After your body gets a handle on the extreme military-like conditions your stupidity is forcing onto it, it’s amazing and then unbearably boring.
It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.*
- Above all, you learn how to nap wherever possible no matter how. You make sure to secretly always be in possession of a sleeping-mask, you sneak out of parties to nap before returning, you learn how to catch naps in bathroom stalls, all cars start resembling portable beds, &c..
- Your sense of time is nonexistent. Although you only sleep two hours a day (via six 20-minute naps), each nap feels like eight hours of sleep and every four hour segment feels eleven hours long; every day feels three days long (equally filled to the brim with darkness and then light) and every week feels like a short February. You would think this would make you lazier, but in reality the opposite’s true: with them being your only means of time-keeping (from your body’s perspective) every nap equates to the end of a day and so you become psychologically conditioned to finish everything on your plate by the time you have to sleep (you’re slowly forced to always be focusing only on the tasks that matter). This eventually has you completing a week’s worth of tasks in two days time, half a week’s if you’re lazy (mind you I’ve only ever tried this schedule while working alone, I don’t ever see this happening within the constricts of working within a company and/or team). If extended family sleeps over they will upon waking find you tirelessly working as you were before they slept (and they will shake their heads in amazement and lecture you on how crazy you are), and if you by chance have to sleep over at your friends’ good luck, because filling in hours of your life without any productive means of doing so is excruciating. The night’s are long.
- Your dreams become as vivid as reality itself. This one really throws you for a loop. Imagine constantly switching between two realities, because that’s exactly how it feels like; one of them is stable and boring and it progresses without any skips, and the other is filled with extremes you will never be able to see coming let alone counter, even when you learn how to lucid dream. (I had a nightmare in which a giant squid unexplainably pulled me down into the ocean— the fear I felt as I slowly died underwater from lack of oxygen was as real as the keyboard in front of me now, and when I died I woke up to real reality, which was just as vivid as what I’d just experienced.) Napping in the same bed as somebody else starts becoming a gamble, you’ll never be able to predict whether you’ll nap and wake up normally or if you’ll wake up from a nightmare arms swinging.
- The etiquettes of sex gets thrown out the window. Sexual intercourse itself stays the same, but what do you do when after having sex your schedule doesn’t allow you to sleep with your partner? While on the Uberman Sleep Schedule sex and sleep become disconnected. Sex becomes strictly an activity, like going to the gym, it is in no way something you do before you sleep— this has a lot of consequences (especially when it comes to the fact that staying in bed together after having sex is a universal sign of affection between people). You will, literally and figuratively, be constantly cooking breakfast for your loved one as means of making up for the fact that you couldn’t sleep with them. It will never be enough.
- You are always hungry. I wouldn’t go as far as to say hungry, but it’s an easier way of saying “You’re always feeling a bit unsatisfied with how full you don’t feel.” Staying awake 22 hours a day burns a lot, you will in turn buy, and cook, and eat a lot. This isn’t really a problem since you have more than enough time to devout to cooking and eating, but you always somehow end up spending a lot on grocery bills. But on the bright side your skills in the kitchen dramatically improve.
- You run out of things to do recreationally. You’ll run through all those self-paced programs that once completed gift you with a quickly-acquirable skill, you’ll watch all those TV shows you’ve been meaning to catch-up on (in the first month), and if you’re like me you’ll find yourself watching, reading, and listening to over ten movies, books, and albums per week. This actually ruins the watching, reading, and listening experiences somewhat in that when you consume so much so speedily you quickly tire of the mediocre and rehashed, and the majority of anything is mediocre and rehashed. After a few months of this, you eventually lose concrete track of all the movies, books, and albums you’ve consumed. Everything’s a blur, and then it’s over and done with too fast.
This is all leading to a place where you find that the only things you can spend your time on are work, work, and more work. This is fine for awhile (especially when you’re trying to get ahead), but after that while’s gone and you’ve done more than enough, you realize that you’d rather just make friends with your bed again.
Everyone who’s ever successfully been on the Uberman Sleep Schedule long-term eventually stops, and most say that the inflexibility of the schedule combined with the boredom of it all finally got to them. It got to me as well.
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*I was on the Uberman and Dymaxion sleep schedules for six months respectively a couple of years back. I don’t recommend them to anyone anymore, you can accomplish far more far more safely with patience and a well-made run-of-the-mill schedule.