Your question resonates strongly with me. About ten years ago, I decided to try Uberman to solve exactly this problem. While it didn’t solve the problem, it taught me a lot about sleep, and it was worth three weeks of hell for that alone.
In the time since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably not that sleep recharges our available mental energy. Recharging is part of it, but I think a bigger factor is probably the fact that sleep provides memory consolidation, and most importantly, sleep makes us forget things. We are able to make progress in the morning at least in part because after a good nights rest, things feel new and interesting. We have insights, see things in a different light, because we’re partially relearning things we knew previously, and adding another layer of paint onto the picture. In the morning, we’ve probably forgotten why we got bored the previous day.
With this in mind, I’ve tried things like working on one project in the morning, then switching to a completely orthogonal project in the afternoon, then another completely orthogonal project in the evening. It’s easier to be excited about things when the things you learned in the morning don’t interfere with the things you’re trying to learn later on. This worked great for me during the Covid lockdowns, when I learned a lot of biochemistry in the evenings, after spending my mornings doing computer related work.
That said, while switching to completely different projects helps, it’s still not great. There’s still an energy loss, an inability to care, an apathy to overcome. If I didn’t have work constraints, I would probably try to switch to a polyphasic schedule again to test or verify some of the above; based on what I’ve learned over the years, my next attempt would be a balanced triphasic schedule. This would put me at 6-6.5 hours awake and 1.5-2 hours asleep, with each six hour ‘awake’ block being a separate topic/category.
Since I currently have the slack to do so, I’m going to try getting into a balanced biphasic schedule to start with. If I actually manage to pull it off I’ll make another post about it.
Your question resonates strongly with me. About ten years ago, I decided to try Uberman to solve exactly this problem. While it didn’t solve the problem, it taught me a lot about sleep, and it was worth three weeks of hell for that alone.
In the time since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably not that sleep recharges our available mental energy. Recharging is part of it, but I think a bigger factor is probably the fact that sleep provides memory consolidation, and most importantly, sleep makes us forget things. We are able to make progress in the morning at least in part because after a good nights rest, things feel new and interesting. We have insights, see things in a different light, because we’re partially relearning things we knew previously, and adding another layer of paint onto the picture. In the morning, we’ve probably forgotten why we got bored the previous day.
With this in mind, I’ve tried things like working on one project in the morning, then switching to a completely orthogonal project in the afternoon, then another completely orthogonal project in the evening. It’s easier to be excited about things when the things you learned in the morning don’t interfere with the things you’re trying to learn later on. This worked great for me during the Covid lockdowns, when I learned a lot of biochemistry in the evenings, after spending my mornings doing computer related work.
That said, while switching to completely different projects helps, it’s still not great. There’s still an energy loss, an inability to care, an apathy to overcome. If I didn’t have work constraints, I would probably try to switch to a polyphasic schedule again to test or verify some of the above; based on what I’ve learned over the years, my next attempt would be a balanced triphasic schedule. This would put me at 6-6.5 hours awake and 1.5-2 hours asleep, with each six hour ‘awake’ block being a separate topic/category.
Since I currently have the slack to do so, I’m going to try getting into a balanced biphasic schedule to start with. If I actually manage to pull it off I’ll make another post about it.