Since December last year, I have been recording the time I go to bed and the time I wake up.
I use the Taplog application on my Android phone to capture this data, then transfer to a database on my computer.
I have been capturing the information to determine how much sleep I need, as part of a bigger “Measured Life” project.
I made some graphs using Microsoft Excel 2007 to get an overview of wake up and sleep times as well as the number of hours sleep.
What did I observe?
The Graphs
Click on the image below to view full size.
The blue line. My wake up time has an average of 6.00am with a standard deviation of 36 minutes. I usually get up at 6:00 on weekdays but earlier on Tuesday morning for a Toastmasters meeting. I don’t normally use an alarm clock on the weekend, but I do tend to sleep for around 8 hours as a catch up rest. I am usually out of bed by 7.30.
The red line. My sleep time has an average of 11.04pm with standard deviation of 32 minutes. I realise that my idea l sleep time is 7.5 hours requiring going to bed by 10.30, but I usually stay up after 11pm. When this happens I am tired the next night so I have an earlier night. My goal is to establish an early sleep routine.
The green line. My average daily sleep is 6 hours 56 minutes (close enough to 7 hours) with standard deviation of 48 minutes. The amount of sleep varies and I need to get more sleep for clearer thinking and better health.
I made another version of the graph in a vertical format.
What’s next?
I want to track the quality of sleep, so I will record a rating for the previous night’s sleep. I was thinking that the best time to assess this would be mid morning. Another possibility is to capture a rating of how tired I feel at several times during the day.
I find the graphics very restricted in Excel, so I am learning to use the open source R statistics package. More information is available on the web site for R statistics . I am learning from the book R in Action by Robert Kabacoff and published my Manning.
Yes, I am a statistics nerd!
Previous articles of mine about sleep and the measured life.
Posted by Vivienne on September 6, 2012 at 6:12 am
This is very interesting, and kudos to you for keeping track of sleep… I was once asked to keep a sleep log and that didn’t work for long