Friday, March 27, 2009

10 Days: Paramount Realization

I don't get enough sleep!
I think one of the coolest features of the GoWear Fit is the sleep tracking. Being able to, in fact being forced to, see how much time I am(or am not) laying down and sleeping each night has been the most eye-opening thing I have noticed in my first 10 days. It is easy to think back to the previous night and remember going to bed around 11:00 and with the alarm set at 7:00, I got about 8 hours of sleep right? Wrong! What really happened is that the TV show I was watching ended at 11:00, then I started getting ready for bed, maybe checked eMail, maybe got a snack, maybe wasted 30 minutes. Laying in bed watching TV, awake another 10 to 90 minutes - wasted time. It was something enguaging on the History channel, but I don't remember it the next morning, it stole some of my sleep time, it wasn't worth it. No more TV in bed.

Research suggests that most healthy adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.
We have all heard this, and many of us think we are getting it done. 3 major problems. One I mentioned above, are you really going to sleep and waking up when you think you are? After seeing my data, I realize that I have not been. Another bad assumption is that you are sleeping from when you fall asleep to when you wake up. Well technically you are, for each time you fall asleep and wake up, but how often do you do that each night? Zero? Yeah I thought that about myself too! The 3rd error people use when justifying their amount of sleep: "7-9 hours is enough, I can get by on 7." We all know what a bell curve looks like, but it seems like almost everyone thinks that they themself are on the favorable edge of it. 50% of us are on the wrong side of 8 hours, 90% of us are undersleeping at 7 hours.

I have got to do better.
And using the GoWear Fit will help me. Being able to see when I am actually getting to sleep will help me realize that I need to get started earlier. I also need to work on being more consistent. I have a 6:00 AM workout on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; I slept through Wednesday this week. I think it would help if I get up at 5:30 every day. On Tuesday and Thursday I should spend that time doing some work in the morning. Forcing myself to get up early will also hopefully assist in convincing me to go to bed earlier - see what happened Friday night, and Monday night(also an early morning). On Saturday moning I woke up at 5:30 but since I was behind on sleep I stayed in bed. In the next 4 hours I only got 2 hours of sleep - again waisting 2 hours, not sleeping, not doing anything. Should have gotten up and then I probably would have gotten to bed earlier Saturday night.
I wish this view was an option in the summary view!

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