One Year of Good Sleep

03 Feb 2024

About one year ago, I wrote about getting control of my sleep. Anecdotally, it feels like it’s working. I’ve been feeling much better, but there are a lot of confounding variables that may be effecting my feelings. I’m also not sure if my quality of sleep is actually improving or if I’m just feeling like it is. I decided to pull out pandas and look at some data from my fitbit.

Deep Sleep and REM Sleep

Looking at total minutes of deep and REM sleep: They seem to be going up.

These sleep stages are the most important for health. As I expected in my last post, they were dangerously low during the pandemic.

Percentages

I also normalized the data into percentages (relative to total minutes slept). Those are going up as well. The formula for this is: 100 * minutes-<stage>/ minutes-asleep:

This means I’m getting less light sleep and more restorative deep and REM sleep. My REM is approaching 25% which I believe is good. My deep percentage is still lower than it should be. I’m currently getting ~75 mins a night which is still less than recommended.

Total Time Asleep

My total time asleep hasn’t shifted much. I was cycling b/w 400 and 420 minutes regularly. I hit a low at the end of 2022 right before I wrote my last blog post.

I need to ask a sleep doctor, but I think this is still not enough. I know some people don’t need a full 8 hours but I’m not sure if I am one of them or not.

Goals for the year

My goals are to increase my sleep time per night as well as increase my deep sleep percentage. I think the two main levers for this goal will be going to bed earlier and getting more consistent exercise. I’ll check back in next year.