Jetlag and Sleep — Data Visualization with SleepCycle for iPhone
I recently flew to Istanbul, Turkey for part of my book tour on Calm Technology. I always use the SleepCycle app (iPhone and Android) to track my sleep and wake me up in the right sleep cycle.
Here is a graph of a solid night of sleep. The ups and downs are different stages of sleep. Some are deep, and others are REM sleep where I have dreams!
Jetlag Graphs
This is a graph of the first night. I took a melatonin pill 30 minutes before bed and listened to a podcast to fall asleep. I stayed asleep until 3 or 4 in the morning and tried very hard to go back to sleep. Eventually I did, but at a cost to my overall sleep. I can always tell when I have Jetlag when I have very plain sleep graphs without any REM sleep, and this one shows the Jetlag well.
I slept better through the night this time, but I ended up waking up a few hours before my alarm clock. You can see it at the end of the sleep recording below.
The first night I got back from the trip I took a melatonin and went to sleep around 9pm. Then I woke up at 5am and tried to go back to sleep I had to be up around 7a for a speech at Design Week Portland! You can see the little dip between 6 and 7am where I managed to kind of fall asleep before being woken up by my alarm clock.
I had a long and exciting day at Design Week Portland and fell asleep as soon as I got home. I fell asleep so quickly that I forgot to take any Melatonin, so I woke up around 3:30am. I tried to go back to sleep a number of times, but failed. Finally I fell asleep at 6am, only to wake up around 7am (before my alarm clock went off). I got dressed and headed to give a talk at University of Oregon’s What is Media? Conference! I was exhausted, but exhilarated.
After two days of conferences, I was really worn out, but I was also very satisfied. The next day was Sunday, so I planned to sleep in. I set my alarm clock for 1pm so I could sleep as long as I needed. I popped a Melatonin and played a podcast to go to sleep. The result? 14 hours of sleep and a lot of great dreams. This is how I knew I was back to normal. No more flat line sleep!
Do you use Sleep Cycle or some other way of tracking sleep? What have you discovered with it?
Originally published at caseorganic.com on April 18, 2016.
