Sam’s Sleep and the Election

The dots are individual readings taken approximately daily (with some gaps) showing the percentage of the previous 7 days I spent sleeping. The red line is a smoothed trend of those first data points.

I said a few times that I did the election stuff mostly in “time I otherwise would have been sleeping”. You can see that quite clearly here.

Although the red line, the average of the average as it were, only dipped to about 21.3% (about 5 hours and 7 minutes per night), the lowest individual reading was on October 15th. On that day, I’d only slept 17.5% of the previous 7 days… or an average of 4 hours and 12 minutes per night. The reality was that although I slept a decent bit more than that on the weekend, but a lot less than that during the week.

It was brutal for a little while there. I just couldn’t sustain the not sleeping. I was starting to be less functional and less efficient during the time I was awake, both on the election stuff and at work. Even worse, I was starting to have to fight to not fall asleep on my commute back and forth from work, which was downright dangerous.

So that’s why as we got to the last week and a half before the election, I started taking some time off from work. First some half days, then actually fully taking off the few days right around the election. Much better to actually take the time off than try to sustain doing everything with so little sleep. That just wasn’t working.

Once I made that change, my sleep started to recover. Once the election was actually over, it recovered dramatically. The trend lines seems to have peaked now, so I thought it was a good time to post. At the beginning of December, I actually got to the point where there was a 7 day period where I spent 31.6% of my time sleeping (about 7 hours 36 minutes per night average). That is the best I’d done in well over a year.

It still isn’t the over 8 hours I’d really like to see, but I just don’t think that is going to happen again any time soon.

In any case, I just thought it was remarkable how clear an impact my election activities had. I really was doing it in “time I otherwise would have been sleeping”.