Thriving in a pandemic? šŸ˜³ What the data revealed about my sleep patterns

Over 850 days of sleep, mood, and location data in charts. (āš ļø For data & sleep nerds only!)

Marta
7 min readFeb 9, 2021

Above 85 is the best. Thatā€™s a sleep score which means the night was great.

If you start your day with assessing how well you slept, looks like weā€™re on the same team.

In the last years many people have turned from sleep-deprived into sleep-obsessed. Catching a glance of an Oura ring on someoneā€™s finger, or hearing them mention Matthew Walker, marks them as a potential ally ā€” a fellow sleep-tracking nerd! šŸ˜

But, just thinking more about our sleep doesnā€™t automatically solve the issue of its lack or its poor quality.

What helps bring it to the next level? Data.

It was only two years ago that I realised how poor my sleep quality was. Since then Iā€™ve been looking at it closely.

I mean very closely.

Ok, well maybe not pathologically closely (no EEG caps or fMRI scanners involved), but still more closely than an average person. And, today, I shall delight you with what this monitoring has lead to.

šŸŖ Polite notices and cookie warnings

This article is full of charts, so if you donā€™t like charts, go have a cookie ā€” itā€™ll probably give you more pleasure.

However, if you do like charts, you might find my other posts interesting, and if you both like charts AND happen to be hiring for a role related to chart-making, we gotta cha(r)t!* šŸ˜‰

Since the last post based on personal data, two things have changed.

  • Over 180 data rows were added to the daily self-tracking file (one row for each day, doh!). Read: More data = more fun!
  • I cracked the basics of Tableau. Read: The charts will be way neater than what my matplot skills can generate.

The boring, but necessary bit: What is this data?

As you may remember, I collect a lot of data about myself.

I fill in a daily form tracking aspects such as mood, exercise, and medication (among many others), and a weekly form where I log my location and time spent on various (laptop-based) activities. The latter I track with Toggl. Writing this text, for example, is classified as ā€œcareer developmentā€, a sub category of ā€œself-improvementā€.

For this post, all the above data points have been infused with sleep-related data from an Oura ring that Iā€™ve been wearing since Dec 22, 2018.

An Oura Ring, for those who donā€™t know, is a wearable devide that tracks a lot of health stats, and focuses specifically on various aspects of sleep.

There were some API games and Python tricks involved to get, clean, and combine these datasets, but Iā€™ll spare you from my datetime.datetime tortures.

Letā€™s go straight to the discoveries!

Where did I sleep the longest?

The first, general, thing to look at sleep-wise is the average duration of sleep.

Below is a map of most cities I slept in, in the past two years.

It only includes places I stayed in for four or more days, a number always rounded to a week.

The top three cities where I had the longest average sleep per night were:

  1. Budapest šŸ‡­šŸ‡ŗ
  2. Paris šŸ‡«šŸ‡·
  3. Warsaw šŸ‡µšŸ‡±

The third spot technically belongs to Barcelona, but given that I only stayed there for around a week, itā€™s not enough data to make that assessment. The shortest average sleep I had in Kuala Lumpur. šŸ‡²šŸ‡¾

What about deep sleep?

The total length of sleep is one thing, but the sleep nerds among us donā€™t have to be reminded that itā€™s the deep sleep (slow wave sleep, SWS) thatā€™s the meat of it, so to speak.

Deep sleep is what the body needs to repair itself[1] and to maintain a hormonal balance[2].

Note that sleeping longer doesnā€™t automatically mean having more deep sleep. ā˜ļø

Letā€™s see how the cities perform when ranked by the average length of deep sleep.

This time the winner isā€¦ Caen, France šŸ‡«šŸ‡·.

With Budapest šŸ‡­šŸ‡ŗ at the second place, and Bali in Indonesia šŸ‡®šŸ‡© at the third.

How about dream time?

Rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep is most often talked about in the context of dreaming.

But, REM sleep can have a role in preserving certain types of memory [1], and facilitating learning[2]. My REM stats suck in general, but the length started falling further since around March 2020.

REM sleep duration by date.

In spite of that, there is still, of course, a winner ā€”a city in which on average I got the highest amount of REM.

Thatā€™s London šŸ‡¬šŸ‡§.

Again, it would seem like the winner is Barcelona, but it was just a 7-day stay so not many conclusions can be drawn from it.

Sleep efficiency: the reasons for melatonin

Some people assume that when they go to bed at 10 pm and get up at 6 am they sleep 8 hours. The sleep nerds know better though!

We can only shake our heads when we hear others making this mistake. It always takes time to fall asleep, and many people often wake up during the night and not remember it in the morning. šŸ¤·ā€ā™€ļø

Here are two examples of my nights (screenshots of sleep stats from the Oura ring.)

Sucky sleep, I wake up a lot. In case youā€™re worried about me (thank you for that kind thought ā¤ļø) there is already an elaborate pre-sleep sequence, called The Marta Shutdown Procedure. It helps reduce latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) and the frequency of waking up.

In other words, not all the time you spend in bed (even with an intention of sleeping), you will actually spend asleep. Here is a difference between time in bed and time asleep per city.

The short stay in Barcelona was good for REM, but not so good for efficiency. A lot of time in bed, but without sleeping can signal it was a holiday! :D

The difference between the total time in bed and time asleep is called sleep efficiency. The Oura ring measures this and converts into an efficiency score.

Here are my efficiency scores by city, as measured by the Oura ring.

Budapest šŸ‡­šŸ‡ŗ clearly in the lead! (This post is not sponsored by the Hungarian Tourism Board.)

What do I know? Self-reported score vs Oura

Before the Oura ring came into the picture, I was giving my daily sleep a quality score on a scale from 0 to 10.

It thought itā€™d be interesting to see how this score compares to the Ouraā€™s total sleep scoreā€”a composite measure of various data points the ring measures.

Is my impression my sleep quality similar to the one calculated based on biological measures?

Here is a chart comparing the scores, ranked by the difference in them.

The highest difference between self-reported and Oura-measured scores was observed in Lisbon. This is likely due to the fact that those were there first three weeks of wearing the ring, which is the period during which the ring calibrates the measurements.

As for the Oura sleep score by city, here is the ranking.

Budapest wins again with an 82.12 average!

Better sleep, lower depression?

My daily form tracks several mood metricsā€”productivity, motivation, self-confidence, and depression, among others. Is better sleep correlated with any of these scores?

Youā€™d think so, and I thought so too.

And, to some extent I was right. Here are some boring scatterplots to illustrate the correlations.

Line pointing up is a positive correlation (the higher the sleep score the higher the other metric, e.g. motivation), the line pointing downwards means negative correlation.

There are correlations, but all are rather small.

As far as I understand stats only about 6% of the variation in the depression scores is explained by the sleep score. In other words, indeed sleeping better can help lower the depression score, but not by a lot.

This result of course is based on a sample size of one. So, maintain your sleep hygiene kids! (Unless you track your own metrics too and it turns out youā€™d do much better playing League of Legends all night.)

It has to be noted too that my depression score lowered quite significantly since March 2020 ā€” looks like some people thrive in pandemics.

Do I have to mention that Iā€™m a bit of an introverted loner? šŸ™ƒ

Drop in depression score from March 2020.

My assumption is that this isnā€™s so much related to the pandemic, but rather to staying longer in one place instead of changing locations every 1ā€“3 months (South East Asian visa runs anyone?).

Looks like itā€™s not a/the coronavirus I need, but rather a calmer and more predictable environment.

What to make of all this?

Ok, we saw many charts and fun tidbits, but what is the tl;dr?

Best to keep sleeping in Budapest (longest time asleep, second best deep sleep duration) and occasionally pop over to London for a REM booster.

Next step: figure out whatā€™s that magic sauce that helps lower the depression score. Good sleep is just one part of the puzzle.

P.S. šŸ—ŗ A version of this post also exists as a Tableau story.

If you liked this story follow me for more. They donā€™t happen very often, but when they do, youā€™re guaranteed to get at least a puzzling title. šŸ˜…

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Marta
Marta

Written by Marta

šŸ“ˆ Aspiring data scientist. Rationality fan. EA. Vegan. Working to improve global mental health at MindEase.io

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