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.