Mark Manson - Self-Discipline: A Guide to Taking Control of Your Mind, Your Time and Your Life

MARKMANSON.NET

2019

Mark Manson

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.

Heres 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 its 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 heres how you did it:

• Sleep follows the 80/20 Rule that is, 80% of your recovery comes from 20% of the time youre unconscious. Conversely, 80% of the time youre asleep, youre 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. People on the internet decided this was inefficient and needed to be fixed.
• What the military scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if youre 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 peoplean ultimate test of ones 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. Thats like having an extra two days each week, or an extra three-and-a-half months per year. Thats insane! Over the course of ones life, thats 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.

You have probably pulled an all-nighter before. Not sleeping for one night is not that difficult. Especially if there are deadlines and/or drugs involved.

Whats difficult are the second and third and fourth nights. Extreme sleep deprivation is a crash course on how fragile our mind actually is.

By day three, you will start falling asleep standing up. You will doze off while walking down the street in broad daylight. You forget basic facts like your mothers name or whether you had eaten that day, orfuck, what day is it?

By day four you become delirious, imagining that people are speaking to you when theyre not, believing that youre writing an email when youre not, and then discovering that you dont even remember who you were supposed to be emailing.

I used to walk in circles around my living room for an hour, just to keep myself awake. When nap time came, I would crash, falling unconscious instantaneously, and proceed to have intense, fucked up dreams that seemed like they lasted for five hours.

Then, 20 minutes later, my alarm would wake me up, where I would spend the next three hours and change desperately lying to myself, trying to convince myself that I felt rested and couldnt wait to get back towait, what was I supposed to be doing again?

In the end, I could never make it through the fourth day. Each time I failed, I felt intense disappointment at my own lack of willpower. I believed this was something I should be able to do.

It pissed me off that some random people on the internet could supposedly do this thing that I couldnt. I felt like it meant there was something wrong with me. That if I didnt have the self-discipline to sleep deprive myself for weeks on end, then what the fuck, Mark? Get your shit together!

So I tortured myself. And the more I tortured myself, the more unrealistic my expectations for myself became.

***

Chances are, at some point in your life, youve tried to change your behavior through sheer willpower. And chances are, you also failed miserably. Dont feel bad! This is what happens most of the time.

Most people think of self-discipline in terms of willpower. If we see someone who wakes up at 5 AM every day, eats an avocado-chia-fennel-apricot-papaya smoothie each meal, snorts brussel sprout flakes, and works out for three hours before even wiping their ass in the morning, we assume theyre achieving this through straight-up self-abusethat there is some insatiable inner demon driving them like a slave to do everything right, no matter what.

But this isnt true. Because, if you actually know anybody like this, youll notice something really frightening about them: they actually enjoy it.

Seeing self-discipline in terms of pure willpower fails because beating ourselves up for not trying hard enough doesnt work. In fact, it backfires. And, as anyone who has ever tried to go on a diet will tell you, it usually only makes it worse.

The problem is that willpower works like a muscle, if you work it too hard, it becomes fatigued and gives out. The first week committing to a new diet, or a new workout regimen, or a new morning routine, things go great. But by the second or third week, youre back to your old late-night, cheeto-loving ways.

The same way you cant just walk into a gym for the first time and lift 500 pounds, you cant just start waking up at 4 AM on a dime, much less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule. To have a chance of success, your willpower must be trained steadily over a long period of time.

But this leaves us in a conundrum: if we view self-discipline in terms of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation: To build willpower, we need self-discipline over a long period of time; but to have self-discipline, we need massive amounts of willpower.

So, which came first? What should we do? How do we start? Or, more importantly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerrys?