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Sleep Diary Adventures!
9 years ago
Yo!
Do you sleep well at night? Can you keep 24-hours routines if you put yourself to it?
I mean, of course everyone gets tired sometimes or has irregular sleep here and there,
but generally a weekend is all it takes to fix everything, right?
Well... not for me! I have always suspected this "8 hours a day of sleep" thing as I
would most likely sleep 10, 12 during school days. I could keep a week of 8-hour-long
naps, but by the end of the weekend I would sleep through the entire Saturday and it'd
take another week to fix that.
So, recently I decided to try and keep a routine. At the start of this year, I've made an
Excel table with many variables to calculate at what time I should go to bed and wake up
in order to keep a 8 hours of rest a day. Here it is:
http://i.imgur.com/CkhHVuF.png
It's pretty simple and straight-forward, as the formula shows. If I was awake for 10 hours,
I need 5 hours of sleep (half of that amount). If 16, then 8. 16+8 = 24, there's a routine!
While that thing was pretty good for time management, and would work clock-perfectly for
several days in a row, every now and then I would sleep extra 2~4 hours out of NOWHERE.
My schedule was ruined because of that.
But the table kept working as intended after that shift, guessing correctly for a few more
days before another leap came about.
That led me to believe there was an offset somewhere. I was clearly not made by THE LORD
to sleep 8 hours a day.
But... how many hours should I put in the table then? We already spend 1/3 of our lives in
bed, I don't want to make that 10 hours a day... so much to do!
So I started to log every single day of sleep in a new table: http://i.imgur.com/GhdFlRh.png
Not worrying about keeping a routine that much, just studying my "natural" sleep schedule.
Mind you, this is just a sample of these last few weeks, I've logged through 124 days so far.
And I think I can finally attempt to make an educated guess at the new number to aim for!
See, here are a few more charts:
Awake/Asleep proportion on a daily basis:
http://i.imgur.com/z7dKlEx.png
The total time I've spent sleeping as a MEAN, from all these 124 days:
http://i.imgur.com/wdtJofo.png
So yeah, you can notice in the first one there is NO SENSE whatsoever in my sleeping habits.
There are days where I'll sleep 4 hours, there are days I'll sleep 17 hours like a rock.
But the MEAN itself hasn't that many bumps. It's been between 35% and 39% for a good while,
and I've decided 36,6% is the GOLDEN NUMBER.
And... after a bit of fiddling and lots of parenthesis, I present you the NEW, BETTER, IMPROVED
sleep management table:
http://i.imgur.com/MW66cCJ.png
Will that work? Will it last?
Well... I'm not sure, but whatever is the outcome, I think I'll have to deal with 8:47 of sleep per day.
I considered developing some siesta strategy, to cut down some hours, but look how much trouble
I have going to bed ONCE, if I had to do it twice a day and still manage my time, I'd go insane.
Let's keep going insane for a more comfortable future, if I manage to use the magic number! :)
Hope you had fun.
Do you sleep well at night? Can you keep 24-hours routines if you put yourself to it?
I mean, of course everyone gets tired sometimes or has irregular sleep here and there,
but generally a weekend is all it takes to fix everything, right?
Well... not for me! I have always suspected this "8 hours a day of sleep" thing as I
would most likely sleep 10, 12 during school days. I could keep a week of 8-hour-long
naps, but by the end of the weekend I would sleep through the entire Saturday and it'd
take another week to fix that.
So, recently I decided to try and keep a routine. At the start of this year, I've made an
Excel table with many variables to calculate at what time I should go to bed and wake up
in order to keep a 8 hours of rest a day. Here it is:
http://i.imgur.com/CkhHVuF.png
It's pretty simple and straight-forward, as the formula shows. If I was awake for 10 hours,
I need 5 hours of sleep (half of that amount). If 16, then 8. 16+8 = 24, there's a routine!
While that thing was pretty good for time management, and would work clock-perfectly for
several days in a row, every now and then I would sleep extra 2~4 hours out of NOWHERE.
My schedule was ruined because of that.
But the table kept working as intended after that shift, guessing correctly for a few more
days before another leap came about.
That led me to believe there was an offset somewhere. I was clearly not made by THE LORD
to sleep 8 hours a day.
But... how many hours should I put in the table then? We already spend 1/3 of our lives in
bed, I don't want to make that 10 hours a day... so much to do!
So I started to log every single day of sleep in a new table: http://i.imgur.com/GhdFlRh.png
Not worrying about keeping a routine that much, just studying my "natural" sleep schedule.
Mind you, this is just a sample of these last few weeks, I've logged through 124 days so far.
And I think I can finally attempt to make an educated guess at the new number to aim for!
See, here are a few more charts:
Awake/Asleep proportion on a daily basis:
http://i.imgur.com/z7dKlEx.png
The total time I've spent sleeping as a MEAN, from all these 124 days:
http://i.imgur.com/wdtJofo.png
So yeah, you can notice in the first one there is NO SENSE whatsoever in my sleeping habits.
There are days where I'll sleep 4 hours, there are days I'll sleep 17 hours like a rock.
But the MEAN itself hasn't that many bumps. It's been between 35% and 39% for a good while,
and I've decided 36,6% is the GOLDEN NUMBER.
And... after a bit of fiddling and lots of parenthesis, I present you the NEW, BETTER, IMPROVED
sleep management table:
http://i.imgur.com/MW66cCJ.png
Will that work? Will it last?
Well... I'm not sure, but whatever is the outcome, I think I'll have to deal with 8:47 of sleep per day.
I considered developing some siesta strategy, to cut down some hours, but look how much trouble
I have going to bed ONCE, if I had to do it twice a day and still manage my time, I'd go insane.
Let's keep going insane for a more comfortable future, if I manage to use the magic number! :)
Hope you had fun.
i know this because i've been there and done that.
but i don't live in such a place.
in today's america,
there are few if any such places,
where it would be possible to live,
without trading one set of anxieties for another,
by indenturing oneself to an automobile.
so instead i do what sleeping i can when it is quite enough to do so,
most often this is during the hours other people are at work or in school.
Luckily (?) I can sleep no matter what, sometimes I wake up naturally and notice there was
some jackhammer going on on the street for hours.
If there's ever an earthquake or nuclear attack, I won't even know it. RIP me.
i have only one wall with another unit on the other side of it,
but the outside walls are acoustically thin too.
also there's a difference between a nuclear attack and the sound of the human voice, its not the noise level but the kind of noise.
trains, cars, industrial noises, strange natural sounds, no problem, but a tv, recording, radio, or just someone talking, and i'm wide awake.
its an anxiety thing.
i doubt very much i could find quieter neighbors anyplace i could afford to live.
but i live in the last unit next to the alley and the dumpster,
an alley that becomes a human thoroughfare throughout much of the night.
loonies come by screaming at their own ghosts,
(often on the other side of the next street over)
friends taking a short cut home at all hours of the night,
carrying on innocent and ordinary, if a bit too mundane, conversations as they go by.
no, its just the human voice, that one thing,
that fucks up the calm and gratifying world of logic, creativity and exploration i otherwise experience in my dreams.
I once lived in a house where 3 out of 5 weekdays the same homeless drunkard would wander at my street at 2AM shouting and cursing at some neighbor's door, until the neighbor started to reply. Police was called a couple times, but nothing was done.
Then we had your typical gangster wannabes with their pumping speakers and bad music in their car, rattling my windows.
That wouldn't be that bad, but the window of my room was about 3 meters away from a neighbor's house... with just a very thin wall separating us. I never saw the family there, but I damn sure HEARD them over 4 long years.
Their mother was a crazy old lady who screamed REALLY loud as if she was being tortured. Every single day, starting at 6~8 AM and going through 18. I never really understood how she could scream EVERY DAY, ALL DAY and still keep enough vocal cords to keep doing it.
She would start screaming: "GIVE BACK MY CANE! MY CAAAANE! SON OF A BIIIIITCH! THEY'RE TAKING MY CANE!"
Then they would give her back her cane and she would start hitting everything with it. THey would take it back, and she would scream again.
"HEEEELP, THEY'RE MURDERING ME! HEEEEELP! POLICE!!!!" and then she'd merrily sing about how the devil was going to get everyone.
The family would try to argue with her, also shouting, but to no avail.
Police did indeed show up there a few times, probably called by beginners who really thought the lady was being murdered.
As I said, I have very solid sleep, so I didn't bother that much, I even had a bit of fun here and there listening to this out-of-a-cartoon-tier drama. Until one day one of her sons had a slight breakdown, and said tearing up he was tired of that, that it had already been 18 years of screaming.
Man... that made me have a bit more sympathy for that family. I wonder how many years it'll still go on.
--
By the way, have you tried blocking noise by foaming up your room walls, or maybe listening to some white noise on earphones while you sleep?
Mustn't be THAT expensive to pull off, although I'm not sure how efficient it'd be.
I love using pink noise from this website when I need to focus and there is TV/people going on: http://simplynoise.com/
Then I'll start using it to try being a normal human being. :D
The chart is predicting well my total sleep debt (which is usually paid on weekends, but my week days have been really strange lately - I set up my alarm to a time where I will already be waking up 2 hours earlier than I should, but then - BAM! I wake up BEFORE the alarm clock, up to 2 hours earlier!
So yeah, I can forecast how my weekend is going to be, but my weekdays are being sabotaged by my own internal clock.
I won't complain, though, I'd much rather wake up earlier than later than I should, as it's easier to remedy by going to bed early.
Maybe the solution would be to reduce the mean's scope for the last month or something like that. While my overall (almost 200 days) mean is 36,6, the last two weeks alone made that mean float around 36,3~36,4.
If I could I would hire someone to study and catalogue all my habits and search for patterns. Air temperature, sleep schedule, food, liquid ingestion... damn. I want IRL status bars.
You'd make a great univursity study hahaha
I've kinda got back my ability to kinda choose when I go to sleep (but only if it isn't too much earlier compared to internal clock) so I can suppress the shifting forward to pretty good extent. I'm still fairly wobbly with how long I am awake though. Sleep time seems to have stabilized to around 7...8 hours.
Status bars would be good indeed...