Anyone who knows me well knows that I love Microsoft Excel. Someone once told me that if I could put my life on a chart I would. I have been conducting a small sleep experiment over the last number of months and I would like to share it with you all!
We all know about the benefits of sleep, and if not you may want to refresh yourself here, here, or here.
In general, I sleep very well. I have decent sleep hygiene, I go to bed and wake up at pretty consistent times, and my room is bat cave dark. About a year ago I started noticing something interesting: some days I would sleep 6 hours and wake up extremely rested, and other days I would sleep 8.5 hours and feel like I had just put my head down. I spent about a year off and on talking to health professionals essentially asking the question “is sleep quality or quantity most important for physical performance.” Never got a straight answer.
So then in October I began noticing that I was tired all the time after sleeping. I was getting 8 hours every night, super consistent, super regular, but waking up tired. This lead me to ponder if sleep length was the most important determining factor of performance or not. This was my sleep at that time:
Then I remembered an 8 week meditation course I had taken. The Doctor leading that course spent a great deal of time talking about the stress system and the brain. He said that insomnia was defined as 1) trouble getting to sleep 2) waking up in the middle of the night or 3) non restorative sleep. Then most interestingly he said that 90% of insomnia was related to stress.
So then I thoughts back to what I was doing in October. I was:
- Trying to run my business
- Just started a new relationship at a gym
- Making a website
- Just got back from 2 weeks in Asia so had a lot of miscellaneous tasks
While I never inherently felt stressed I realized that all of the stuff I had going on could be causing micro stresses which could accumulate to add a significant load to the mind and body.
This pandemic has been very stressful for everyone. I knew that if I wanted to make it out of the other end of this productively I needed to manage this stress. I inserted two new habits:
- a 1 hr bike ride after the work day
- phone shut off by 7pm
Both of these are huge de-stressors for me. Here are the results:
I know its only a 1 week comparison, but I am getting almost 1 hour of extra deep sleep per night! My subjective score of restedness (1- not rested, 10 totally rested) has risen from about 6 in October to an 8/9 lately. And most importantly I feel better!!
So in my small, very unscientific experiment, I make the follow observations:
- Sleep quality is everything (of course you need a certain volume of hours to get through enough deep REM).
- Even micro stresses that you may not observe or feel daily can limit sleep
