Sleep tracking

How not to do it

I’ve been tracking my sleep passively for a while. Not that I had any issues with sleep, but considering you spend massive chunk of your life sleeping, seems like a good idea to optimize it. After I bought Emfit sleep tracker I figured it would be interesting to try correlating its stats with my subjective feelings.

Every morning, I log few things on the scale from 0 (bad) to 2 (good), one of which is something that I defined as “physical energy” (as opposed to mental energy). Well,

| date         | physical |
|              | energy   |
|--------------|----------+
| [2018-07-10] |        1 |
| [2018-07-11] |        1 |
| [2018-07-13] |        0 |
| [2018-07-15] |        1 |
| [2018-07-16] |        1 |
| [2018-07-17] |        1 |
| [2018-07-18] |        1 |
| [2018-07-19] |        1 |
| [2018-07-20] |        1 |
| [2018-07-21] |        1 |
| [2018-07-22] |        1 |
| [2018-07-23] |        1 |
| [2018-07-24] |        1 |
| [2018-07-27] |        1 |
| [2018-07-28] |        1 |
| [2018-07-31] |        1 |
| [2018-08-01] |        1 |
| [2018-08-02] |        1 |
| [2018-08-05] |        1 |
| [2018-08-07] |        1 |
| [2018-08-08] |        1 |
| [2018-08-09] |        1 |
| [2018-08-10] |        1 |
| [2018-08-13] |        1 |
| [2018-08-14] |        1 |
... you get the idea ...
| [2019-02-10] |        1 |
| [2019-02-11] |        1 |
| [2019-02-12] |        1 |
| [2019-02-13] |        1 |
| [2019-02-14] |        1 |
| [2019-02-15] |        1 |
| [2019-02-16] |        1 |
| [2019-02-17] |        1 |
| [2019-02-18] |        1 |
| [2019-01-19] |        1 |
| [2019-02-20] |        1 |

As you can see that’s not very fruitful (not sure what happened on 13 July 2018 lol). There are two possibilities here: my self introspection is really bad: many well being/mood tracking apps would let people estimate on the scale from 1 to 10, and I can’t even distinguish between three states.

Another one is that I’m just very stable and actually have no variation. For instance, I never had problems working out first thing in the morning, without having any food or stimulants. What bothers me a bit is that I don’t seem to experience any ‘high energy’ states either, which apparently people do.

I guess the lesson here is to reevaluate things I’m measuring after a short while and make sure I can actually track something meaningful or something I am capable of measuring.