Sleep Tracking & Stress Measurement
I recently read a blog post by Mark Crittenden about how he has stopped tracking his sleep because it ends up dictating his day. As in, if he saw he didn't get enough sleep on his app, he'd end up having a bad day. In short, sort of a reverse causation. Rather than actual sleep quality affecting his life and outlook for the day, he was basing it on what he saw reported in his app.
I get the idea behind that, but I must be wired differently because I don't subscribe to that idea. I track my sleep, but often don't actually do anything with the data. I look at it, and say, "okay, that's interesting." But is there any follow-up to it? Not really. I keep telling myself that I should do something with it and yet I never do anything about it. The data just sits there in my health app. Truly I want to do something with this data, as beyond needing enough sleep to avoid seizures, I believe that among other health benefits, it is also helpful with losing weight (another thing I'm working on).
Beyond that I'm also thinking of another aspect of measuring my health, that being the stress measurement feature on my smart watch. I am still a bit flummoxed as to how this function works, but it has something to do with measuring heart rate variability (HRV) technology?1 I'm not entirely sure how accurate it is. It doesn't help that the smart watch / app displays the measurement on a graph from green (low/no stress) to red (all of the stress), rather than quantifying it with a number. I suppose that would be the smart2 way to go about it, since stress levels aren't exactly quantifiable in the same way as sleep.
This is another area where I want to do a better job tracking. What is the point of keeping track of my stress levels if I don't do anything with that data? It's like my sleep tracking all over again. Well, I have a plan for that and it involves interstitial journaling. I've seen my chart and as expected it fluctuates throughout the day. Although I can't zoom in, it gives you a timeline - so you can see roughly where you were the most stressed, and the least stressed, and see an average.
So how does interstitial journaling work into this? My intention is to check in every few hours to see how I'm doing. But because of the in-quantifiable nature of measuring stress, I want to know what I was doing to contribute to my stress levels. I feel that in this way, I can sort of quantify it. At least, I can figure out - OK, I was showing high stress at this time of day. What was I doing? Oh right, I was dealing with a bunch of last minute deadlines. Stuff like that. I also figure in this way I can discard "high stress" measurements when I know I'm not doing something I don't consider truly stressful.
As I'm typing this - I have not implemented this yet. I am definitely in the "conceptualization" stage of the process, trying to figure out how I'm going to do it. On paper makes a lot of sense, but I'm not always going to have access. Maybe both paper and electronically? The latter for when I'm not able to write down in my notebook. And I don't know how long I will keep this up for - maybe forever, maybe a few weeks. Not sure. But I would like to compile the data after an extended period, anyway.
Looking forward to what I discover about myself.