I have a flexible schedule so I wake up naturally almost every day, but my sleep length still has massive variance. Even though I have over a thousand nights of data, I still have no clue how long my sleep cycles last.
Here is a histogram of my time spent in bed:[1]
My average is 535 minutes, but only 40% of my nights fall within the 60-minute window from 505 to 565 minutes.
Given the theory about how sleep cycles work, I’d expect to see a multimodal histogram with peaks every ~90 minutes. But instead the histogram is unimodal. So I don’t know what to do with this information.
[1] I’m reporting time in bed rather than time asleep because first of all, my phone isn’t very good at knowing when I fall asleep, and second, I think time in bed is more relevant because I can’t control when I fall asleep but I can control when I go to bed.
Wow, that’s quite a lot of variance for natural wake-ups. Are there any big external variables? Stress before bed, drinking, morning sounds, kids/partner activity in the morning?
I sleep with the window open (to keep my room cool) but I sleep with earplugs + a fan, and it’s rare that I get woken up by outside noise.
I usually don’t eat any food within 3–4 hours of going to sleep, to avoid digestion potentially disrupting sleep.
I rarely drink alcohol (twice a year maybe).
I live alone, no kids/partner.
My stress levels vary but it’s rare for stress to literally keep me up at night.
I take 300mcg melatonin an hour before bed and I use a blue light filter on my computer. (It would be even better to stop using my computer an hour or two before bed, but I don’t do that.)
The biggest variables I can think of are
My bedtime varies from 9pm to 11pm or so.
The sun rising usually wakes me up (I have blackout curtains but the sun wakes me up anyway). Although this isn’t a complete explanation because my wakeup time varies by more than sunrise time.
I have caffeine 4 days a week (M/W/F/Sa), always in the early morning. This may affect sleep quality.
I have a flexible schedule so I wake up naturally almost every day, but my sleep length still has massive variance. Even though I have over a thousand nights of data, I still have no clue how long my sleep cycles last.
Here is a histogram of my time spent in bed:[1]
My average is 535 minutes, but only 40% of my nights fall within the 60-minute window from 505 to 565 minutes.
Given the theory about how sleep cycles work, I’d expect to see a multimodal histogram with peaks every ~90 minutes. But instead the histogram is unimodal. So I don’t know what to do with this information.
[1] I’m reporting time in bed rather than time asleep because first of all, my phone isn’t very good at knowing when I fall asleep, and second, I think time in bed is more relevant because I can’t control when I fall asleep but I can control when I go to bed.
Wow, that’s quite a lot of variance for natural wake-ups. Are there any big external variables? Stress before bed, drinking, morning sounds, kids/partner activity in the morning?
I try to minimize external variables.
I sleep with the window open (to keep my room cool) but I sleep with earplugs + a fan, and it’s rare that I get woken up by outside noise.
I usually don’t eat any food within 3–4 hours of going to sleep, to avoid digestion potentially disrupting sleep.
I rarely drink alcohol (twice a year maybe).
I live alone, no kids/partner.
My stress levels vary but it’s rare for stress to literally keep me up at night.
I take 300mcg melatonin an hour before bed and I use a blue light filter on my computer. (It would be even better to stop using my computer an hour or two before bed, but I don’t do that.)
The biggest variables I can think of are
My bedtime varies from 9pm to 11pm or so.
The sun rising usually wakes me up (I have blackout curtains but the sun wakes me up anyway). Although this isn’t a complete explanation because my wakeup time varies by more than sunrise time.
I have caffeine 4 days a week (M/W/F/Sa), always in the early morning. This may affect sleep quality.