Sleep Holds Secrets

It used to be you’d go to a sleep clinic, stay overnight and get totally wired up to accurately measure your sleep cycles. And that’s still the case for sleep apnea and diagnosis of severe sleep problems.

I met with a Pulmonologist (a sleep doctor who specializes in breathing) at the Carolinas Medical Center about a month ago to chat about sleep, and was amazed at the sleep charts he sat and showed me on his office computer.

You think you’re not sleeping? he said.  Oh man, there are people with serious problems.

I’ve been measuring my nightly sleep using an EEG headband (Zeo) for over 6 months, and there is a definite pattern, with much more activity than you’d imagine. It’s more ragged, with shorter bursts of deep sleep and REM sleep, than I thought. I realized night rhythms are not so different than waking rhythms.

Nothing holds my attention more than a few minutes:  5-10 minutes of deep sleep and BAM, I’m dreaming.  20 minutes later I’m awake.

All the deep sleep happens early in the night, with REM (dreaming) sleep three, four, five times during the night. How come I remember none of the dreams? Interesting to get confirmation of how many times I awake during the night.

The excel diagram in this post is 31 nights of EEG measured sleep, using a ZEO – each horizontal stripe is one night, each little numbered box is 5 minutes.

Color & Sleep Phase Break Down

• Purple is deep sleep
• yellow is REM
• orange is awake
• red is up and active, and
• green is light sleep….or as the Pulmonologist described, trash sleep.

All the good stuff happens during REM and deep sleep.

If you’re sick, you heal while sleeping, you gain procedural memory during sleep, grow taller, resolve conflict with dreams, and organize memory. Neurologists measure sleep as more active than waking.

To me, the pattern of sleep is the most captivating, it reflects basic organic and human qualities. The proportions of the pattern itself is inherently recognizable and familiar.

Christine Peterson's poster of her Zeo research (download poster) was one of the highlights of the QS conference for me, as I said in an earlier post:

She measured her sleep with a Zeo for three months. Her poster showed how various things, such as caffeine consumption, correlated with sleep measurements, such as REM time. I believe the most important Zeo measurement is how long you are awake during the night. ... Christine's data showed a strong correlation between her score on Zeo's Sleep Stealer's index (...) and how long she was awake at night. With a high score, she was awake twice as long (about 1.5 hours) as with a low score.

Here's why.

The correlation between Sleep Stealer score and time awake.

When her Sleep Stealer score was 5 or less, she was awake about an hour during the night.

When her score was more than 5, she was awake about two hours - a big difference. There should be a big difference, but you could fail to see it for a thousand reasons. The large difference is a validation of the whole thing - above all, an indication that her Zeo is working correctly.

                                                          C Peterson - Total Z v Sleep Stealers                        

Even when her Sleep Stealer score is low, she is awake a long time.

This means there are major determinants of sleep depth not captured by the Sleep Stealer score. With the right Sleep Stealer score - assuming the correlation reflects cause and effect - she can improve from two hours to one hour (one hour difference) but that leaves one hour. This implies that the determinants of time awake not in the Sleep Stealer score are just as important as those that it contains.

Even when she is at the best level of important factors, she is awake a long time.

When she had no drinks, she was awake 56 minutes/night.  When other people didn't disrupt her sleep at all, she was awake 54 minutes/night. C Peterson -Time in Wake v Alcohol

C Peterson - Time in Wake v Disruption

The average wake time for women 50-59 is half an hour.

That's a lot of lost time, day after day, night after night. Note however that the data is from Zeo users, who may have worse sleep than average.  (Editor's note: see What's Your ZQ for more information about Zeo users' sleep quality)                                                                                              

It only took three months to collect the data.

This isn't on the poster. Yet this is a solid contribution, in the sense that I learned from it. With perhaps nine months of data and better data analysis, it might be publishable.

The main point such a paper would presumably make is that even when you do everything right (Sleep Stealer score = 0) you're still awake a lot. This point is nowhere in the sleep literature.

Seth's advice for better sleep

Christine, if you would like to sleep better I suggest:

1. Don't eat breakfast until at least three hours after you wake up.
2. Get at least one hour of sunlight early in the morning - e.g., 6 to 7 am. You can do this by working outside.  (I work outside several hours every morning.)
3. Stand on one leg to exhaustion four or more times per day. (I do it six times/day.) You can do this while reading - it should not reduce your free time.