Over the last few weeks, I’ve been half-heartedly monitoring my sleep cycle using, you know, Sleep Cycle. In theory it’s useful for waking you up when you’re already most awake, circumventing that WTF-how-is-it-morning feeling. Normal charts come out looking like this:
In my case, I’m looking for magical insights into sleeping better; I have a hard time falling asleep, wake up easily, and am pretty much permanently tired. For example, I am very jealous of this person’s chart:
The trouble with such magical insights, aside from the magic, is the fact that I never sleep alone. Sleep Cycle tracks your awake-ness based on the motion or stillness of your bed. Since it can’t differentiate one person’s movements from another’s, my charts are doomed to come out with two graphs overlaid, not to mention the possibility of interactions between the two (i.e. one person waking the other up when they move). Thus my charts look like this:
On nights when I’m not at home, my husband has been Sleep Cycle-ing too. (I’m also jealous of his clear results. I blame my general sleep chart jealousy on general sleep jealousy, which I blame on sleepiness.) By contrast, his charts normally look like this:
This morning I woke up, peered at last night’s palimpsest of a chart, and decided it was time to pull out the graph paper and crayons. My theory: perhaps, from looking at Scott’s normal patterns, I could tease apart our shared graph into our two separate cycles. From his charts, I learned that he normally experiences cycles throughout the night that are somewhat irregular but generally shallow (meaning he rarely reaches the “awake” level). I applied this to three samples. Scott is red. I’m blue. The result:
As with any data plotting involving crayons, this is not an exact science. The two-mountain-ranges approach doesn’t tell me, for instance, the moments that lie behind the blue range:
Then there are moments when my differentiation of the two cycles could itself be wrong. Here, it seemed to make sense to separate out the two peaks, but you’ll see once Scott is up and I’m still sleeping, I continue to have that double peak pattern all by my lonesome:
Still, an overall pattern does appear to emerge. I go through regular cycles, but ones that jump rapidly from near awake-ness to deep sleep. Of course, by the third example, it’s equally possible I’ve begun constructing (vs. observing) such a pattern. Look how simple I’ve made my sky-scraper-esque chart, at the cost of giving Scott something much more erratic:
Assuming that I do tend toward extremes in my sleep patterns, those steep cyclical slopes might explain why I have such a hard time sleeping soundly, since they imply that when I wake up, I wake up hard. At the same time, these charts imply that I spend almost no time in the “dreaming” part of sleep, and I’m definitely a dreamer: long, involved dreams I often remember after waking. I have these dreams during short naps as well as overnight stretches, and feel like they run right up until morning.
Wait, crap, did I learn anything? /Falls asleep at keyboard.
