Reading Amy X. Wang's recent New York Times story about the latest sleep enhancing technology, this sentence caught my attention: "Some 42 per cent of Americans use a wearable fitness tracker — like an Apple Watch or Oura Ring — that alerts them to how they've been sleeping."
Once you decide to measure your sleep quality and quantity, you automatically alter it from what it would have been: the very act of paying attention to numbers in the sleep space changes them.
I know this firsthand because even though I was convinced from the get-go that such "quantified self" measures are useless at best, I gave them a go for a few nights by wearing my Apple Watch and then checking the results in the morning on my phone.
What a crock.
Screen after screen of graphs and charts and tables and numbers comparing this to that, all of it not worth the pixels bringing me the data.
Quantum theory tells us it is impossible to measure both the momentum and position of a particle simultaneously: once you quantify one, the other variable is unknowable.
So with sleep: once you measure markers of aspects of sleep (time/stage/depth/movement etc.), the results incorporate the fact you decided to measure them, altering your prospective slumber.
As for wearing a watch in bed so as to know what time it is if you should happen to wake up earlier than you wanted to: bad idea.
Once you see what time it is, you're dismayed because you know it's not enough sleep.
On the other wrist/hand, if you have no watch to tell you the time, it could be any time — that means there are a zillion different paths back into slumber, each starting at a different time.
Should you choose not to know, that allows for any one of those myriad world-lines to carry you off to dreamland.
Thus, you're much more likely to get back to sleep if you've adopted this no-watch strategy.
Up top: a terrific 2002 film.
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