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I've been wearing my watch to bed most nights in the last month to check out my sleep patterns. I am not entirely sure how my watch knows, but it can tell me when I was awake, when I was in REM sleep, Core Sleep and Deep Sleep. I suppose it also shows me what time I go to bed and what time I wake up, which as you can see is nearly always before 6am and very very rarely after 7. I'd say this month hasn't been very typical, in that half the time I have been woken by my alarm (which I don't bother setting at home as I have a free 6am alarm called Ernest Herring), but sleep past 7am is rare luxury in my life now.
It also shows that in the last month I haven't had one of my early morning panic attacks that keeps me awake for three hours until I calm down again, though tonight's sleep was the most interrupted for a while and for once the orange bit of the graph did not demonstrate when I got up for a wee (well not only that). I can remember that I woke up a few times, but I can't remember why, though it's interesting (or boring I can't work out which) that I snatched some tiny moments of sleep before lying awake again.
I don't really know how to interpret much of this - does 4 equal sections of REM sleep equate to 4 dreams? And when will my watch be able to record the dreams for me so I can watch them back at my leisure? That tech can't be far away surely. It's the one time the internally visual part of my brain actually works so I'd like to make the most of it.
Overall I am impressed that I am averaging six hours and 44 mins of sleep a night. If I had had this technology when I was a teenager or even when I didn't have kids, we'd be seeing a greater percentage of my day in deep deep sleep.
Maybe we should be able to view these stats for everyone we encounter (and our political leaders) because we might be more sympathetic to their foibles if we realised they were getting by on 5 hours sleep a night and were awake between 2 and 5am and howling into the void.
I am sad that the sleep stats of my youth and any time before last month are lost forever. I should probably keep this going for the rest of my life now, just so future historians will be able to ascertain how well I slept and speculate about how many times I needed to pee in the night (not all those orange sections are wees, historians - sometimes I just woke up).
I love a graph though. Hopefully one day I will be able to document my whole life in graphs and not words. Just post you details of my sleep, steps, minute by minute weight, toilet time, sexual activity and number of original thoughts per day. All right maybe per month on that one. Or year? Maybe a lifetime count. It's just ticking up to three in the next decade.
Sorry. The fact i can't really write about the stuff I am doing when I am awake has forced my hand on this one.
