On the magic of actually looking and intending to do stuff

I was talking with a friend a while back about how to get into a flow state while doing jiu jitsu and how to think things through when necessary without breaking the flow of things. It turned out to be helpful, which is always nice. When I mentioned that it still amazes me when things work out so perfectly like that, she mentioned that she has just come to expect it, ''and that's why she stopped asking how it works on a practical level''.

I had kinda thought that the reason she stopped saying "okay that's nice in theory but how do I actually do it" was that she understood how. Apparently it's just that she had come to expect that when talking to me that part will "magically" work out, and didn't want to mess with a good thing.

yeah the first few times the intention of trying something made it work kinda baffled me. I did actually spend some time trying to figure it out at some point, and then got worried that in doing that I'd fuck it up. I sort of tossed it in the bin of "meh sometimes the subconscious is just way smarter than the conscious" which is a handy wastebasket diagnosis, and just was happy its a thing. 

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yeah, like seriously the discussion last night about signal to noise makes all the theoretical sense in the world, and all the sense practically when dealing with electronics, but trying to translate that into a practical difference today... like it doesn't make sense. Nothing about that conversation should have been easier to implement than [my jiu jitsu instructor] constantly telling us to stop thinking so damn much. But it was very different. And no, that doesn't make alot of sense to me how my brain translates that discussion into doing what I've been trying and failing at doing for months now. But I'm actually pretty ok with it not making sense. Because it works, and it works well and efficiently and seems to only be getting better. So given the trajectory, not messing with it seems the appropriate choice. I can always go overanalyze it to death later on if I hit a sticking point where "magic" doesn't work.

I told her then that I'd give her an answer, and kinda forgot to do it until recently. I figured it actually makes sense and is a decent explanation even without further context, so here it is:

How a hypnotist adapts to polyphasic sleeping

A few years back I decided to play with polyphasic sleeping. I gave up after two weeks, because I wasn't well rested enough to have access to my best cognitive output and it didn't seem to be getting better, but I'm pretty confident I could have sustained it at that level if I had wanted to. The remarkable thing was just how painless the entire process was.

Everything I've ever seen about adapting to polyphasic sleeping is that it's supposed to be hard and miserable. In particular, it's a will power intense process and it's difficult for people to wake up.  Common advice is that you need someone there to wake you up — preferably someone that can be insistent even when you're a jerk at them and want to keep sleeping. When my friend tried to transition without someone to wake him up, he got an alarm that required him to shut if off by scanning a QR code he kept in the kitchen — only to wake up and find that his phone had been disassembled and he had no memory of doing it. I've read similar stories of other people doing the same thing. This was not my experience at all, and I can explain why.