Restless Fourteen Times
The Marvel and the Tyranny of Personal Data
Last night, I went to bed at 10:26 PM. It took me one hour and seven minutes to fall asleep. I was awakened fifteen times, but I only remember waking up once. My birthday present, a black bracelet that syncs wirelessly to my computer and phone called Fitbit Flex, provided me with this data and much more. All told, I was restless fourteen times last night, for a total of 194 minutes. These periods of restlessness interspersed with my total six hours and forty minutes of sleep probably account for the fact that I feel bleary-eyed right now.
I’m not the girl who needs the latest tech gadget, and I’m far from being a fitness junkie. But I can’t get over the fact that for $100, I can get a wristband that will keep track of the calories I burn, the steps I take, and the minutes I sleep. I am amazed that I can access this information so easily, and I am amazed that it is accurate.
And it is accurate. Yesterday was one of the most sedentary days I’ve had in a while. When I pulled up a chart of the calories I burned over the course of the day, I could see exactly when I went outside to let the chickens out in the morning. There was a long period where I burned about a calorie a minute, and there were two spikes from when I went stir crazy and walked a quarter mile next door to visit my parents—one spike going and one coming back. The wristband doesn’t lie.
One of my favorite shorts in Francois Girard and Don McKellar’s 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould is called “Diary of One Day.” Images from an X-Ray monitor are cut with text taken from the brilliant pianist’s ‘Health Diary.’ We see a beating heart and blood moving through arteries to the Gigue from Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano Op. 25 and, abruptly, we see: “152/112 to 160/116.” Cut again to “4:00 p.m., Aldomet (2).” We move back to the arm, the elbow, and finally the hand, moving as if playing the piano, then cut to: “5:00 p.m. Gravol (3) 148/110 148/108 142/104.” And so on. Except of course for Gould there was no “and so on” about it: every number meant something extremely personal. The most poignant cut of text in this film for me has always been: “9:00 p.m., after (O-J).” Something about Gould’s noting that he had orange juice before his nine p.m. blood pressure reading has always broken my heart. Perhaps I intuited what I hate to admit: that no amount of careful attention to personal objective data will ever fully add up to a sense of control over a person’s well-being.
I had my blood drawn half a dozen times this past summer. I was looking for something in the numbers that would account for recent inexplicable rapid weight gain, but every time, for every quantifiable aspect of my blood, the numbers came out within normal limits. But I was looking for more than an explanation for weight gain: such fluctuations have invariably accompanied episodes of my mood disorder. I wanted to catch some errant chemical misbehaving. What’s surprising is that I got my hopes up at all. I have been treated for bipolar disorder for almost fourteen years, and in that time I have had my thyroid (TSH) levels checked on five separate occasions—just to be sure. You see, I’m a woman of science, and bipolar disorder is simply too unsettling a diagnosis.
In the year 2000, when I first started taking medication for bipolar, I kept charts. I tracked my mood, my sleep, my period, my diet and exercise, and my meds—including vitamins. The more systematic I was, the more I felt I was in control of this strange and merciless mood disorder. Of course it didn’t change the fundamental facts of my existence, but it was an impressive diary.
If I had the Fitbit then, in 2000, I would have been able to see exactly why I was such a mess. Two nights ago, I was in bed for 9 hours and 13 minutes, but I only got 5 hours and 57 minutes of sleep. And I was awakened fourteen times during that period. In 2000, during a hellish mixed state, I could only guess about such details beyond a certain point. I might have known I had less than three hours, but whether I had two and a half hours or less than one, I didn’t know (though I knew—I could feel—that it was bad).
If I had the Fitbit in the summer of 2012, I would have been able to see that my rest metabolism was considerably higher than usual—a fact easily deduced by my losing twenty pounds in two months without increasing exercise or significantly decreasing my caloric intake. Anyone around me could see the change, but the data would have shown it much more dramatically than me wearing clothes that had been collecting dust in my closet.
There is triumph in numbers. There is absolute confirmation and validation in numbers. This summer, when every test we ran came out normal, we only showed that what we tested for was normal. With more comprehensive data, we would have seen the truth. This is what I believe.
But I also tread carefully, because I know how maddening data tracking can become. None of the charts and tables I kept in the first couple years after I was diagnosed nudged my sleep or my mood in one direction or the other. I was only keeping records—and when this is the case, numbers are inert.
I love my new toy. I won’t stop monitoring my sleep any time soon. But I am hoping I will have many days so good that I forget to find out how many times I was restless the night before.
