Early to mid twenties. They both have supportive work environments and a whole host of people helping them through the days. Theoretically it will take them a few weeks to get used to it.
I thought similarly, or that it was perhaps 16-18 year olds taking it upon themselves for a science project or something. However I'm now assuming it is people in their mid-twenties who apparently regard themselves so free of the inherent responsibilities of life that they refer to themselves as kids.
I'm 22 and married. I immigrated to Canada (and the legal responsibilities inherent in this would likely scare the life out of these two 'kids'). My friends and family members of similar age to us have children (in fact our marriage is directly responsible for one of them), and I will likely have children before the two authors consider themselves 'adults'. I have responsibilities and obligations, like I assume most twenty year olds do, and I consider myself to have very few responsibilities in comparison to many of my friends and relatives.
It must be a privileged life to be able to consider yourself a kid well into your twenties, I stopped thinking of myself as a kid when I had to get a full time job at 16. I definitely stopped thinking of myself as a kid when I was handling an intercontinental relationship and funding international travel, which as I said before has resulted in me immigrating to another country.
Thanks, at least on HN the majority balances out the down-mods so that coherent posts stay balanced. We're not reddit yet where any non-conformism gets down-modded to non-existence. I frequently try to upvote posts I disagree with that are well written.
The definition of "kid" keeps expanding. I'm in graduate school and the students call each other kids. One once asked me, "are you the kid who..." - I'm 34 years old.
We referred to ourselves as kids because we regularly ponder the implications of becoming dinosaurs and consider Nerds a viable food product. It has nothing with our age, so much as a mindset.
To answer the question, we're 22 (Caitlin) and 25 (Blake). No actual children are involved with the experiment. Does this clear the age question up?
Yeah, it's cutsey and all, but you should include a parenthetical explanation (so people don't panic over 10 year olds risking their health on that kinda shit).
having kids in the title makes the article much more click-worthy. You have to stand out somehow among all the other polyphasic sleep experiment blogs, right?
Prepare for 'Two kids accepted to Y Combinator's funding program' articles in the future.
The navigation on the front page is terrible. It's impossible to know that "n days left" means n days left of normal sleep, and hence those should be read first.
I was able to figure out the nav only after clicking the links and checking the "posted-on" dates.
Watched a documentary recently, experimenting with 3hours/day. It was cancelled after a week because the "victim" was showing dangerous side-effects and beginning to show major-organ dysfunction, apparently from the stress caused by lack of sleep.
One cycle of three hours hardly encourages the body to enter REM. That person might've only gotten one 30 min sessions in that 3 hour cycle. Once we have transitioned, our body will be getting four 30 minute sessions of REM.
Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not an expert on this, I've just read a lot. I think my thoughts would align with other polyphasers, though.
Funny, I've heard a lot of stories of people starting this sleep schedule, but not a single one of someone that managed to maintain it. Let's see how this one goes.
I know people, and indeed, get like this myself sometimes (though not as often as I used to), who will have natural cycles in which they are awake for hours on end and sleep only 1 or 2 out of every 24. But even for those who seem to be naturally wired to do so, it only lasts for a few days before either their body or their mind needs sleep so badly that they a) fall asleep in the case of physical exhaustion, or b) must take sleeping aids to force themselves back into a normal pattern so they can think clearly again. Polyphasic sleep sounds good in theory. In practice, well, there's a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.
This is why we started this website and are telling a lot of people, to help us maintain this cycle.
It'd be very easy for me to say "Eh, screw this", but the fact that we have ~50 Twitter followers, local friends, and other people following us through the website, all helps to give us motivation.
Okay! It's actually nap time, so I'll be back to answer some more comments in 30 minutes.
I vacillate between thinking that if our body fights this hard against polyphasic sleep, there must be something wrong with the idea, and that sometimes we need to overrule our body's natural tendencies, such as wanting to eat lots of fats, sugar, and salt, and to not exercise properly.
Also, I'm concerned that I would not be able to discern any degradation in mental capacities due to my degraded mental capacities.
(Confession: I tried polyphasic sleep once, but didn't make it past the third day.)
To your point, I don't think my former work colleague knew he was kind of out of it.. I can only describe it if he had been up all night smoking pot and was still feeling a little of the effects the morning after.
To the health point: I think polyphasic sleep may also increase your desire for high fat, sugar and salt foods because it destroys the meal cycle.
I can't speak for Blake, but I have a horrible meal cycle as it stands already. Inconsistent in everything, mostly nutritional value.
Already, a few months ago, I tried to schedule myself into small healthy snacks every couple hours, instead of a few large and pretty unhealthy meals.
With this strict schedule on sleep, I'm eating within the first hour of waking up. (Eating a couple apples seem to help for the late night snacks.) Small breakfast after the 6am nap, small dinner right after my 6pm nap, etc. Some healthy-ish snacks sprinkled it the middle (but no too close to naptime).
That sounds like a good plan. Food, sunlight and physical activity are signals for circadian cycles. You should try to incorporate each into every waking period, at least in the beginning.
I'm very sun-driven. I need to find a good way to incorporate that at night. It's been much, much easier for me to stay awake when the sun is out. Thanks for the tip!
It helps going into this sort of thing to know you don't have any underlying mental problems. I used to pull crazy sleep schedules as an early 20-something, but as a late 20-something even mild sleep deprivation leads to muchos weird psychological situations for me now.
If I were giving any advice to early 20-somethings nowadays, I'd say save up your sleep deprivation experiments until you have a baby. You'll need them :-)
There's an RSS feed and a Twitter account if you guys want regular updates. We definitely want to let people keep track of what we're doing. Gives us some accountability as well. It's easier to keep going with the experiment when you have friends paying attention.
A swedish student, Thomas Jönsson, performed a similar "polyphasic sleep" experiment 2 years ago. He slept 2.5 hours per day; 25 minutes every 4th hour. His aim was to improve his potential and performance on a wide front, and he increased results in several contexts (learning, and physical exercise being the most notable ones). He kept his experiment going for about 6 months. He was 23 years old at the time.
Interesting he was able to improve physically. I've always been tempted to try an extreme sleep schedule, but one thing has kept me from doing so -- I go to the gym regularly, and evidence has shown that sleep is an essential part of muscle growth.
I've wondered about this as well. I've been exercising, and I'm curious as to how sleep will effect that. I'd be intrigued to see research on the topic.
Really nice blog design, I like it a lot. I've always thought that a split post design like that would be interesting for any sort of blog that revolved around the participation of a couple/pair.
On that thread, I found crocowhile's comments particularly good.