Sleep 1.5

UPDATE ON THE SCIENCE

There will be a proper debrief of this study at the end of the month, for now, here’s some preliminary graphs (I only used people’s first responses to my survey for these graphs which is 145 observations).

Scatter plot of age and sleep hours

The most surprising result I found was that sleep hours did not seem to be correlated with age for my sample population of people aged 17 to 77. After seeing this plot I ran a correlation test to see what statistics say and got cor = -0.05325842 (p = .532) which is strong evidence of there not being any correlation between age and sleep hours.

How rested you felt when you woke up, 7 (dark blue) is very rested, 4 (gray) is neutral, and 1 (dark red) is not rested at all.

The second interesting finding was if you only consider people who were neutral to very rested the histogram of sleep hours looks more like a normal distribution (a true bell curve) than it does if you consider all responses. This, combined with the sizable correlation between amount of sleep and feeling rested when you woke up (cor 0.3578, p = 9.948e-06) implies that some of the people who are sleeping less would feel more rested if they were sleeping more.

Also if you compare the above graph to the graph below (I don’t have the file without the joke text) you can see that I seem to have replicated the findings most sleep surveys find. This implies that, given large enough datasets, the questions “how much sleep do you get?” and “how much sleep did you get last night” yield quite similar results.

Graph from my initial post

The final interesting initial finding is that there is not currently strong evidence that having a sleep disorder (or experiencing insomnia in particular) correlates to less sleep.

Color code: DARK RED = “has at least one sleep disorder including insomnia” LIGHT RED = “has at least one sleep disorder excluding insomnia” GREY = “has 0 sleep disorders”

This brings me to the embarrassing part…

I wanted to track what effect sleep had on tiredness or restfulness, but the only reliable measure I can use is restfulness when you wake up. This is because google forms does not give me participant’s IP addresses so I cannot calculate what time anyone took the survey like I had planned.

So I’m editing the survey in two ways (which will hopefully help me collect more interesting data):

1. I’m adding the question “how tired did you feel yesterday? (scale from 1 to 7)”

2. I’m adding the question “what is your timezone?”

If you’re interested in taking the survey again now that I’ve made those edits I would cherish you forever, here’s the link!

Thank you to everyone how’s taken the survey so far! And a special thanks to everyone who’s commented. A special shutout to Becky Delahoy’s blog post about baby’s sleep and to Rick Gibson who commented the following:

…I retired a couple of years ago and went from a tightly regulated/scheduled life to one which is completely unregulated and unscheduled. My sleep has improved enormously. I go to bed when I want to, much later than I used to. I set an alarm simply so that, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can tell myself the alarm hasn’t gone off yet, so no need to even think about checking the time or getting up. I still wake up before the alarm, but choose to stay in bed longer, even when it goes off. I’m probably averaging 6-7 hours of sleep a night, far less than what I used to think I needed. Most days I feel great. Some days I take a nap, if I feel like it.

I guess the lesson in this is that the laissez-faire approach works great if you have no specific obligations to be anywhere at any specific time. Trying to fit sleep into a societally-imposed schedule is counterproductive, at best. Sleep “disorders” probably reflect the fact that human physiology, sleep included, can’t be expected to conform to the averages.

Thanks to rick I’m editing the survey in two more ways:

1. Adding the question “did you wake up to an alarm?”

2. Adding the question “how long were you awake before you started your first scheduled task (a job, a morning routine, waking up your kids, etc.)?”

Catch y’all on the flip!