This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 930, self-reported by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com and I'm Justin Molick. Happy Thursday, getting close to the weekend, and welcome back to Optimal Living Daily, or the OLD podcast where I read to you from some of the best blogs I can find and get permission from, mostly covering personal development and minimalism on this show. For now, let's get right to it and start optimizing your life. Self-reported by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com.
For about a month, I've been tracking my sleep habits using two different sensors. One of these sensors is tucked under my mattress, plugged into the wall and connected to my apartment's Wi-Fi. It keeps track of movement and seems to be fairly sensitive. It gets a lot of its most vital data for my breathing as it's detected through the mattress.
It then packs that data together each morning, sends it away to a processor farm somewhere, and spits out its findings to an app on my phone about 30 minutes after I've woken up and started my day. The other sensor is built into my fitness tracker, a simple gizmo that I bought primarily to help me keep tabs on my heart rate while I'm running, but which has also, as a by-product, allowed me to discover that my heart rate doesn't get as high as I thought when I performed my normal nightly workout routine, but does get quite high when I play guitar. This little wrist-mounted gadget uses similar data to tell me how I slept the night before, and that data is also presented most cohesively through another app on my phone. What's been particularly fascinating to me has been the difference in reporting between these two devices.
It took a few weeks to determine specifics, but I've come to realize that the fitness tracker seems to bundle all the time from when I get into bed until I get out of bed in the morning, as my sleep period, while the mattress base sensor is more granular, waiting until I actually fall asleep before it starts sorting out whether I'm in a light, deep, or REM sleep state. Part of the issue here is that I usually read for anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours while in bed before actually sleeping. The lights out, the light on my Kindle turned down low, this is one of my favorite routines and when I've been enjoying for years. I'll sometimes check my phone, also turn to a low-light night time setting to check when I get into bed and when I set down my book, but by comparing these two sensors' data, I've been able to derive a more accurate outline of my timing for these portions of my night.
When I lay down, how long I read, when I decide it's time to sleep, and how long it takes me to conk out for the night. From there, I also know how long it takes me to segue into a deeper sleep if I wake up during the night, when I typically wake up in the morning, and how long in total I've slept each night, each week, and each month. All this information onto itself is interesting, especially if you're into little lifestyle tweaks and figuring out ways to optimize aspects of your day by experimenting with different ways of doing things. So this information has already been useful to me.
Heart rate monitors worn on your wrist are imperfect by default, but by combining that data with other data collected in other ways, it becomes more valuable. Such monitors also come with important privacy trade-offs, but for my purposes at least, those trade-offs are currently worthwhile. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of all this data gathering, though, has been slamming my combined nightly sleep results up against my personal perception of how I slept the night before. Each morning before checking my little data collection apps to see how the machines think I did, I'll take a moment to self-assess, to consciously think, okay, well, how did that go?
I found that over the course of the month, my estimates have gotten better. Because I've had this more objective information available, I've been able to combine the feeling of being especially well-rested, or especially not well-rested, with a quantity of hours slept, or the deepness or lightness of my sleep, or with noises or internal conflict waking me up throughout the night. Having the objectivity to anchor my subjectivity, in other words, has helped me increase the quality of my subjective interpretation. One of the major flaws found in the world of sociology is that much of the information collected is based on self-reported data points.
The sociologist asks someone a question, and the person on the other end of that question answers to the best of their ability, that information is then used to ascertain larger truths. In some cases, this isn't much of an issue, but quite often we are terrible at gauging things, that un-eat its self-assessment, and that includes things we've been doing for a very long time, like sleeping, like determining when we got to sleep, like determining how well we slept last night compared to some other random night the previous month. There are a great many variables that can warp our perception of such things, and unfortunately we often make decisions based on that warped perception. We tell ourselves that everything is fine, but in reality, we're feeling stressed and frantic and unwell.
At we better mean so comparison, we might realize this, but being stuck in our heads, our bodies, the way we are, is nearly impossible to extricate our assessment from our subjective experience. Maybe things seem like they're going well because we were less stressed, less frantic, less unwell feeling yesterday than the week before. That doesn't mean we couldn't change things around to feel even better where we were able to recognize our more expansive baselines. Data unto itself can be interesting.
You might even find it useful in a geeky, experimental, hey, that's neat, sort of way, but the real utility of collecting and crunching this data, in my opinion, comes from comparing it to our own subjective experiences and seeing what emerges from that combination, using it to calibrate our perception of reality of how we experience the world and remaining skeptical of these results, none of these commercially available sensors are perfect, while also remaining open to the possibility that what we've been construing as reality is, in fact, only part of the big picture. Using such an approach, we might, with a few small adjustments here and there, get more out of life than we would have previously thought possible. You just listened to the post titled Self-Reported by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com. So I use a sleep app too to track some of that stuff, but haven't really dove into that data, and I think it's because of exactly what he said, I didn't add my own feelings to it, to actually compare and say, oh yeah, that's why I didn't feel my best today.
But seeing the data alone is interesting sometimes. On another note, I definitely agree with the issue of self-reported information, that's where placebo is coming handy, but that idea of combining how you feel with actual data from a third party or from actual facts, I think that works. I used to track everything I did every day, not by the hour, but more by events, like a write down, I went to a restaurant, I went to the store, hung out with so and so, it wasn't really a journal, but just a simple tracker of what I was doing. And then every day also, in a separate column, I would set a mood ranking between 0 and 10.
And as an extreme introvert, I thought my best days would be like a relaxing day alone, or reading a book, whatever, something like that. But the highest days were actually the ones spent with other people. And that's an example of taking your own factual data, like what you did that day, there's no disputing that, that's fact, and then mixing it with how you feel, which was my mood score. So you can do that with food logs, sleep logs, like Colin did, anything you want, but you just have to be disciplined to do it frequently.
And then once you have enough of that data, you can compare and contrast and then see what works best for you and make adjustments as necessary. So hopefully you can try something like that out, or if you already are, let me know, get in touch at oldpodgecasts.com. But I'll leave it at that. I hope you're having a great day.
Thank you for being here and listening to me and for subscribing to the show. And I'll be back in the Friday show tomorrow reading to you. So I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits.