Many equate self-discipline with living a good, moral life, which ends up creating a lot of shame when we fail. There's a better way to build lasting, solid self-discipline in your life.
When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who claimed that you could train yourself to sleep as little as two hours per day. Keep in mind, this was back in the early 2000s when we all still believed random shit we read on the internet.
Here’s how the story went: There was a hyper-productive sleep schedule that had been discovered by military scientists. They were testing the limits of sleep deprivation on soldiers and made this startling discovery. Supposedly, great historical figures like Napoleon and Da Vinci and Tesla followed the same sleep schedule and it’s why they were so productive and influential in history. Supposedly, anybody (i.e., you and me) could achieve this state of daily hyper-productivity. Supposedly, all we needed was enough willpower to barrel through days of sleep deprivation and “acclimate” to this new superhuman schedule. Supposedly, this was all true and verified and somehow made sense.
Supposedly.
The scheme was called “The Uberman Sleep Schedule,” and here’s how you did it:
Sleep follows the 80/20 Rule—that is, 80% of your recovery comes from 20% of the time you’re unconscious. Conversely, 80% of the time you’re asleep, you’re a lazy piece of shit.
This uber-efficient portion of sleep is called REM sleep and only lasts approximately 15-20 minutes at a time. That means for every two hours that your body is asleep, really only the last 20 minutes or so is “useful” sleep. Thus, when you sleep eight hours during the night, only 80-100 of those minutes are actually causing you to feel rested and restored.1 People on the internet decided this was inefficient and needed to be fixed.
What the military scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if you’re severely sleep-deprived, your body will immediately fall into REM sleep the second you pass out. It does this in order to compensate for its lack of rest. People on the internet decided this was incredibly efficient.
The idea of the Uberman Sleep Schedule was that if you took 20-minute naps, every four hours, around the clock, for days and weeks on end, you would “train” your brain to fall into REM sleep instantly the moment you laid down. Then, once your REM sleep was over, you would feel rested and restored for the next 3-4 hours.
As long as you continued to take 20-minute naps every four hours, you could effectively stay awake forever. Congratulations, you were now an Uberman. Here, have a gold star.
But there was a catch: supposedly it took 1-2 weeks of intense sleep deprivation to properly “adjust” to the Uberman Sleep Schedule. You had to stay up all night, every night, forcing yourself to only sleep for 20 minutes at a time, six different times per day. And if at any point you screwed up and overslept your nap, all would be undone and you would have to start over.
PS: Caffeine is not allowed. And alcohol might as well be suicide.
Therefore, the Uberman Sleep Schedule became this kind of decathlon of willpower among internet self-help people—an ultimate test of one’s self-discipline with the ultimate pay-off: an extra 20-30% of productive waking hours per day, every day for the rest for your life. That’s like having an extra two days each week, or an extra three-and-a-half months per year. That’s insane! Over the course of one’s life, that’s over a decade of extra waking hours. Imagine everything you could accomplish with an extra decade of life, all while everyone else is asleep.
Like an idiot, I tried to do this. Multiple times. For years, I obsessed with achieving the Uberman Sleep Schedule.
And for years, I continually failed at it.