Who Didn't See This Coming, Yo-Yo Sleeping?

After a huge night of oversleeping, Sunday's night of sleep was a whopping 5 hours. On average, the total is about right for 2 days worth of sleep, but I don't think you can borrow and trade sleep like that. I ignored the 5:30 wakeup call, but my sore back would not have allowed any "real" training and more sleep was way more important than a very light workout would have been.

Sleep, Sleep, Sleep
It is one thing I need to do better, but so far it has also dominated the content of my blog, my training, health and fitness, and weight loss blog. Partially because it is the first thing that jumped out at me after looking at a weeks worth of data from the GoWear Fit, but also largely due to my injured back which has regulated training to rehab. Don't worry though, things will get more exciting around here.

Woe Is Me

Being sidelined sucks. I did almost nothing Saturday. I was up past 1:00 AM working Friday night, but got a decent sleep. I got up at 8:30 and scrambled to get the rest of my work done before noon. Once that was done, I went to watch a local rugby game. A few hours of standing made my back ache as if I was out on the field getting knocked around. I paced around at about a whopping 600 steps an hour, and that is about all I did on Saturday.
In my 9 hours of being up, I averaged 1.81 METs. Putting me well under my target activity level and therefor target calories.

Why Only 9 Hours With Activity?
I got up at a decent time for a Saturday, 8:30; but after standing up watching a few hours of rugby, I came home sore and not wanting to do anything. I watched a bit of TV, then forced myself to get up and do something. I worked around the house for about an hour, but then laid back down and quickly fell asleep. This was at 6:00 PM. I woke up around 10:00 PM but didn't really feel like getting up and doing anything. So I watched some TV till I fell back asleep, pretty intermittently till I woke up for about an hour at 7:00 AM then on and off till about 9:30.

I got over 10 hours of sleep over a 15.5 hour period. So Saturday I was up only 9 hours, and now it is late Sunday night, but I am not tired and need to get up at 5:30 Mondy morning. In my last post about sleep, I mentioned getting more consistent. I utterly failed this weekend, and hope it doesn't take me too long to recover. The only good thing is that it won't hurt my traing since I am taking some time off to heal my back and hip.

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!