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I know one of the reasons I am always running out of time is because I have to sleep long hours. I need to sleep 7 or 8 hours a day. This may sound normal, but most Japanese workers will not have enough time left for sleep and the average will be 5 or 6 hours or so. My problem has been that I need to sleep much everyday. Unless otherwise, I cannot concentrate on my work and I don’t feel energized enough. I’ve convinced myself I can work well because I can sleep well, until I watched a TV program at my grandma’s house in Osaka. I wouldn’t have watched such a TV channel in a daytime if I didn’t stay there. It was about Dr. Hinohara.

I know he is such a famous doctor who works very hard in spite of his age. But I didn’t know that he is sleeping only a couple of hours everyday and eat very little. We would think that sleeping less may not good for our health. Eating less may cause us sickness. But look, he is a doctor and he has outlived now that he is almost reaching 100 years old in a few years. It looks like somebody uploaded the one exactly I watched on Youtube.

His breakfast is only milk and orange juice with 4 table spoons of olive oil.
His lunch is only milk and small cookies (3 or 4 pieces).
His body line and weight have not changed since he was 25 years old.
Many people ask him if he is not hungry with such small meals, but he says he won’t feel hungry at all because he is too concentrated on his work to feel that.
His dinner is 1300kcal. For example, half a bowl of steamed rice, 100g of meat, miso soup, and a lot of vegetables. He tries not to use elevator or escalator and instead he walks up stairs. With this diet, he doesn’t need to sleep long hours. Here’s the difference I found between my habits. I like eating. I eat a good amount of meal 3 times a day. I will not be able to live with such a small amount of breakfast and lunch, and I cannot feel at ease with empty stomach before I get to work.

When I watched this TV program, I was thinking “Dr. Hinohara is someone very special. He’s got a special spirit and a body that none of us can do the same.” and days have passed. One day when I was withdrawing money from ATM at a 7-eleven near my house, my eyes caught a book sold there. The title of the book would be something like this if translated into English. “Smart people sleep short and deep in this way.”

I borrowed the book from a public library the other day and read it. I learned that we have to sleep because we need to rest the brain, the body and the visceral organs. Non-REM sleep comes first that is known as the period for the brain to rest and then follows REM sleep for the body to rest. It’s said that we will keep non-REM and REM sleep alternately and the ideal timing to wake up is right after REM sleep is over. One cycle takes 90 minutes, which means 3 hours or 4.5 hours or 6 hours are better than 8 hours for example. (90×2=3 hours, 90×4=6 hours)

Whatever it is, the author of the book says anyone can live with 3 hours sleep everyday only if he or she eats less. He says we need 2 weeks to get used to 3-hour-sleep. If I can do this I can get 5 extra hours a day and I will be able to lose weight (fat) because I eat less, but I strongly wonder if I can live with less foods and less sleep. I couldn’t make up my mind if I want to go for it or not when I finished reading the book, nevertheless I knew I could gain 5 hours everyday and that can change my life. I found myself totally full of earthly desires. I want to sleep and I want to eat. It’s that much, not easy for me to ignore these feelings at all!

Today I spent another sleep-well eat-well day in spite of myself. I have not yet made up my mind that I should start 3-hour-sleep with 60% of meals that my stomach wants. But I was fed up with myself being indulged with too much sleep and foods for days to come. I suddenly decided to start anguish 2 weeks to get into a short sleeper from tonight! I decided this around 10pm and so this means I have to stay up all the night and up until next night, except for 5-10 minutes of short naps. (That’s why I am writing this to distract my feelings that I want to sleep.)

The anguish 2 weeks goes like this. I still don’t know if I can live with this. But let’s see how it works out for me.
Day1: last day I can sleep 8 hours/day. This is going to be April 1st. (I’m not kidding, this is not April fool~!)
Day2: stay up all night.
Day3: sleep 6 hours at night. (may have a slight fever, dizzy, pains, but overcome them.)
Day4: sleep 6 hours at night. (recommended swimming or jogging. no sweets or alcohol, no bathing.)
Day5: sleep 6 hours at night. (will lose weight)
Day6: sleep 4 hours at night. (eat vege 70% and meat 30%)
Day7: sleep 4 hours at night. (will look thinner)
Day8: sleep 3 hours at night.
Day9: stay up all night. (don’t drink too much water and don’t eat much.)
Day10: sleep 3 hours at night. (pains, faint, dizzy…)
Day11: sleep 3 hours at night.
Day12: sleep 3 hours at night. (if not feeling good, go back to day1 to restart.)
Day13: sleep 3 hours at night.
Day14: sleep 3 hours at night. (last day of 2 weeks. 3-hour-sleep has become normal to you by this time.)

Am I able to say good-bye to my too-much-of-sleeping and too-much-of-eating? I am not confident at all, honestly. It looks too harsh and if I give up sleep and foods I wonder if my life is happy even if I receive additional 5 hours a day. All I know is only from what I go thru. I’ll just give it a try. Will share my experience later!

When you have sequence of negative experience, sadness, madness, disappointment, failure, and etc. don’t you think you feel like blaming your fate?

When I was younger, I couldn’t stop comparing my life or myself with my friends’, although I knew that was completely nonsense. It just made me sad whenever I wondered why my family was not happy while my friend’s one was, why I was so bad at math, why I had less good friends, why, why, why…and that only tortured myself more and more…

This bad habit didn’t change even after I started working. Whenever I saw my colleagues’ good designs and cool ideas, I questioned myself “Was I able to come up with such an idea? No, I don’t think so…” and I was upset.

There’s no one who has only good things, and vice versa. That’s too natural to be told. Yes, I know. But I want that to be told from time to time. SInce most of Japanese people do not have religion, which however doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in whatever God, I think I sometimes want to listen to preaches from someone who has deep experience of his life.

Lately I read a book “Seifu no housoku (正負の法則)“. It means principle of positive and negative in this universe. And this book taught me something very interesting.

According to the author, Akihiro Miwa, anyone’s life is even with good things and bad things happening equally. One of the parts I found interesting was that if your life is too many good things so far, you’d better go for charity or something before bad things actually occur to you. If you just enjoy good things, you will have to have very bad things to balance your life, because that’s how life is supposed to be.

In that sense, he says if your life is so-so or OK, that’s considered good enough because you wouldn’t have very bad things to set off. People would envy beautiful, rich, popular and successful people, but they should have negative things to set off such positive things.
I thought that’s one of the reasons why celebrities or rich people make donation often, in order to set off their too many positive things.

My life has become something more relaxed since I stopped comparing.
This book also made me expect good things from so many bad things so far happened in my life.
What do you think? Have you heard of similar story?