How I Sleep Now
Whenever I want to learn something, I look for someone who is better at it than I am and try to learn all I can from them. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not so easy. Nevertheless, it is what I try to do whenever possible, and I think it is one of the best ways to accrue knowledge.
When it comes to reading a book or blog, it’s usually an educated guess as to whether or not the author has something useful for me until I’ve consumed their material. I try to listen to recommendations from friends, authorities in whatever field, other authors, etc., but I still have to make a determination. In the interest of making doing that easy for you, I am going to show you how I was sleeping a few years ago and how I am sleeping now. One of the great steps forward in sleep improvement came just a few years ago with the advent of personal sleep monitoring devices and applications. While I made decent progress improving my sleep for about 6 years before these became available, I made HUGE improvements when I got my hands on some of these devices. Once I was able to track my sleep quality every night with accuracy rivaling medical sleep labs at times, entire new avenues of improvement opened up to me. As Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed.”, and once I started measuring, management improved by huge leaps.
Since I began using these tools, I have logged sleep data for over 1000 nights and continue to do so until this very day, and I am still improving. Here, so that you can see for yourself, is my progress, collected with the excellent, free sleep monitoring app Sleep Cycle. (More about using that to collect your sleep data in an upcoming blog entry very soon)
As you can see, when I started tracking my sleep quality, my average night’s sleep quality was in the 60% – 70% range. For those of you not familiar with these numbers, a 60% sleep quality is one of those nights where you wake up feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck and your brain is in low gear. Not good. A 90% quality, by comparison, is a great night’s sleep where you wake up refreshed with no trouble getting going and feel physically good.
As you can also see on the bottom edge, Sleep Cycle anonymously collects data from people all over the world and even averaged out back over 3 years, I sleep better than even the people in the best sleeping countries on Earth. (Note: I plan to visit New Zealand - there is something great going on there!)
You can get a somewhat better idea of how I sleep now by looking at my average over several weeks:
While it varies, I rarely go below 90% and am still trending higher over time. Here you can see that I REALLY sleep better now than most people on Earth. I still have the occasional off night at under 80%, but it becomes more and more rare all the time.
As you can see, my average has improved dramatically over the last three years and is still improving: In the upcoming pages of this blog, on the podcast, in my book (and some videos as well for things requiring demonstration), I will tell you everything I have learned and done in full detail so that you can do the same.
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