Season 3
has really helped me pull through the 2-6AM phase. The only problem is that I don’t want to watch more than 2 episodes at a time or I will finish them too quickly. That leaves me with about 2 hours to find something else to do. I’ve found that on a bad day like yesterday, reading is near impossible (including reading websites). I think today I’m going to try a mindless physical task, aka cleaning my kitchen. It needs cleaning badly and I think it’s the perfect thing to keep me awake.
Dreams have been extremely unusual, and I don’t mean the content of them. The content has been normal but my dreaming seems to be a bit less visual and more mental. When I was sleeping 8h a night I would remember images from my dreams quite vividly. Now it’s more what the dream was about than a visual image. Also, my sleep has been extremely light. It isn’t unusual for me to wake up 5-10 times per nap. It will usually be in the middle of a dream. I will wake up for a few seconds and then fall back asleep extremely rapidly. Then I will have a new dream. It’s very strange having 5 unrelated dreams in 20 minutes.
As others have observed sleep often seems much longer than 25 minutes. Sometimes I will wake up before the alarm thinking I overslept when it has only been 15-20 minutes. It has been taking me roughly 3-5 min to fall asleep so I’ve been setting my alarm to 28 min (target of 24-25 min of sleep). Remember to account for this!
So what are my suggestions to those interested in attempting this?
1. Change one thing at a time! If you’re planning on improving or changing your diet or adding exercise do it at least a week before you try polyphasic sleep (or a week after adjusting). That way it will allow your body to adjust to one thing at a time. Too many major changes can do strange things to your body.
2. Don’t rush it. I see so many people blogging about changing their sleep the day the first read about it. Don’t do that! First, educate yourself about sleep. Learn about the cycles, your body’s rhythms, sleep deprivation, and what has worked for others. You’ve been a monophasic sleeper your whole life, there is no need to rush and change that today. A few days aren’t going to make a difference.
3. Don’t give up. Don’t worry about minor setbacks such as oversleeping. You should plan that everything won’t be 100% perfect. There will be times when you’ll oversleep. Pick yourself back up and continue where you left off. You may even choose to sleep a little longer on certain days when you are extremely tired.
4. Change slowly. Try changing your sleep patterns gradually. Use core sleep with naps or long naps. Your body typically adjusts to slow changes better than instant ones.
