Oh man, I hope my friends and family don’t land here. But to the extent that I am wanting to provide a 100% honest account of my experience with Uberman, including my motivation and the precursors, for someone with hypomanic tendencies, it needs to go on the record.
After 3-4 days of very-very happy coffee tripping, I crashed hard last night. Was fighting with Rebekah (she PMS and me hypomanic – very bad combination) and we went out dancing until late which for various reasons didn’t work for me. Woke up tired and very depressed and decided it’s just bad luck to start a major lifestyle experiment in this state. Especially when my success with it is directly tied to my business and psychic survival. Damn.
I did get to thinking about hypomania though, and had some useful thoughts. I just finished the longest hypomanic trip of my life – about 5 months – but I didn’t know this until a few weeks ago, thanks to several friends’ feedback. I was misinformed about the maximum length of a hypomanic episode, I thought this was just a new state – a very thrilling state. My being hypomanic for 5 months was directly related to my getting laid-off 2 weeks ago. I knew what I was doing and that I was going to get myself fired, but this wasn’t compelling enough to get me to stop. Most people in my circle don’t understand the direct correlation between coffee and hypomania for me. I got clear this morning that the way my brain is wired, I can’t stop myself doing something as intensely pleasurable as drinking coffee unless there is an immediate negative consequence – and by “immediate” I mean 4 hours, maybe 12 hours on the outside. A negative consequence coming in weeks, let alone in 5 months, simply doesn’t cut it. It’s too far away to make any difference to my animal brain. Hence my interest in polyphasic sleep schedules – coffee would totally mess me up in the next nap cycle, which is never more than 5 hours away. I am not so dumb as to do that.
Through this awareness, I let go of my guilt over the coffee. But I still feel sad about the job, and that I didn’t know about polyphasic sleep schedules 5 months ago. The problem with the job is that it filled my life with tedium, and at the end of the day I had nothing left. Dinner and time for bed. Weekends were spent resting and recovering from coffee toxicity. If I had known about Everyman back then, I could have worked the early morning shift (1-6am) doing training and career development, pursuing my interests and managing my life – that’s an extra 35 hours a week – and once I felt secure in my self-employment income, and/or able to command a higher rate, I could have quit the day-job. Now we are hitting a financial emergency in 30 days or less, it’s going to take me 10-14 days to get fully Uberman adapted, and God knows how much longer to develop a full self-employment income. Finding a day job in this economy is difficult for the skills I have (even if I wanted one, which I am not entirely sure about). Yikes.
Anyway, c’est la vie, what’s done is done. Who was it that said, the the price to be paid for good judgment, is a lot of bad judgment.
My second train of thought this morning was about my work schedule once I get going with this. I can’t see any other way right now than to put in 3 Uberman shifts daily for work (the midnight, 3am, and 7am shifts). Plus the night shifts (midnight and 3am) on weekends, for a total of about 65 hours a week. This is pushing it for me, historically. Of course, whether I am doing training and career development 35 hours a week plus a 45 hour a week day-job, or else 65 hours of self-employment work, mm.. the first schedule does sound exhausting though.
Of course until I have success with this these thoughts are pointless. And just because I am up 20 hours a day doesn’t mean I want to be working all the time – even if such a thing were possible.
Anyway it’s all fine. I was especially happy to write the My Manifesto article and I know it’s going to be ok. I start tomorrow (God willing :-).
