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Archive: sleep graphs

Sleeping patterns: At project completion

4 January 2009 23:56

Categories: Books, Entertainment, General, Personal, Work

Sleep graphs 2008

A series of posts

  1. Sorting out my sleeping patterns
  2. Sleeping patterns: progress update
  3. Sleeping patterns: update after nine months
  4. Sleeping patterns: At project completion

My new year’s resolution for 2008 was to get my sleeping pattern into check. To help me do this I recorded data about my sleep on a daily basis throughout the year. Although it was clearly impossible to get precise measurements of things such as the time I fell asleep, I managed to make estimates for every single day of the year. As with a graph of my taste in music, graphs about my sleep tell a surprising amount about my life.

As before, these large graphs show seven day rolling averages of the variables, each of which should be self-explanatory. The smaller graphs concentrate on one variable each. The blue line represents the daily change. The red line is the seven day rolling average, while the grey straight line is a trendline.

Sleep graph 1 - 12 months
Sleep graph 2 - 12 months

The final quarter of the year didn’t start very well. After a relatively well-behaved summer, I began to slip into nocturnal habits at the beginning of October. At first this happened by accident, but I also encouraged it because at the time the following two Formula 1 races were “flyaways”, races in Asia that happen in the middle of night UK time.

What I didn’t think of, though, was that while it was perhaps, just about, feasible to stay up until about 6am to watch the Japanese Grand Prix, it was totally stark raving bonkers to stay up until about 9am watching the Chinese Grand Prix. Which is why the graph drops more quickly than it rises, as I changed my tactics for approaching the grands prix at the last minute.

In mid-November, my work situation changed. Instead of working primarily at nights, which I had done more or less since I started working at Woolworths, I was now working during the day (I don’t know why — must be the excellent customer service I provide!). This completely altered the path that my sleeping patterns took, and also led me to view the project in a new light.

Insomnia - 12 months The week I woke up the earliest all year was the seven day period leading up to 1 December, when I got up at an average clock time of approximately 09:13. At the same time, my “insomnia”, which was one of my primary concerns through the year, fell through the floor, lasting an average of just 21 minutes per night by the end of the year. The average “insomnia” for the whole year was 1 hour and 30 minutes per night.

Asleep for - 12 months All the while, the amount of time I was sleeping didn’t change too much, despite the earlier-than-normal starts. It fell to an average 7 hours and 1 minute per night on 18 December. That is pretty low, but it that was a one off (it normally hovered around 7½ hours) and it had been as low as 5 hours and 59 minutes in March.

Indeed, the fact that the amount of time I slept per night was pretty much stable at the recommended 8 hours per night was the pleasant surprise of the project. Maybe I had nothing to worry about all along.

All-in-all, my taste of what life in a 9–5 routine might be like left me with optimism about how I would cope. I adapted to regular early starts without a great deal of bother. I slept a bit less, but not uncomfortably so. And I was actually saving a lot of time by falling asleep much more quickly when I got to bed.

I came to realise that perhaps all of the sleep “problems” I had were actually down to a lack of routine rather than any genuine trouble with sleep. Of all the experiments I tried to help me sleep better, having a reason to get up early regularly was by far the best. And there’s no use in setting the alarm early if there’s no reason to get up, because I’ll only switch the alarm off and sleep in until at least the mid-morning. And why not? Maybe my new year’s resolution for 2009 should be to relax more about everything.

Slept from - 12 months You might be asking, “what’s with that mad spike on most of the graphs on 31 December?” Well, I was hit by a dodgy winter-related disease. I went to bed at about 16:30 and more or less slept right through until 08:30 the following morning. Apart from making me feel rotten, the illness caused a right mess of my graphs! Mind you, the finishing point of the seven day averages looks fairly normal because I had been so indulgent during that Christmas week.

Overall, I am pleased with how the year-long experiment has gone. The trendlines for almost every variable I measured went in the right direction as the year progressed. The exception was ‘lazy’, to my shame. The experience of the final few weeks of the year have assured me that I probably don’t actually have much of a sleeping problem at all.

But I found the whole thing fascinating, and I already kind of miss logging every detail of my sleeping habits. I referred to the graphs often just for interest. But I have decided that I had better stop graphing elements of my life in minute detail, before it jeopardises any relationships.

All of the remaining sleep graphs are included below the fold.

My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to read more books. I have quite a daunting pile (actually, it’s a shelf) of books that have gone unread, some for several years. I will make my aim to reduce the existing pile to zero by the end of the year. I think my primary strategy will be to get more reading done in bed before I go to sleep. After all, now that I’m no longer worried about my sleep, it’s probably the easiest place to cram it in!

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Sleeping patterns: update after nine months

1 October 2008 17:21

Categories: General, Personal, University

Sleep graphs 2008

A series of posts

  1. Sorting out my sleeping patterns
  2. Sleeping patterns: progress update
  3. Sleeping patterns: update after nine months
  4. Sleeping patterns: At project completion

I’m not sure how this post will be taken. The first update got 20 comments, the second one got zero. It does seem a bit self-indulgent. But I promised to keep you updated on the experiment so here it is.

If you missed the original posts, basically I made it my new years resolution to get my sleeping patterns in order. A big part of that is logging all sorts of information to do with my sleep so that I can see how things are progressing. I have already posted updates at the 3 month and 6 month marks. Today marks the end of the 9th month, and I am three quarters of the way through the experiment.

Sleep graph 1 after 9 months

As in the previous posts, these graphs all depict 7-day rolling averages. Hopefully the labels are self-explanatory. As you can see, my sleep still has these annoying cycles which I’m trying to shake off at the moment. I am still experimenting a bit, seeing what I can do to make the situation better.

At the beginning of August I decided I would go to bed quite early regardless of how tired I felt, no matter whether I thought I would get to sleep or not. The result was that I was actually getting to sleep later than I had been (as the blue line heads down, the red line heads up). By the end of the week I felt awful and I knew that I had wasted a lot of time just lying awake in bed. I think it is probably better to tire yourself out before you retire to bed.

Looking towards the end of the graph, it also seems as though the lines are beginning to flat-line rather than go in these peaks and troughs that I am trying to get rid of. There is a slow but definite drift upwards though due to a lack of commitments giving me little incentive to get up early.

Just now I am going to bed later than I have for a number of months and I am not getting up until after noon. So in the short term I’ll be working to bring those times back earlier again.

Sleep graph 2 after 9 months

In this graph you can quite clearly see the point where I tried going to bed early — the highest peak in the ‘insomnia’ graph all year. You can see the knock-on effect that had as a whole by the red and green peaks as well. All-in-all, I was spending almost 12 hours per day in bed. That’s not on as far as I’m concerned, and it’s good to see that the whole thing has calmed down a lot over the past couple of months, with a prolonged period where I was only spending 9 hours per day in bed. I’m aiming to keep this below 10 hours in the long run.

Slept in - 9 months One annoying feature of my sleeping patterns that has crept in over the past few months is waking up early for no apparent reason. The graph to the right demonstrates this.

The blue line shows the difference between the time I set my alarm for and the time I wake up every day. The red line is a 7-day rolling average and there is a grey trendline. As you can see, the spikes below zero are becoming more frequent than they were at the start of the year.

I think like most people I have always woken up in the middle of the night, but normally I am able to go straight back to sleep. More and more, I find myself unable to simply turn over and fall asleep again and I actually end up staying awake until I get up. Strangely, this seems to happen most often on Saturdays. That used to be the day when I slept in the most.

Alarm - 9 months What I also find amusing about the graphs is just how much you can tell about my life just by looking at them. Take the time I set my alarm for. You can see more or less the exact point where I finish university, when the regular early starts stop in March. You can even see that extra-evil exam when I had an extra-early start.

From then on, the time I set my alarm at more or less goes wherever my whim takes me. But you can still see little glimpses into my life. Those moments where I set my alarm at 0830 every two weeks or so? Formula 1 practice sessions. You can even see the point when it was the Canadian Grand Prix rather than a European race, the giveaway being that there is no early start for around four weeks in June. The line goes even further up because there was no early Sunday morning start for the GP2 race! The same happened when there was no F1 action for three weeks in August.

All-in-all, I’m pleased with my progress so far during the year. But the times have not become much earlier since I wrote my last update in July. Then I said my aim was to start getting up regularly at 1000. I have failed to do that and the trendline still rests above 1100. The times remain around an hour earlier than they were at the start of the year — the same as six months ago.

My target for the rest of the year now is to take all of the activity an hour earlier, then get rid of the ‘cycles’ so that I have a regular pattern. There are a couple of challenges ahead, namely the Japanese and Chinese Grands Prix which are coming up in a couple of weeks. That will inevitably cause havoc.

On my side, though, is the fact that the clocks change later this month. Essentially, my target therefore is to keep my sleeping patterns as they are. That might seem like a bit of a cop-out, but I’m sure most of this is psychological.

Perhaps unwisely, I didn’t take into account daylight savings time in my graphs. This means that instead of getting up (etc.) one hour earlier, I have really got up two hours earlier. But in a way I don’t think that’s the point. The point is, how much do I feel like I need to get up if I wake up at 1000? How different does that feel if I wake up at 1100? My aim is to start feeling like I should get up at 1000.

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Sleeping patterns: progress update

1 July 2008 14:07

Categories: Food and drink, General, Personal

Sleep graphs 2008

A series of posts

  1. Sorting out my sleeping patterns
  2. Sleeping patterns: progress update
  3. Sleeping patterns: update after nine months
  4. Sleeping patterns: At project completion

My first post about my sleeping patterns was a surprise hit. So I have decided to write a second update as I reach the halfway mark of my year-long experiment to keep data on my sleeping patterns.

The previous post ended on a bit of a cliffhanger as all my graphs were spiking up quite alarmingly. Since then I think progress has been quite good.

Here is graph 1 (data measured in clock times) updated to show the first six months (i.e. this year up to yesterday). As before, these are all seven day rolling averages.

Sleep graph 1 - 6 months

As you can see, the broad trend for all of the lines is for them to go in the right direction. In fact, very recently the ‘alarm’ and ‘slept until’ lines were at the lowest point they’ve been all year. However, since my sleeping patterns appear to be in cycles, that will be counterbalanced soon enough by a period where I wake up later. You can just see the start of that at the end of this graph.

The previous three months are very different to the first three months. The cut-off point for the last post came just after I had had my last class at university. Since then I have had far fewer regular engagements, but I have still had the odd activity to get up early for — exams, GP2 races, graduation ceremonies and what-have-you.

In general, I am still having a lot of trouble predicting how long I will sleep for. Choosing the right time to set the alarm for is the most difficult thing about getting my sleep under control. If I set it too late then that is useless, whereas if I set it too early I just go back to sleep, possibly not to be seen again until the afternoon!

The ‘morning’ lines (alarm, slept until, got up) have been much more unpredictable than the ‘night’ lines (bed at, slept from). In fact, the night time variables are remarkably flat, with only a little bulge a couple of weeks ago ruining an otherwise slow but relatively steady trend towards earlier times. It now feels weird to be up after, say, 0200 and I consciously try to avoid staying up beyond that time (which was otherwise commonplace for me).

Slept until - 6 months Having said that, although they fluctuate a lot, the morning variables are also going in the right direction — but very slowly. At the start of the year I was most likely to wake up at midday. Nowadays I’m more likely to wake up at 1030. Considering we have also had the clocks changing in that period, I am effectively waking up two and a half hours earlier than I was at the start of the year. Assuming I end up with a normal job though I will be looking to get up three or four hours earlier than even this.

Here is graph 2 — variables measured as lengths of time.

Sleep graph 2 - 6 months

This graph is still fluctuating quite a lot. As you can see, ‘insomnia’ is going down in general. But it is still causing me a headache. I seemingly can’t tell how tired I am, so sometimes I am unable to fall asleep for half an hour (which I consider to be normal), others for over four hours (as actually happened on one day and is distinctly abnormal).

Incidentally, the data for what I have called the ‘insomnia’ variable is slightly odd. The name is misleading. It measures the difference between the time when I go to bed and my estimate of when I fall asleep. But often I am sitting in bed reading a book before actually turning in. So perhaps you can knock, say, half an hour off the figures to get a better idea of my ‘insomnia’.

Another notable aspect of the graph is the fact that the area of green — which I have called ‘lazy’, the difference between the time when I wake up and when I get up — has increased. I think this is partly due to some advice I followed in the comments to the last post. Duncan2 and 4u1e both suggested putting my alarm at the other side of the room.

Lazy - 6 months I had tried that trick before, but with little success. Now I have put it at the complete opposite side of the room, a good 15 or so yards from my bed, and in an awkward position. At first it certainly had me waking up earlier — but I felt so awful that I just stayed in bed for ages! Hence the increase in ‘laziness’.

As you can see on the ‘lazy’ graph, it is pretty easy to pinpoint the moment when I started putting the alarm at the other side of the room, with a massive spike in early April. Since then the spikes have still happened from time to time. But they are getting smaller, suggesting that I am coping better with the scheme now. However, the ‘lazy’ graph is disappointingly the one graph where the trendline is going in the wrong direction. So that’s something for me to work on over the coming months.

Another point to note from the comments is that I have now extended my caffeine curfew. Beforehand I just banned coffee after around 1800. Now I have banned tea as well. Green tea is banned from about 2000 onwards except for when I am working until 2100, in which case I have that final mug of caffeine at the first opportunity I get. I used to be sceptical about whether cutting out caffeine was actually working for me. But since I started cutting out tea as well I have found that I am getting to sleep earlier.

I think overall the year so far has been positive in terms of getting my sleep under control. Now what I am aiming for is to start waking up regularly at 1000 without feeling rotten and hauling myself out of bed at that time as well!

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