I don’t know if it is a different attitude that makes this schedule easier, but something definately has. I mean, I still get badly fatigued, and crave sleep at different points, but I can comfortably say that I am adjusting. It was foolish of me to have a half hearted attempt at staying up, with no consequences for oversleeping. Now that I am not oversleeping (or not badly during the night) I am feeling like I am adapting, no matter how tired I am.

This morning was rather comfortable. I was very tired for the majority of the time, and getting progressively worse until 4.30, when I had my nap. I decided beforehand that it was not wise to have extra naps in the morning, and the reasoning being that I will likely oversleep, and doesn’t help getting me over the effects of melatonin. To keep myself awake, I found myself doing push ups and other physical exercises. When 6 am hit, I decided to go for a run, which helped at keeping me awake, and had a cold shower afterwards. Even after getting my 8.00 nap at school I still felt quite tired, and couldn’t seem to do any work until I squeezed an extra nap in my free around 10.30 am. After that I could work at a very average pace through the whole day, until the last lesson, where I really felt the need to sleep (the mid afternoon sag).

Despite this sleep deprivation, I am pleased and highly motivated at the fact that I am not depending on core sleeping anymore, and now am simply struggling with the naps themselves. I know that I should be good to go as long as I can keep this up for the whole week. I realise however that my 31 days to adjust is really not feasable. At my current state, I doubt I would pass any exam, even with a heap of revision. Consequently, I must adjust in the rest of this week to ensure that I can do well. It would be a huge waste if I spent all this time adjusting just to need to fall back into the normal routine for my exams, so that is a little extra motivation to keep going.

My persuits were almost cut short today after school though. I was feeling the need for a nap, and I had one at 5. Being extra conscious of the fact that I really need to get up, I set an alarm on my computer to wake me up. Turns out my computer alarm is better at waking me up than my mobile phone alarm, and so I only set one alarm on my phone. Big mistake. I was woken up by mum at 8, telling me to come out and eat some dinner. I was very unhappy about my oversleeping, and I wondered what had actually caused it. Turns out my laptop was on powersaver mode.

My school is not laptop friendly, and subsequently finding a powerpoint is hard. I use my laptop on a day to day basis at school, so I put it on powersaver mode so that it lasts. When I get home, I plug it into power. My laptop starts charging, but (stupidly) doesn’t turn back to high performance or balanced settings. So, after 15 mins of disuse, my laptop goes into hibernation, and doesnt play its alarms. Additionally, I slept ontop of my bed, which definately helped me in oversleeping.

Despite this, I feel that I can keep going with this schedule, as the oversleep was not very long. I just need to be careful. One massive oversleep and it’s all over. If this happens, I will quickly change back into monophasic for the exams, and restart in the holidays.

Let’s just hope that isn’t going to happen,

Jimmi

Advertisement