What I learned from monitoring my sleep patterns for a month

#1 - It's a real pain in the a@@ to keep track of all that stuff for an entire month.

#2 - I averaged 7.5 hours of sleep per night.  The most I ever got was 9.25 and the least was 5.25.  In general, my sleep quality was better when I got more sleep.

#3 - I went to bed between 11:00 pm and 1:30 am, with an average bedtime of 12:15 am.  In general, I got more sleep when I went to bed earlier.

#4 - It took me an average of 30 minutes to fall asleep.  This is somewhat subjective, since I couldn't really monitor when I got to sleep.  I based it off of the last time I looked at the clock after going to bed.  The longest it took was 2 hours.  I fell asleep faster when I went to bed before midnight.  The five nights that it took more than an hour to get to sleep, I went to bed at midnight or later.  The shortest times to sleep were when I went to bed shortly before midnight.

#5 - The longer I slept, the better I rated the quality of sleep, in general.

#6 - The more pain I was in, the less sleep I got.


#7 - In the day-to-day game of weight gain/loss, I lost more when I slept more and gained more when I slept less.  Although from day to day, I gained or lost up to 2 pounds, overall, I didn't gain or lose significantly during the month.

#8 - There was a slight trend of worse sleep on days with more alcohol, but it wasn't as significant as I'd expected.

#9 - I looked at the four nights where I rated my sleep "poor" and found no common denominator.  I exercised each of the days, but did different exercises and different times of day.  My mood, pain, and energy levels were moderate to good on those days.  Some days I got outside, some I didn't.  I went to bed from 11 pm to 1:30 am.  So, it was disappointing to be unable to find any reason that would lead to poor sleep.  Even the phases of the moon were different!   Similarly, the nights I rated the best didn't have any obvious commonality.

#10 - I did not engage in self-care activities such as meditation and journaling nearly enough over the month to determine if it would help with sleep, mood or weight loss.

My conclusions from this month were pretty limited:

1)  Aim for bedtime before midnight.
2)  Limit alcohol consumption.

My next experiment will be to try to journal and meditate every day for a month and see if it has any effect on sleep, mood and weight loss.  I'm going to give myself a break from monitoring my own behavior for a week, and start the experiment in March.