Yearly Theme 2024 Recap - Year Of Sleep

Changelog

• 2024-12-08 - Fixed a typo
• 2024-12-08
  • Added a line about my uncertainty about Sleep++’s sleep duration score - is it sleep debt or something else after all?
  • Added a few words to clarify that Oura was not Apple Health’s number one sleep data source

Blog Post

Even though I do not listen to the Cortex podcast anymore, because it became too far removed from how normal salaried workers can organize their lives, one idea I have taken from it, is the idea of the yearly theme.¹

Here’s one of the podcast hosts, CGP Grey, introducing the concept:

For three years I have done this now:

• 2022 - Year Of The DIFF - (Doing, Intention, Focus, Fun)
• 2023 - Year Of Analysis
• 2024 - Year Of Sleep

2022 and 2023 where not super successful in the sense that I lost touch with these themes for considerable amounts of time in their corresponding year. But at the same time these themes were always there offering a frame to do something, don’t do something, reflect and consider adoption of new things or just to reject them.

2024, the Year Of Sleep has so far been the most successful. A big part of this is the considerable amount of money I (or in one case somebody else) invested to make this theme more present in my live:

• Bought a year of Rise
• Bought An Oura Ring + a year of their Membership premium subscription
• I got an Apple Watch Series 9 as a gift
• Bought AutoSleep
• Bought a year of Gentler Streak which added at some point explicit sleep analysis

I had used Sleep Cycle for years before looking into other means of tracking my sleep, so I’d say I have a pretty good general idea of what sleep tracking is all about and as of this year what is out there, especially after checking out so many other sleep tracking apps.

Sleep Tracking Options Are Pretty Much On Par With Each Other

To get an idea about the differences and similarities in sleep tracking I wear both my watch and my ring at night and can say that for all practical purposes the differences between wearing a watch, a ring, or using an app listening to me sleep via microphone are pretty negligible, it seems. Or maybe not negligible, but maybe those differences are less important as long as you stick to one thing and define your baseline based on those measurements.

What I mean is this: Apple Health reports, that I have slept 7 hours and 10 minutes, while Oura is clocking in at 8 hours for time asleep for today. As long as you always go with one or the other, you’ll be fine. As a result, you might say that you need between 7 and 7.5 hours according to Apple Health whereas you might say your sleep need is more like 7:45 to 8:15 according to Oura’s measurements (these numbers are made up, but hopefully get the idea across). Third party apps like Rise or Gentler Streak might calculate a sleep need different from these as well, most apps just ask you what your sleep need is, as if this would be super obvious for people to know. Anyways: Pick your poison and stick to it.

EDIT: I should clarify that Oura is not the number one sleep data source and therefore what was tracked in Apple Health was almost assuredly not the ring (except in circumstances where I didn’t wear my watch). I changed this after publishing this article for a couple of nights but because Apple and Oura interpret the sleep data from the ring differently, you still get differences in sleep duration et. al. So sticking to one device and app as a baseline is still good advice.

Sleep Debt - The Only Good Measure? Seems so.

Most measures are relatively meaningless to the average person.

Overall, then, wearable sleep trackers are already pretty good, and they will likely continue to improve. The next question—the really hard one—is what we should do with the data. If cyclists are getting less REM sleep after mountain stages, what should they do differently? “Ride easier” isn’t useful advice; and it hardly seems like we need a fancy algorithm to give us the usual sleep-hygiene advice about bedtimes, alcohol, and electronics before bed. — The Problem with Tracking Sleep Data

This is also my feeling: The data is pretty good, but I didn’t really know what to do with it, so most of it gets tracked but then ignored.

The only meaningful measure (for me!) I have found, is sleep debt. Here it is as defined by Rise:

Sleep debt, simply defined, is the amount of sleep that you owe your body over the past 14 days or so. It’s a running total of the hours of sleep you’ve missed, relative to your sleep need. — The Rise Science Guide to Improving Your Sleep - The Two Laws of Sleep - Sleep Debt

Another way to put this is: If you sleep less one night, you’ll probably need to sleep more later. The good thing is that you can control sleep debt - as opposed to, say, amount of deep sleep: You can actually sleep in, stay in bed, go earlier to bed, etc. and it will have a direct impact on your sleep debt (insomnia, external factors and similar issues notwithstanding).

So it seems to certainly be a choice to make for Gentler Streak to not include this measure:

While sleep debt is widely popular, it lacks solid scientific backing, and it’s more of a patch to the wound than allocating and addressing the source of pain. While testing various sleep devices and apps, we found that the short-term sleep overviews provide better insights into your sleep habits, helping you spot patterns in duration, consistency, and sleep stages so you can improve your sleep hygiene over time. Rather than “repaying” lost sleep by sleeping in on weekends, focusing on consistent sleep hygiene will be more beneficial to your wellbeing. Catching up on sleep doesn’t erase the stress your body endures from lack of sleep during the week. Doing so over time can take a toll on your health. Being aware of your overall sleep hygiene, prioritizing it, and making adjustments can lead to better rest and recovery and have long-term positive effects on your health.

I mean, I get it, but I have a very hard time believing that short-term sleep overviews are scientifically better than the concept of sleep debt.² Wikipedia seems to suggest that sleep debt is somewhat ill defined and it also seems that more sleep debt doesn’t always translate to worse performance:

There is debate among researchers as to whether the concept of sleep debt describes a measurable phenomenon.[…] In one study, subjects were tested using the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT). Different groups of people were tested with different sleep times for two weeks: 8 hours, 6 hours, 4 hours, and total sleep deprivation. Each day, they were tested for the number of lapses on the PVT. The results showed that, as time went by, each group’s performance worsened, with no sign of any stopping point. Moderate sleep deprivation was found to be detrimental; people who slept 6 hours a night for 10 days had similar results to those who were completely sleep deprived for 1 day. — Wikipedia: Sleep debt

However: From what is available and useful, has actually been scientifically studied and can be directly manipulated by the user’s actions, it seems still the right move to concentrate on sleep debt: If I sleep more, then this measure goes down and if I fail to sleep enough, the measure goes up. How sleep debt is defined in the app might be the topic of debate, but it still correlates with my own feelings as well, since I will feel worse if I have slept less over some time versus if I slept a lot over the same timespan.

I also found this comment on sleep debt on reddit, which seemed believable:

(for reference I hold a BRPT and ACP-sleep and lecture on the pathophysiology of sleep disorders at a post grad level)[…] Your question seems to relate to mild, and partial sleep restriction and then being able to make up this sleep debt… firstly, yes sleep debt is an accepted theory (I don’t think I’ve heard it called a theory, I’ve always considered it a given). And secondly yes there is quite a bit of literature that looks at making up for sleep restriction, often using catch up sleep on weekends as the model being studied. My understanding is providing you avoid significant chronic long term sleep deprivation, regular catch up sleep is likely to be sufficient to avoid significant health implications from mild cyclic sleep restriction. — Reddit User Phil Teuwen answering another user’s question in r/askscience “Is sleep debt from accumulated sleep loss real according to current understanding?"

Lots of Useless Gimmicks

The world of sleep apps is filled with somewhat useless features that don’t really make a difference. I tried tagging various activities in the Oura app to see if they had an impact on my sleep, but it didn’t really lead to any interesting insights. That my total sleep decreases after I tag coffee isn’t actually that helpful - although it is kind of nice to know that this is actually the case, I guess.

Rise has a feature where it lets you rate your last night’s sleep, which is another thing to do without a lot of benefits, it feels like. Maybe if you’re unsure or see discrepancies between for example your sleep debt and how you feel in the morning, but for me sleep debt is itself a pretty good gauge already. That is to say, I feel my sleep was better when I slept longer, but 4 hours of sleep will in all likelihood always feel terrible the next day.³

Sleep Hygiene Is Hard - Melatonin Helped

Since I am living a real, full-blown adult live with a partner, a dog, a job and constantly changing and shifting priorities, interests and challenges, it is maybe unsurprising that prioritizing sleep hygiene - or even just parts of it, like regularly going to sleep on time - is actually very difficult.

Regardless, I’m happy to report that, according to Apple Health, I have slept about an hour more, 7:26 in 2024 vs. 6:29 in 2023, on average. This figure will be somewhat inaccurate, since I have also switched sleep trackers and so forth, but I do not believe the trend is just entirely imaginary since I also feel more rested, on average, if less so than those numbers might make it seem.

One of the most important enablers of sleep success for me was using melatonin. If I take it early enough, about 4 hours before I plan to go to sleep, I will actually be drowsy enough that I’m in the “nothing else matters, but sleep” zone, which is great for going to sleep on time instead of partaking in Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which I’m a grandmaster in.

Another thing that helped is sleeping with a sleep mask. The slight pressure on my eyes and the fact that I have to take the sleep mask off to see something, makes a difference to me.

Autosleep And Sleep++

I wanted to say something about Autosleep, because it is a one-time purchase app that stand out for this fact alone. Autosleep is weird. On the one hand it seems exactly like the nerdy non-subscription solution with lots of interesting features that I ought to like, but it seems to have problems with accuracy and I find it very unintuitive to read their graphs and UI or configure it correctly.

It doesn’t help that what I consider a normal weekend morning in which I wake up - after having gone to bed at 3 or 4 in the night - at 8 or 9 to take out the dog and give it food just to sleep for four more hours, seems to be impossible for Autosleep to wrap its circuits around. Sleep trackers in general have a hard time accommodating this pattern. The best is Oura as long as I don’t open the app and let the ring sync. Apple’s sleep tracking can deal with this, too (sometimes), as long as I don’t end sleep focus. But Autosleep is by far the worst at making sense of this.

So this app sadly wasn’t worth its cost at all.

Very recently I looked into Sleep++, which I would describe as an alternative Apple Health sleep data UI, but it seems to have similar problems with fragmented sleep as AutoSleep. The UI is familiar to me, because I’m a long time user of the step counter app Pedometer++ by the same developer. If it would be better in dealing with my idiosyncratic sleeping patterns on weekends this would probably be all I need.

(EDIT:) I am not sure anymore if I understood Sleep++’s Duration Score correctly. When I wrote this, I thought it was a sleep debt score, but I am not sure if this is actually the case.

Looking Ahead

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the results of this year, because I got a little more sleep. But I also learned that there is lots of snake oil in sleep tracking and most of the tracked data is actually kind of useless to me. However, not everything is useless either. The point of sleep tracking is not that different from tracking workouts: It is a kind of motivational tool that makes you engaged with your body, although progress is much less visible, because we all sleep more or less the same amounts - jock or nerd - and being into sleep is not exactly the same as going to the gym and seeing those weights and reps go up: you may become more aware of your sleep needs and habits, but there are very little gains to report. For example, I don’t foresee that my average will improve beyond that one hour going forward. And should it? Should I sleep 9 or 10 hours? Will that make a palpable difference? At what point do I sleep too much?

From all those things I tried, here’s what’s probably going to stay in 2025 and beyond:

• Oura’s sleep tracking is seemingly better than the Apple Watch’s, but I do not think I will buy another ring. I’d rather buy a new Watch since 300€+ for a ring is pretty expensive (even though I love that Oura is made or at least designed/engineered in Finland). But as long as this ring works I will use it.
• I will also wear my Apple Watch, because it can wake me up without making sounds and I like to have a fallback if I forget to put my ring on or whatever
• Rise has great sleep debt tracking and puts this measure front and center, but it’s too expensive for what it offers. However, since sleep quality scores are so useless, I might end up buying another year, since Oura’s app doesn’t include sleep debt at all and Autosleep/Sleep++ only works with my Apple Watch (and has problems tracking fragmented sleep, see above).
• Taking melatonin on most week nights and wearing a sleep mask.

P.S.: I also recently learned that according to Apple Health I may have sleep apnoea. Which is not the same as snoring, if I understand correctly. I will have to look into that, since this might also impact my sleep.

This is why I like tracking biometric data: It’s an opportunity to look into something health related that might otherwise go unnoticed or even if it is noticed its relative severity is too unclear to act upon it. This sleep apnoea thing might also lead to nothing or only very little, but I’m doing something about it, because my health data suggest that I should consider it. Otherwise I would’ve probably thought “everbody snores” and let that be the end of it…