Evidence

I have one night’s worth of evidence that the amount of sleep you get isn’t as important as how you sleep.  Granted, this is all based on numbers pulled off my Apple Watch and who knows if any of it is even close to accurate.

I got seven hours and five minutes of sleep last night.  That’s so much sleep I don’t know what to do with myself.  I slept so late that I’m amazed I wasn’t late for work.  I was awake for about an hour from a little after 3:00am until a little after 4:00am.  That might skew the results somehow but I’m not sure.  Of the seven hours, the watch determined that four hours and fifty minutes was “restful sleep,” whatever that means.  That’s more than I usually get.  Most nights it is around four hours, but very rarely does it approach five hours.

Based on all of that (other than the hour I was awake) I would expect to be feeling nice and rested today.  Makes sense, does it?

One other number that the Apple Watch tracks is the heart rate.  According to the Sleep Watch app, the app I use to display all of this data, your heart rate is supposed to drop while you sleep.  A drop rate percentage in the teens is average, in the 20’s is good.  What was my heart rate drop percentage last night?

Negative One.

My heart rate actually went up while I was asleep.  The watch calls a rate change like that, “not optimal.”  I wonder if my rate was -10 would it be labeled “shitty”?  I wonder.

So given the numbers, the final piece of the puzzle is how do I feel?

Well, I feel shitty.  I feel like I barely slept at all last night.  This implies that the heart rate dip percentage is actually more indicative of sleep quality than the restful sleep number.  Interesting.

On a side note, my CPAP machine keeps some stats of it’s own and each night it gives me a grade where the top score is 100.  Last night it gave me a 100.  Whatever messed up last night had nothing to do with the CPAP machine.  That all went fine.

Isn’t all of this fascinating?  No?  Well it is to me so screw you!