Category: Just Because

Last Friday. Leaving work I noticed it was different: the quality of light, the temperature, that hazy-overcast so indicative of autumn in Phoenix. It was like someone flipped a switch and summer was finally gone. It's one of the things I've always liked about this time of year in Arizona. One day it's summer, the next it's not.

5-1/2 hours sleep, 42% sleep quality. I simply could NOT fall asleep last night. I finally got up at 12:30 and took a Benadryl. That knocked me out, but I'm comatose this morning.

I have an app on my phone that tracks my sleep. After the initial novelty wore off years ago I deleted it, but lately I've been wondering if my sleep patterns have become truly as awful as I've suspected from the way I've been feeling upon getting up in the morning, so I reloaded the latest version.

The old version required that the phone be placed under the pillow on the mattress itself to track motion. I can only surmise there were some overheating incidents, so now it's designed to sit on the nightstand and instead of tracking motion it listens to your breathing.

While I can understand how the previous version of this software would track your sleep stages via mattress movement, how this works now simply by listening escapes me (especially with more than just me in bed, the ceiling fan, the gurgling aquarium, and the humidifier whirring in the background.)

Even not understanding how this works, seeing this data has been—pardon the expression—eye opening. It verifies that I do often wake up—and remain awake for some amount of time before falling back to sleep—anywhere from 3 to 5 am almost every night. The fact that I almost immediately fall into deep sleep after going to bed explains why I'm almost never aware of Ben coming in later. It also shows the times I get up to use the bathroom.

What's less clear is how "Sleep quality" is computed, because it seems the higher the score on that, the less rested I feel upon waking. Of the data I've posted here, the 67% night was subjectively the best night's sleep I've had in weeks, while the 91% night was among the worst.