I didn’t meant that it’d be *harder*, though you raise an interesting point: Biochemically, it’s known that teenagers need more sleep than young children or adults, particularly in the morning hours. So it might actually BE harder, for that reason.

My contention with teenagers doing it is that it’s unhealthy, not hard. Adjusting to polyphasic sleep involves deliberately sleep-depriving yourself for a while — a short while, as long as you do it correctly — and while short-term sleep deprivation doesn’t have any negative affects on a grown person, it can mess with the complex cocktail of hormones and chemicals involved in brain and body growth. Teenagers are smack in the middle of a crucial growth process that cannot be repeated — read that again; ONE SHOT is all you get. I’m against anything that might permanently decrease or otherwise eff up anyone’s mental and physical health, and that includes people who are still growing depriving themselves of sleep or nutrients (I’m against teenagers trying restrictive diets that rely on fasting or periods of hunger to adjust to, for the same reason).

On the other hand, for many teenagers, I suspect the situation is the same as it is for you: You’re too busy; the world makes you do lots of crap you don’t want to do at times that aren’t convenient for you (for example, the data about teenagers needing extra sleep in the morning to function and grow correctly has been out for decades, but schools don’t want to have to start later, so they just ignore the problem for the benefit of the adults; isn’t that nice?) — and as a result, you’re sleep deprived anyway. If polyphasic sleep, by putting you through a short period of sleep-dep that may or may not be worse than what you already experience, could solve your problem of constantly being sleep-deprived, wouldn’t that be a total win? I would think so. It might not be the best solution, but it might beat the heck out of long-term sleep deprivation, which is worse for *everyone* than short-term.

Here are my suggestions, then: First, do a LOT of research, and make sure you understand what it is you’re thinking about getting into. Second, if you have guardians with legal control over you, you NEED their permission to do this, simply because they DO have the power to take it away from you, and it would suck to do all the work to get it built up and then have it ruined because you didn’t take that into consideration. And third, if you decide that polyphasic sleep and it’s short-term sleep dep are better for you than your current schedule, make sure you remember that that’s polyphasic sleep done CORRECTLY. Done incorrectly, a polyphasic adaption leads to long-term nasty horrid sleep-dep, which is majorly un-fun and can be very unhealthy and even dangerous, so make sure that if you decide to try it, you do everything in your power to make sure to get it right the first time.

Best of luck to you, whatever you decide!

Thanks in advance.

ak5

Now that I’ve tracked you down, I’ll get back with you guys by email and see if I can be of any help.

*high five* for even thinking of this experiment, though!

PD

I think it’s fantastic that your school might be interested in doing a study! The only thing I could possibly say about it is that if it gets done, would you pretty pretty PLEASE let me see the results? Maybe even link to them, or post them, on my blog? I would love to at least see them, if it’s possible. And of course, if you have any thoughts about the process, I’d be thrilled to read/post those too. Having someone finally get a serious study done (there are *many* possible studies that could be, and should be, done on this schedule) would be really exciting for a lot of us, I think.

Thanks for the comment!
PD

Always happy to read an interesting Post from you (even if my oppinions are mostly different)! Keep up the good work!

Oh well if not, like I said, myself and some friends are going to conduct an experiment challenging the claims of polyphasic sleep. Two will be testing the Uberman Sleep Schedule, while another two will be testing the Everyman. Naturally, all participants are required to have contacted their parents for approval before they do it. We’re beginning to being adapting to it, right now by just getting used to the concept of a 20 minute power nap and gradually work our way up. We’ll be going into the full-blown schedules over the holiday break. From what I researched previously, I also recommended that all participants make a physical list of things they want to accomplish in their spare time so as to not get bored and be tempted to sleep.

Haha, does it sound like we are on the right track?