Well, Steve was right about day 2. It was much harder than yesterday. The whole principle of the adjustment period is that by deliberately depriving yourself of sleep, your boy has to quickly adapt in order to keep up. I think that sleep-deprivation is kicking in and making it much harder for me to function. It varied throughout the day, but the worst parts were when I got up at 1:30pm and now, my 4:00am wakeup. Right now I\’m typing while I watch “24” and I\’m absolutely struggling to stay awake. I\’m sitting straight up, typing, holding a laptop, and watching TV, and I\’m not doing a good job of any of it. My spelling is atrocious (misspelling words so badly that Word can\’t even make suggestions. The TV show is fading in and out and I\’m not sure what\’s been going on for the last twenty minutes. The problem is that even though I\’m up and out of bed, I can\’t maintain that energy level (the energy level of consciousness) for a long time. That last sentence is specifically referring to right now, as well as around 1:30pm. I have been better for most of the day and did things like go to the mall, play with my daughter at the playground, family swim at the YMCA, and more.

 

I\’ve also had a harder time waking up from my nap. I have myself pretty well conditioned to get up and stay up to the first alarm. I don\’t know if I\’m sleeping deeper or just needing more sleep, but the alarm goes off midway though my dream and I stay very groggy because I\’m being awakened straight out of REM sleep. I certainly hope this goes away, because I can\’t put up with this for long. The extra time would not be worth it if it felt like this, but according to Steve, it gets better after the second day and it\’s great after the first week.

By comparison, Steve said that on his day 2, he never got above a 5 on a 1-10 scale of attention. He even sat and stared at a wall for 90 minutes and felt like a zombie. He even had interaction with his family that he didn\’t remember later. I can\’t say that I felt like that – my worst moments were when I had just woken up and sat on the couch, and no amount of focus or effort could keep me awake. I just sat there, probably 60% asleep, just trying to keep myself from going back to bed.

PS: Steve\’s Day 3 was better than his Day 2, but he still wasn\’t sure he was over the hump. Good luck to me tomorrow!