Sleep - 3. Sleep Winner

It only took me about a week from the last post to achieve my goal. Which means it took about 11 days from the time I set the goal to increase my sleep to actually doing it consistently. Goals are great! I should have just done what I said I was going to do in my first post and be in bed for an 8 hour period, I might have increased my sleep a while ago.

But maybe it's not that simple.

 A chart of my sleep deficit for the last 11 months.

Some of this is change in environment, some of it due to changing jobs and having to adjust to new sleep cycles. But it looking at the graph I can see that there are a few stretches of time that I was not, for lack of a better term, losing sleep. It's almost like I have cycles of sleep cycles. December, January, February I can actually see a correlation between my Mood logged from MoodPanda and an increase in deficit. While I think lack of sleep tends to lower my mood, I don't necessarily think that could be the cause since May seems to be another drop in sleep income and my moods were mostly above 5 in May and June.

It is interesting to compare the two, but I know there is more at play here. The last year has been filled with a lot of emotional highs and lows. Stressful work environments, moving, not having a bed, and depression are all factors involved in gradual loss of sleep. Trying to balance my life through data is one of the reasons I started writing this blog.

I've had the same goal of getting 7.5 hours of sleep since I started using Sleep As Android because I thought that worked for me, but I'm not really sure if that is the amount of sleep that I actually need. In the next week, I'm going to examine the scores that I give to my sleep each night and see if I can determine if 7.5 hours of sleep is actually what my body wants. I can tell you that I usually rate my sleep pretty poorly, so I'm very excited to see what any high rated nights of sleep have in common.

Sleep - 2. I'm Challenging (Myself)

My sleeping situation has changed so much since I last wrote about sleeping. Different beds, air mattresses, couches, it hasn't been fun, to say the least. The situation has stabilized but my sleep has not. Let's take a look.


The last half year I have:
Duration Deficit: -0:40 [-0:27]
Deep Sleep Cycles: 44% [+2%]
Noise Snoring: 3% [-7%]

The past 2 weeks:
Duration Deficit: -0:35 [-0:08]
Deep Sleep Cycles: 39% [-7%]
Noise Snoring: 4% [-8%]

The numbers in [brackets] indicate the change since the last posting about sleep. Yeah, it's been a while. I think the most significant thing is the reduction of noise snoring. One thing that I try to do in bed every night is just to scan my body and it helps to be laying in a symmetrical position, so I've been falling asleep on my back whereas I used to fall asleep exclusively on my side. I need to get better about paying attention to the position I'm in when I wake up. It is difficult to tell how much my body is moving. I've been considering a Fitbit that goes on my wrist when I sleep, but I'm not ready for that. I love my Fitbit One and I just clip it to my underwear when I sleep, but I mostly just use Sleep As Android for all my measurements.

The good news is that Sleep As Android now has Goal Setting integration so a few days ago I challenged myself to improve my sleep duration to 7.2 hours per night. I've improved a little by giving myself enough time in bed to account for my poor sleep or inability to fall asleep which happens with some regularity. I'll be back to talk about my progress soon.

I've been writing more in notebooks and I plan to post more frequently about various projects I'm doing to help measure my life. I look forward to the next entry.

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Mood - 3. Trending

MP: 
Average mood: 6.1
Happy: 61.5%
Ok: 17.2%
Unhappy: 21.3%

My average mood seems to have dropped back down to the first measurements. This leads me to believe that 6.1 is probably my baseline. I had a lull in recording and upon returning I noticed that at first, I was only reaching to record when something was going wrong. So that seemed to be a trend that could have dropped the average down a little. In any case, I'm back to recording. Interesting that my "OK" times remained the same. Those originally took a huge leap from 1st to 2nd recording.

One thing I found helpful in mood regulation was the SBNRR technique. I have been reading "Search Inside Yourself" by Chade-Meng Tan recently and he talks about this practice. It stands for Stop, Breathe, Notice, Reflect, Respond. I found myself getting off balance from people who were having bad days. Instead of letting them get to me, I remember to use this technique. Try it out thinking about a recent conversation you had that went poorly. Because of depression I often find myself ruminating, but this can help to turn that around. I highly recommend looking for a copy of "Search Inside Yourself" if you can. It is an excellent intro to mindfulness from a Google engineer.

Don't bring me down. No, no, no, no, no. - ELO

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Mood - 2. Baseline

MP: 
Average mood: 6.4
Happy: 66.3%
Ok: 17.2%Unhappy: 16.6%

I have shifted some of my unhappiness into being all right. My happiness level maintains its level, in fact it received a .6% bump from some of that Ok. These results are with no interference by experiment from me.

I'm a little bit surprised at the decrease in unhappiness. I had been going through a lot of stress at work for a very long time and often felt too exhausted to write, or some nights even feed myself a proper dinner. It is a good sign for me, because I am about to go on vacation and I feel ready to move that Ok to Happy. I even remember saying to myself "Well it looks like my last month in this position is going to be as awful as my first." For reference I had to work 20 days in a row my first month and then had 1 day off and rounded out the month with 10 more work days. Wild ride. Glad it is over. Part of the reason that I started tracking my mood is because I started seeing a therapist due to stress and a resurgence of depression from long ago and it was suggested that I journal my feelings. Mood Panda was much quicker than pulling out my journal. When times were bad I would log my mood as soon as I had a free moment. It is nice to take a moment out of your day to vent and be honest to strangers. Sometimes you get hugs. You can take a moment and see recent publicly posted logs, and sometimes your problems don't seem so bad. Sometimes.

I'm about to be on vacation so I am sure that there will be an increase in mood. I am tying up loose ends for my move across the country and that sort of stress feels very manageable, especially when I'll be sitting on a beach next week. I will make it a point to log my mood daily so I'll have updates more frequently. I am very excited to see the Dark Tower on Thursday. Tickets to see the 7:19(!) show!

Sleep - 1. The Very Beginning

Many years ago I purchased a Fitbit. I really had no interest in exercise. I was not trying to "get fit" and had little interest in changing my physical routine. My main concern was tracking my sleep. I was working a night job and would get home between 1:30 and 2:00 AM. Having a moderately physical job may make me feel tired, but I still felt mentally awake. In the past I've have referred to myself as a night owl. I don't really know how to explain it, but I just feel more alert at night. Maybe it was just the world slowing down for a while causing a brief respite from the seemingly constant clatter, giving me the space to think. In any case, I often wouldn't get into bed until near 5. I also had friends that worked the same shift so we would often stay up even later. At work I often felt tired after having slept all day and waking up just in time to shower before my 5:00 PM work time.

I knew I wasn't getting restful sleep, so in order to determine the cause I began my first tracking experiment. How can you fix a problem if you don't know where you are starting from? I know know I had heard good things about Fitbit and I knew it tracked sleep so I purchased a Fitbit One. I chose that one in particular because I pretty much always have pockets and at the time it was the only one that measured flights of stairs. I started taking simple measurements of fluid, caffeine, nicotine and hours of sleep. The feedback I was looking at was how restful my sleep actually was. If something I was doing worked well, I went with it. Eventually I switched to a day job and had a much different problem. Mornings were my new enemy. I continued tracking sleep for a while, but since I was not really doing anything with the data I didn't care when I lost the wrist strap, I just clipped the Fitbit One to my pillow, made sure it was on sensitive mode, and dealt with it.

More recently I've decided that I want to feel rested at work. Since I didn't really like the feel of having to wear a wrist strap every night I was looking for other options. I was looking for something that would have great connectivity with other types of trackers, but also something that had the ability to provide high quality data should the need arise. I decided on the Sleep as Android application for my phone. It provides wonderful charts and as a bonus for me it has ways to tweak the snooze setting. One major problem I have had since having an alarm clock has been the snooze button. I would just hit it and hit it and barely even be aware of it some mornings. I always had to resort to tricks like having the clock on the other side of the room. Sleep as Android offers the ability to modify the duration of the snooze and limit the number of times it can be pressed. If that doesn't get you, there are several different captcha type games that force you to think in order to turn them off. There is even the option to print off a QR code which you can put somewhere else in your house that you must get up and scan to turn the alarm off. I haven't had the need of that functionality yet, but that would have saved me many snoozes when I was younger.

For now my sleep is mostly regular. I want the quality of my sleep to improve. This will be my first documented project in which I attempt to modify my behavior based on the data I am collecting. My daily goal is to get 7 hours of sleep, but realistically I am only in bed for that amount of time and don't fall asleep the minute I get into bed. I do my hardest to only use the Sleep as Android app in bed, so I do not stare at a screen all night. Having a phone in bed is a very bad habit and I know I have spent many a night laying awake just reading internet.

Looking at the baseline for the last half year I have:
Duration Deficit: -0:13
Deep Sleep Cycles 46% 3:07 (5x)
Noise Snoring: 10% 0:06

The past 2 weeks I've been much worse:
Duration Deficit: -0:27
Deep Sleep Cycles 46% 3:01 (5x)
Noise Snoring: 12% 0:06

I suppose much worse is a bit of an overstatement.

My current target condition for Duration Deficit is ± 0:00.
My first experiment will be to actually be in bed 7 hours and 30 minutes before I would like to wake up. Giving myself some time to settle.

I'll have to start tomorrow because I've already past that mark tonight. Goodnight.

Mood - 1. Getting Started

This is an odd place for me to start. I thought that I would do something was easily quantifiable, like my diet, weight, or steps taken, and I am sure that I will cover those things. However, I started using MoodPanda last month and I find it quite helpful. I never thought about trying to quantify my mood. Growing up, I spent a lot of time alone and didn't really have a fluency of emotions. Even as an adult it has been hard to interpret moods sometimes.

MoodPanda, put simply, is a mood tracker. Whenever you feel the urge you score your mood on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 to 4 are not good, 5 is OK and 6 - 10 are good to great. Over time, you can see trends. Month view allows you to see the ups and downs of the week. You can see your daily mood compared to the global average, Fitbit data can even be imported so you can compare your steps to your mood. When rating your mood you can write some text as to why you gave a particular score.

Tracking my mood has allowed me to have better idea of where my head is at. I'd had a lot of work related stress recently and having the MoodPanda app would have been very helpful to get through some of the stress. If I am not feeling great about something it is wonderful to have a tool to help instantly reflect on a situation. Or even if I am feeling great about something and I might feel like it is bragging if I tweet about it. One of the great things about MoodPanda is that you are anonymous. You can post publicly, but you only use whatever name and initial you put in. You have the option of posting to social media, but that is not what I use social media for.

Anyway, I have collected 42 days of moods and developed a baseline for where my mood should be at a given day. For the time being I will monitor without attempting to modify my behavior.

MP:
Average mood: 6.1
Happy: 65.7%
Ok: 10.4%
Unhappy: 23.9%