Thriving in a pandemic? š³ What the data revealed about my sleep patterns
Over 850 days of sleep, mood, and location data in charts. (ā ļø For data & sleep nerds only!)
Above 85 is the best. Thatās a sleep score which means the night was great.
If you start your day with assessing how well you slept, looks like weāre 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 someoneās finger, or hearing them mention Matthew Walker, marks them as a potential ally ā a fellow sleep-tracking nerd! š
But, just thinking more about our sleep doesnāt 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 Iāve 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.
šŖ Polite notices and cookie warnings
This article is full of charts, so if you donāt like charts, go have a cookie ā itāll 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!* š
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 ācareer developmentā, a sub category of āself-improvementā.
For this post, all the above data points have been infused with sleep-related data from an Oura ring that Iāve been wearing since Dec 22, 2018.
An Oura Ring, for those who donāt 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 Iāll spare you from my datetime.datetime tortures.
Letās 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.
The top three cities where I had the longest average sleep per night were:
- Budapest ššŗ
- Paris š«š·
- Warsaw šµš±
The third spot technically belongs to Barcelona, but given that I only stayed there for around a week, itās not enough data to make that assessment. The shortest average sleep I had in Kuala Lumpur. š²š¾
What about deep sleep?
The total length of sleep is one thing, but the sleep nerds among us donāt have to be reminded that itās the deep sleep (slow wave sleep, SWS) thatās 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 doesnāt automatically mean having more deep sleep. āļø
Letās see how the cities perform when ranked by the average length of deep sleep.
This time the winner isā¦ Caen, France š«š·.
With Budapest ššŗ at the second place, and Bali in Indonesia š®š© 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.
In spite of that, there is still, of course, a winner āa city in which on average I got the highest amount of REM.
Thatās London š¬š§.
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. š¤·āāļø
Here are two examples of my nights (screenshots of sleep stats from the Oura ring.)
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 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 ššŗ 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 itād be interesting to see how this score compares to the Ouraās total sleep scoreāa 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 metricsāproductivity, motivation, self-confidence, and depression, among others. Is better sleep correlated with any of these scores?
Youād think so, and I thought so too.
And, to some extent I was right. Here are some boring scatterplots to illustrate the correlations.
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 youād 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 Iām a bit of an introverted loner? š
My assumption is that this isnās so much related to the pandemic, but rather to staying longer in one place instead of changing locations every 1ā3 months (South East Asian visa runs anyone?).
Looks like itās 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 whatās that magic sauce that helps lower the depression score. Good sleep is just one part of the puzzle.
P.S. šŗ A version of this post also exists as a Tableau story.
If you liked this story follow me for more. They donāt happen very often, but when they do, youāre guaranteed to get at least a puzzling title. š
*Unless you donāt want a team-mate who thrives on dad jokes and gifs.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/how-sleep-boosts-your-energy
[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slow-wave_sleep#/Functions
[3]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#/Possible_functions
