Sleep has been tricky for me—falling asleep, staying asleep, and waking up rested have all been a struggle for a few years now. It’s time to focus on getting the rest I need and making lasting improvements.
Thankfully, I’ve carved out some time for myself, giving me the flexibility to experiment with my sleep schedule, among other things. It’s a great opportunity to learn and build better habits.
Living alone makes it tricky, though—it’s easy to lose sync with society when I have few obligations before 11 a.m. most days. Plus, sleep isn’t exactly an easy topic to dive into with friends in my experience.
I’m starting this thread to share how I’m tackling (well, will be trying to tackle) this with Beeminder. I may also share any other insights I pick up along the way!
I can’t recommend the Beeminder Oura integration enough if you have / can afford one of their rings.
I got a pretty big win in my Resilience score (closely tied to HR & HRV during sleep) by enforcing certain behaviors (also via Beeminder), and could then be pretty confident about the cause by just comparing the graphs side by side.
Also just the fact that I’m setting a bar to hit means that I need to keep it charged and generally check the app daily, which makes me more aware of my sleep.
I can’t remember the last time I worked until 3 or 4 am, which I used to do every 1-3 weeks in the past.
My HR and HRV during sleep are consistently awful, so I’d be curious what goals you set up, if you’re game to share! Was it just getting a bit more sleep, or sleep-timing, or was there something else…?
(I have anxiety, so my HR and HRV are consistently awful in general, but… surely one can still find improvements, right?!)
I’m actually beeminder waking up early with my Oura ring. I’m a night owl, and it’s very easy for me to stay up, so waking up early consistently has always been challengin, especially with a remote job. So I set a goal that every weekday (so 5/7) I need to wake up and start my day before 10am.
I wrote a script that grabs the wake up time from the Oura API, checks if it was before 10am then turns it into an RSS and I feed that to my Beeminder goal. I added an auto ratchet to 2 days in case I need a “cheat” day just in case.
This has been tremendously helpful, especially because you cannot “cheat” with the Oura ring. For example if you wake up at 7am, be awake 20m then go back to sleep and wake up again at 10am, the ring will set your real wake up time at 10am.
I have been beeminding this for a few weeks now and I’m actually not that groggy when my alarm sounds now (8am). Also stopped hitting snooze!
This ties into my reading goal since I want to relax and get sleepy by reading in bed. For now, I’ve copy-pasted the setup from bednight to a new goal: bedread.
I got to test iOS shortcuts for Beeminder goals. They felt easy to use. That’s good!
Plan for Week 51, December 16-22
Focus: Sleep Regularity
I want to see if establishing the regularity around 07:30 would help. My phone is now aware that I want to sleep between to 23:00-07:30
Consistency
Changed bednight slope to 1.25 to help me go to sleep between 22:30-23:00
Routine
Changed bedread slope to 1.75 to help me start reading in bed 22:00-22:30
Difficulties falling asleep
Commitment: A sentence on whether any other difficulty pops up, once I’m consistent with the sleep window and my routine.
Nap tracking
Commitment: Keep napping (take even more naps) nad keep tracking.
Misc
I do expect some irregular nights, I’d like to not introduce any other:
15/12 → 16/12. I don’t expect to make my schedule at all due to a date.
17/12 → 18/12, this will be difficult so I need to watch out.
(And perhaps one more evening.)
Commitment: I’d like to see if I can do at least a bit better with these irregularities. I should have some notes by next week. (Thinking in line of saying no to social invites, getting into a bedtime routine with the person I’m dating, etc.)
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