2024 Sleep Reflection

I slept more than usual in 2024, and I'm proud of it. To give an adequate amount of context for this, I need to go back 6 years. I was in-between jobs and drafted a Career Plan for myself (maybe I'll write about this later!) that involved getting a Master's Degree. Some research, a few jobs and a handful of classes later - I found myself starting a Master of Science in Computer Science Program at Georgia Tech in 2020. I found out a few things early on in the program:

This is going to be hard
My sleep is going to suffer
This is going to be hard

As a husband and father who also works full-time, I slotted most of my "school time" for late nights after the rest of the house went to sleep. Late nights might mean waking up much later for some, but sadly this wasn't my reality. My sleep did in fact, suffer. Thankfully, I made it out of my program alive (barely) in December 2023 and late nights became less frequent - which meant more sleep! Right?

As we near the end of the year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how much my sleep actually improved this year by looking at some data. Before I do that, I should shout out the Oura Ring which I've been using to track my sleep on and off since 2022. @ Oura, ILY. This isn't a sponsored post, but it could be! ¹

Average Total Sleep

Isn't it beautiful? In the two years where I was in the program and tracking my sleep, I was averaging <= 5 hours and 30 minutes of sleep per night. In 2024, I averaged closer to 6 hours and 45 minutes of sleep per night. That's a ~22% increase in average sleep!

Earlier I mentioned that I had graduated from the program in December 2023, but I actually finished my last exam at the beginning of November 2023. With that in mind it's pretty interesting to see the chart by month:

total-sleep-by-month — Avg. Total Sleep in Hours by Month

Two things stand out to me when I look at this chart:

Causation! The large jump right after I finished my last exam gives me striking evidence to say that the program was a huge factor in lack of sleep
No time wasted! The immediate jump right after my last exam suggests I celebrated by sleeping

Thinking back to November 2023, it was a glorious time. I equate it to how Thanos felt when he finally collected all of the infinity stones and got to rest / watch the sun rise on a grateful universe. Minus the snapping of the infinity gauntlet and what happened after part.

Sleep Stages

As you may know, sleep is often divided into 4 different categories called sleep stages:

Awake - what it says on the tin
REM - associated with dreaming
Light - a transitive less restorative sleep
Deep - the sleep your body needs to repair and restore itself

I knew that I was getting more sleep, but I was curious to see what type of sleep I was getting more of. Here's that breakdown for the last ~24 months:

What's really interesting here is that it looks like the only substantial increase that happened after November 2023 is in Light Sleep. The other sleep stages haven't seen an increase to that scale. Oura has a cool article about the Benefits of Light Sleep and I'll pull some things out that stood out to me about Light Sleep:

We need it for memory & creativity - is this why all of a sudden, I've been inspired to blog?
Deep sleep is often associated with physical restoration and repair, but light sleep also plays a role in this
Light sleep should be about 45-55% of our total sleep if we're getting the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep per night

That last point piqued my curiosity so I compared the % of Light Sleep I was getting between 2023 to 2024:

The 10% increase in my Light Sleep percentage is great with the added context that it puts me in the expected range of 45-55% I mentioned above. What I'm gathering here is that my Light Sleep was the main stage that suffered throughout my program. Perhaps my body adapted into prioritizing Deep / REM and wasted little time in the "transition" stage.

Whatever the case, it is somewhat concerning that I was lacking in the sleep stage that helps with memory . You would think I would need to remember the material I was learning in order to succeed, but maybe these memory effects impact an individual longer term? Who knows...maybe Oura does! What I do know is that if you ask me about anything I learned about in Robotics back in 2022, I might fall asleep on you.

Readiness

Since I've used Oura a lot in this post, I would be remiss not to mention their Readiness Score. It's a metric that they define with a question: How ready are you for the day?

Sleep is a huge factor when they calculate your readiness score, but they also take into account your activity. I've been more active in 2024, but I'm curious to know how these three main metrics (readiness, sleep, and activity) took shape in my life.

three-metrics — Sleep, Activity, Readiness Score by Month

This chart is actually pretty surprising. My Sleep and Activity Scores rose significantly in 2024. There was an increase in my Readiness Score as well, but not as pronounced as the increase of the other two scores. I expected all three to raise significantly, but given Readiness measures things like stress, heart rate variability, and resting heart rate - there's much more to the equation than the other two scores.

Final thoughts

The trend of my readiness score has me thinking - what if my body adjusted to the lack of sleep? So when I was getting more sleep, my body responded well to it, but not as well as I would have thought. All things considered, I'm glad I'm getting more sleep. I mentioned I've been more active this year, and I don't think that would have been possible with the amount of sleep I was getting before 2024. Some of you might be thinking, "you still get less than 7 hours of sleep!". To those of you who say that, I envy you. I call this an achievement.

Oura, if you want to know how loyal I am - I'm on my third ring now since I lost my previous two (one in the dumpster and the other in the TSA line at LAX ) ↩