I have some initial conclusions from my ~2 weeks of sleep experiments.
- A pitch black room does increase my perceived sleep quality. I remember my dreams more and seem to have more dreams in general.
- The blue blocker sunglasses don’t seem to yield any meaningful result for me. This might be because of my current level of caffeine.
- Sleeping alone doesn’t seem to impact my quality of sleep either way.
- Sleeping with the Zeo itself interrupts my sleep. A bit of a heisenbug …
- Measuring my heart rate while I sleep also interrupts my sleep. However, it yielded some interesting results. While I sleep, I can see 3-5 peaks where my heart rate will temporarily jump from 43bpm to 75bpm… I assume these coincided with REM dreaming. I can’t get my heart rate monitor and the Zeo to sync up without exporting the data and re-importing it into a new system.
Here’s a run from while I was sleeping the other night.
I can’t perform extensive analysis on this just yet as I haven’t exported all the points.
My next big change is to quit caffeine again (I’m down to only 30mg) and then try to sleep without caffeine and wake up when I feel rested. I think I can migrate to bi-phasic sleep where I have a 5-6 hour core and then a 20 minute nap in the afternoon.
Part of this is confused by my rigorous athletic training which requires sleep for recovery.