Consciousness: the annoying time between sleep
Every so often we hear or read sleep headlines that remind us how important sleep is and than they proceed to provide some various oddities to try and help us achieve a better night sleep. Anything from not looking at your phone before bed, to avoiding certain foods, or even adjusting the amount of sunlight and or adjusting our bedroom furniture. Recently I even read a study that suggested eating breakfast for dinner improves your sleep. Everyone has their own unique approach to sleeping, but the one thing that we can all agree upon is good sleep is important for a person’s health. Everyone knows the saying “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Sleep is a similar conversation where everyone knows it importance, and they hear things like need to get a minimum of 8 hours of sleep. However, to me sleep is a personal thing and it is something that unique to everybody.
Recently I received a Garmin connect watch, and wow it has a lot of functionality packed in. It is considered a smartwatch but I prefer the name of all knowing watch. It seems to track every possible health metric. The listt includes sleep, weight, Calories, Heart Rate, Stress, Hydration, V02 Max, Lactate Threshold, and HRV stress. For all this tracking ability it does lack analysis of the data that it connects. So with my new found tracking superpower I decided to embark onto a health tracking journey. I decided I am going to track and learn about my personal unique sleeping routine, and how I may need to adjust certain behaviors. Out of all the possible metrics I choose sleep because I believe its the easiest to alter (you have to do it everyday no matter what), and sleeps seems to be vital to a persons health. Before I share my experience of sleep tracking I did want to share the common sleep myths I learned during this process. These sleep myths do become important later in my story because during my tracking journey I realized I had some unhealthy sleep behaviors.
Common Sleep Myths
Myth: It doesn’t matter when you sleep as long as you sleep enough hours.
It is best to sleep at night, or as much as possible in darkness. Sleeping at night helps align the body’s circadian rhythm/internal clock with the environment. Proper circadian rhythm can affect mental health, cardiovascular function, metabolism, and other key health functions.
Myth: A good sleeper doesn’t move at night.
Minor movements can occur during good healthy sleep. Movement at night is only bad in extreme cases like sleep walking and in prolong and chronic conditions.
Myth: More sleep is always better.
Extra sleep can be good especially in certain circumstances like injury or rest. However, in the average person sleep too much can be bad, and be the result on underlying conditions. A study has shown that people who sleep too much have high rates of mortality. However, WAY MORE RESEARCH NEEDS TO BE DONE TO SOLIDIFY THIS AS A CORRELATION.
Myth: Napping makes up for a lack of sleep.
Naps don’t move through the stages of sleep the same way sleep at night does. This can throw your sleep schedule and circadian rhythm out of wack, and make it harder to fall asleep at night. If you do nap you need to keep it less than 30 minutes and in the early afternoon.
Myth: If you can’t sleep stay in bed until you can fall asleep.
Sleep experts recommend getting out of bed if you can’t fall asleep within 20 minutes. It is important to associate your bed with sleep, and tossing and turning can make you lose the associate of sleep with your bed and make it harder to fall asleep.
Myth: Exercising at night is bad for sleep.
Data from surveys and research studies indicates that even vigorous exercise at night does not usually affect sleep. In fact, working out at night helps many people sleep better.
Myth: Hitting snooze provides meaningful extra rest.
Fragmented sleep is not restorative, and once again can disrupt you circadian rhythm.
The Journey Begins
First off for you to totally understand the journey of tracking my sleep I think it is important for you to get to know who I am. I am a 23 year old male college student living in an off campus house with 3 other roommates. I am studying computer engineering, and I would say I am moderately active working out about 3–4 times a week. I graduate in less than 6 months so I am currently in the stressful process of searching for full time employment. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have morning class until 2:30. However, Monday and Wednesday I have night class that end at 9:30. The reason I am giving you all this information is an attempt to show you how inconsistent my schedule is. Also on top of all that I have gone on two out of state multiple day vacations. This inconsistency has followed into my sleep now too, and it has been harder to guarantee good sleep quality throughout my college career. Some days I feel completely refreshed, and other days I have to literally fall out of bed. Oh did I mention I don’t drink coffee (Yes I know how weird that is), and no I don’t have any desire too(super caffeine sensitive). This inconsistency in my sleep quality always had me wondering what was I doing wrong. However, it wasn’t until I got my Garmin connect watch did I have the tools to explore my sleep quThe Appalities. Yes they are apps that “track” sleep, but I didn’t trust the ones that used movement to determine sleep quality nor did I want to put a phone under my pillow while I sleep. Meanwhile wearing a watch to sleep is inconvenient, but not wildly appalling. Plus, the watch can go almost entire week without being charged so the maintenance besides wearing it is low. The watch also connect to an app that automatically updates the charts as it comes in, and display it in fairly visually appealing ways.
The App
When you first pull the app up it displays your current heart rate, stress, and steps.
From here if your pull down the 3 bars you will get a list of options to choose from as the picture below is showing.
If you click on health stats you then get another list of all the different metrics you can view.
When you proceed to click on the sleep option than the main menu for the sleep tracking section shows up.
The above image showing the sleep page is where most of my time was spent during this tracking journey. On this page you can see that get your total sleep broken down into the different cycles of sleep, and of course your total sleep. It also provides a very cool stages timeline graph which essentially shows what part of the cycle you were in during a specific period of time in the night. This graph alone demonstrates the importance of getting 8ish hours because you can see it takes me along time to go through all of my REM cycles. If notice the app also has the ability to show your movements throughout the night. This way you can see if at any particular time of the night you moved alot. It also gives an option of showing you how much sleep you got the last week. This allows for easy day to day comparisons. Another cool feature for this app is it sets healthy sleeping goals for you. Right now I have it set to 8 hours as my goal so when I sleep for more than 8 hours and my sleep cycle is normal I get the green check mark.
Overall I enjoyed dark colored theme of the app, and I thought the UI design was masterfully done. The stages timeline proved to be super valuable, and an amazing addition. It really helped me to understand importance of good and consistent circadian rhythm. The UI was really intuitive and super easy to navigate from one page to another. I spent almost no time learning how to use the app besides the initial connection between the phone and watch. The ability to go back and see how previous weeks went was amazing for reflection purposes. One thing I disliked about the app was the difficulty in understanding what I was reading. In the beginning of the journey I knew little about sleep cycle so I would stare at the stages timeline graph and have zero understanding if my cycle was normal or not. I would recommend they place an “ideal” sleep cycle next your personal one so we could get an idea of what we we should be striving for. Another negative was they didn’t give a running average of the week for total sleep time and REM time. This made week to week comparison harder than needed. Once again I had a generally pleasant experience with the app and I would recommend it to anyone interested in tracking sleep. However, it does have hefty price tag of around $300 so it best if you use the watch fro other purpose as well such as steps, stress tracking, heart rate and monitoring. One cool thing about the Garmin connect watch is they have their own store so people are constantly creating new widgets (their version of apps) and they are almost entirely offered for free. I haven’t personally look around or downloaded from store (besides like two clock widgets) but from a quick glance it looks like it has tons of options. In terms of accuracy I believe the watch is fairly accurate. It not a professional sleep tracking equipment but for personal usage I think it accurate enough to give a good idea of your sleeping trends. For example one night my picture frame fell and scared me awake, but than I fell asleep 5 minutes later, and when I woke up in the morning I could see that movement in the data.
The Journey
The first goal I had in tracking was to figure out what is a sleeping goal for me?I knew I wanted to improve my sleep quality, but I didn’t know what that meant. Do I need to sleep more? Do I need a more rigid sleep schedule? are naps included in healthy sleeping? Do I need to sleep in the same bed? I had all these questions so I decided my first task would be tracking my sleep for 3 weeks to learn about my sleep schedule and about what was working and what was not. I did this by wearing my watch every night for 3 weeks and than returning to see the results and try to glean some insights about my sleep. The 3 weeks were a gauntlet for my sleep schedule since the first two weekends I spent out of the state sleeping in a friends house for one weekend, and in a hotel for another. As you can see in the charts below the unpredictability of the weekend and the foreign bed truly hampered my quality of sleep. For the first two vacation weeks my weekend average total sleep was averaging around 6 hours. I particularly felt tired, and not refreshed the first weekend and it was so rough that I had to drink tea in order to wake up (sensitive to caffeine). However, during the school week I was actually averaging around 8 hours. You can see that I had a week averages of 7 hours 37 mins, 7 hours 44 mins, and 7 hrs 55 min. The good news is that I am already fairly close to averaging 8 hours of sleep per day across a week. However, the bad news is my sleep schedule is wildly inconsistent. One night I get 6 hours and then the next I get 10 + hours. Another thing I noticed was if my REM cycle total time is longer than 2 hours and 30 minutes than I also didn’t feel refreshed. This only happens on days that I sleep longer 10 + hours. Using these insights after my initial 3 weeks I came up with a list of 3 sleep behavior goals in attempt to see better quality of sleep.
Sleep Behavior Goals
Achieve 8 hours of sleep consistently
This goal is fairly straight forward, and to be honest I wasn’t too far off from this goal in my status quo sleep behavior. Also a side goal within this one is to make sure I get less than 10 hours of sleep. One of the things I noticed in my testing phase was I feel equally rough after 10 hour + sleep than I do after like a 5 hour sleep. The trick with this goal is to see if I can maintain getting 8 hours everyday and with consistency across a week. Sometimes with college things can be unpredictable like a night out, or late night homework rush. However, I tried my best to get at least 8 hours of sleep scheduled into my day.
Go to sleep at the same time everyday
I noticed that my sleeping schedule was far from routine as you can get. Some days I would be in bed at 10 pm and on other 3 am. For this goal I wanted to try my best to build some kind of daily sleep routine. My goal was simply go to bed some time between 10:30 pm and 11:30 pm. This proved incredibly harder than anticipated.
Workout at night
I know this has nothing to do with sleep so why am I including this with my sleep goals? Last semester I had a very busy schedule so I only had time to workout at night. Well I started to workout everyday (normally don’t do that), and I felt like my sleep was better. Summer came around and I had an internship working a 9 -5 job and I started working out right after work (my workplace had nice gym). I started skipping the gym more, and my sleep felt off. Since one of sleep myths of which I believed was that working out before bed is a bad thing. I wanted to reincorporate that to see if it did improve my sleep. Oh yah and maybe i just like working out a night more??? Probably because there is less people. I hate working out with people around me.
Goals Achieved ???
So changing human behavior is hard, even if it is yourself you are trying to change. Overall I did make some general improvements in my sleep behavior. The last two weeks I have had an average of 8 hours 27 minutes, and 8 hours 49 minutes of total sleep time. In week one I had zero days over 10 hours and zero days under 8 hours so for the first week I successfully completed my first goal. The second week I did get at least 8 hour of sleep everyday but on two separate nights I got over 10 hours of sleep. Both times was over a weekend and I hit the snooze button a couple times. The weekend is so enticing for sleeping in, especially when I had a very relax day planned. I guess if I were to failure the goal at least it was more sleep then less sleep. Regardless I do need to be more disciplined in my sleep routine.
The second goal was definitely a failure within the first week. I aimed for going to bed between 10:30 pm and 11:30 pm everyday. I was able to achieve that during the school week but when the weekend came that plan completely fell apart. The same thing happened during the second week as well. What makes the goal particular hard is that college students are generally night owls when it comes to the weekends. Events, parties, even soccer practice are scheduled late at night because that is when “everyone” is available. For example I am on an intramural soccer team and we wanted to practice before our game but the only time we can find that was open for everyone was at 9:30 pm. It very difficult to go to sleep before 11:30 when you finish soccer practice at 11:30 pm. I am not making excuses but I believe that total adherence to this goal is unsustainable as a college student without sacrificing some version of a social life. However, even just striving for this goal during the weekdays will still help improve my sleep routine and overall quality of sleep.
For my third and final goal I found relative success. I have been attending my local planet fitness at around 7–8 pm about every other night, and I do have to say that I am enjoying it immensely. There is less people so I am more comfortable during my workout, and more importantly my sleep just feels better. I fall asleep easier, and for some reason I tend to use my phone less before going to bed. Something about coming home taking a shower and then going to bed is relaxing. I believe this is an example of just personal preference and finding your niche sleep routine. That why I recommend everyone to take some time and experiment with your sleep routine to try and find your niche. Who knows maybe your find out your actually a morning person when given quality sleep? Maybe that cup of coffee is not as necessary as that 9 hours of quality sleep.
