DailyDogo 1108 🐶

DailyDogo 1107 🐶

Changelog

• 2024-12-08 - Fixed a typo
• 2024-12-08
  • Added a line about my uncertainty about Sleep++’s sleep duration score - is it sleep debt or something else after all?
  • Added a few words to clarify that Oura was not Apple Health’s number one sleep data source

Blog Post

Even though I do not listen to the Cortex podcast anymore, because it became too far removed from how normal salaried workers can organize their lives, one idea I have taken from it, is the idea of the yearly theme.¹

Here’s one of the podcast hosts, CGP Grey, introducing the concept:

For three years I have done this now:

• 2022 - Year Of The DIFF - (Doing, Intention, Focus, Fun)
• 2023 - Year Of Analysis
• 2024 - Year Of Sleep

2022 and 2023 where not super successful in the sense that I lost touch with these themes for considerable amounts of time in their corresponding year. But at the same time these themes were always there offering a frame to do something, don’t do something, reflect and consider adoption of new things or just to reject them.

2024, the Year Of Sleep has so far been the most successful. A big part of this is the considerable amount of money I (or in one case somebody else) invested to make this theme more present in my live:

• Bought a year of Rise
• Bought An Oura Ring + a year of their Membership premium subscription
• I got an Apple Watch Series 9 as a gift
• Bought AutoSleep
• Bought a year of Gentler Streak which added at some point explicit sleep analysis

I had used Sleep Cycle for years before looking into other means of tracking my sleep, so I’d say I have a pretty good general idea of what sleep tracking is all about and as of this year what is out there, especially after checking out so many other sleep tracking apps.

Sleep Tracking Options Are Pretty Much On Par With Each Other

To get an idea about the differences and similarities in sleep tracking I wear both my watch and my ring at night and can say that for all practical purposes the differences between wearing a watch, a ring, or using an app listening to me sleep via microphone are pretty negligible, it seems. Or maybe not negligible, but maybe those differences are less important as long as you stick to one thing and define your baseline based on those measurements.

What I mean is this: Apple Health reports, that I have slept 7 hours and 10 minutes, while Oura is clocking in at 8 hours for time asleep for today. As long as you always go with one or the other, you’ll be fine. As a result, you might say that you need between 7 and 7.5 hours according to Apple Health whereas you might say your sleep need is more like 7:45 to 8:15 according to Oura’s measurements (these numbers are made up, but hopefully get the idea across). Third party apps like Rise or Gentler Streak might calculate a sleep need different from these as well, most apps just ask you what your sleep need is, as if this would be super obvious for people to know. Anyways: Pick your poison and stick to it.

EDIT: I should clarify that Oura is not the number one sleep data source and therefore what was tracked in Apple Health was almost assuredly not the ring (except in circumstances where I didn’t wear my watch). I changed this after publishing this article for a couple of nights but because Apple and Oura interpret the sleep data from the ring differently, you still get differences in sleep duration et. al. So sticking to one device and app as a baseline is still good advice.

Sleep Debt - The Only Good Measure? Seems so.

Most measures are relatively meaningless to the average person.

Overall, then, wearable sleep trackers are already pretty good, and they will likely continue to improve. The next question—the really hard one—is what we should do with the data. If cyclists are getting less REM sleep after mountain stages, what should they do differently? “Ride easier” isn’t useful advice; and it hardly seems like we need a fancy algorithm to give us the usual sleep-hygiene advice about bedtimes, alcohol, and electronics before bed. — The Problem with Tracking Sleep Data

This is also my feeling: The data is pretty good, but I didn’t really know what to do with it, so most of it gets tracked but then ignored.

The only meaningful measure (for me!) I have found, is sleep debt. Here it is as defined by Rise:

Sleep debt, simply defined, is the amount of sleep that you owe your body over the past 14 days or so. It’s a running total of the hours of sleep you’ve missed, relative to your sleep need. — The Rise Science Guide to Improving Your Sleep - The Two Laws of Sleep - Sleep Debt

Another way to put this is: If you sleep less one night, you’ll probably need to sleep more later. The good thing is that you can control sleep debt - as opposed to, say, amount of deep sleep: You can actually sleep in, stay in bed, go earlier to bed, etc. and it will have a direct impact on your sleep debt (insomnia, external factors and similar issues notwithstanding).

So it seems to certainly be a choice to make for Gentler Streak to not include this measure:

While sleep debt is widely popular, it lacks solid scientific backing, and it’s more of a patch to the wound than allocating and addressing the source of pain. While testing various sleep devices and apps, we found that the short-term sleep overviews provide better insights into your sleep habits, helping you spot patterns in duration, consistency, and sleep stages so you can improve your sleep hygiene over time. Rather than “repaying” lost sleep by sleeping in on weekends, focusing on consistent sleep hygiene will be more beneficial to your wellbeing. Catching up on sleep doesn’t erase the stress your body endures from lack of sleep during the week. Doing so over time can take a toll on your health. Being aware of your overall sleep hygiene, prioritizing it, and making adjustments can lead to better rest and recovery and have long-term positive effects on your health.

I mean, I get it, but I have a very hard time believing that short-term sleep overviews are scientifically better than the concept of sleep debt.² Wikipedia seems to suggest that sleep debt is somewhat ill defined and it also seems that more sleep debt doesn’t always translate to worse performance:

There is debate among researchers as to whether the concept of sleep debt describes a measurable phenomenon.[…] In one study, subjects were tested using the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT). Different groups of people were tested with different sleep times for two weeks: 8 hours, 6 hours, 4 hours, and total sleep deprivation. Each day, they were tested for the number of lapses on the PVT. The results showed that, as time went by, each group’s performance worsened, with no sign of any stopping point. Moderate sleep deprivation was found to be detrimental; people who slept 6 hours a night for 10 days had similar results to those who were completely sleep deprived for 1 day. — Wikipedia: Sleep debt

However: From what is available and useful, has actually been scientifically studied and can be directly manipulated by the user’s actions, it seems still the right move to concentrate on sleep debt: If I sleep more, then this measure goes down and if I fail to sleep enough, the measure goes up. How sleep debt is defined in the app might be the topic of debate, but it still correlates with my own feelings as well, since I will feel worse if I have slept less over some time versus if I slept a lot over the same timespan.

I also found this comment on sleep debt on reddit, which seemed believable:

(for reference I hold a BRPT and ACP-sleep and lecture on the pathophysiology of sleep disorders at a post grad level)[…] Your question seems to relate to mild, and partial sleep restriction and then being able to make up this sleep debt… firstly, yes sleep debt is an accepted theory (I don’t think I’ve heard it called a theory, I’ve always considered it a given). And secondly yes there is quite a bit of literature that looks at making up for sleep restriction, often using catch up sleep on weekends as the model being studied. My understanding is providing you avoid significant chronic long term sleep deprivation, regular catch up sleep is likely to be sufficient to avoid significant health implications from mild cyclic sleep restriction. — Reddit User Phil Teuwen answering another user’s question in r/askscience “Is sleep debt from accumulated sleep loss real according to current understanding?"

Lots of Useless Gimmicks

The world of sleep apps is filled with somewhat useless features that don’t really make a difference. I tried tagging various activities in the Oura app to see if they had an impact on my sleep, but it didn’t really lead to any interesting insights. That my total sleep decreases after I tag coffee isn’t actually that helpful - although it is kind of nice to know that this is actually the case, I guess.

Rise has a feature where it lets you rate your last night’s sleep, which is another thing to do without a lot of benefits, it feels like. Maybe if you’re unsure or see discrepancies between for example your sleep debt and how you feel in the morning, but for me sleep debt is itself a pretty good gauge already. That is to say, I feel my sleep was better when I slept longer, but 4 hours of sleep will in all likelihood always feel terrible the next day.³

Sleep Hygiene Is Hard - Melatonin Helped

Since I am living a real, full-blown adult live with a partner, a dog, a job and constantly changing and shifting priorities, interests and challenges, it is maybe unsurprising that prioritizing sleep hygiene - or even just parts of it, like regularly going to sleep on time - is actually very difficult.

Regardless, I’m happy to report that, according to Apple Health, I have slept about an hour more, 7:26 in 2024 vs. 6:29 in 2023, on average. This figure will be somewhat inaccurate, since I have also switched sleep trackers and so forth, but I do not believe the trend is just entirely imaginary since I also feel more rested, on average, if less so than those numbers might make it seem.

One of the most important enablers of sleep success for me was using melatonin. If I take it early enough, about 4 hours before I plan to go to sleep, I will actually be drowsy enough that I’m in the “nothing else matters, but sleep” zone, which is great for going to sleep on time instead of partaking in Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, which I’m a grandmaster in.

Another thing that helped is sleeping with a sleep mask. The slight pressure on my eyes and the fact that I have to take the sleep mask off to see something, makes a difference to me.

Autosleep And Sleep++

I wanted to say something about Autosleep, because it is a one-time purchase app that stand out for this fact alone. Autosleep is weird. On the one hand it seems exactly like the nerdy non-subscription solution with lots of interesting features that I ought to like, but it seems to have problems with accuracy and I find it very unintuitive to read their graphs and UI or configure it correctly.

It doesn’t help that what I consider a normal weekend morning in which I wake up - after having gone to bed at 3 or 4 in the night - at 8 or 9 to take out the dog and give it food just to sleep for four more hours, seems to be impossible for Autosleep to wrap its circuits around. Sleep trackers in general have a hard time accommodating this pattern. The best is Oura as long as I don’t open the app and let the ring sync. Apple’s sleep tracking can deal with this, too (sometimes), as long as I don’t end sleep focus. But Autosleep is by far the worst at making sense of this.

So this app sadly wasn’t worth its cost at all.

Very recently I looked into Sleep++, which I would describe as an alternative Apple Health sleep data UI, but it seems to have similar problems with fragmented sleep as AutoSleep. The UI is familiar to me, because I’m a long time user of the step counter app Pedometer++ by the same developer. If it would be better in dealing with my idiosyncratic sleeping patterns on weekends this would probably be all I need.

(EDIT:) I am not sure anymore if I understood Sleep++’s Duration Score correctly. When I wrote this, I thought it was a sleep debt score, but I am not sure if this is actually the case.

Looking Ahead

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the results of this year, because I got a little more sleep. But I also learned that there is lots of snake oil in sleep tracking and most of the tracked data is actually kind of useless to me. However, not everything is useless either. The point of sleep tracking is not that different from tracking workouts: It is a kind of motivational tool that makes you engaged with your body, although progress is much less visible, because we all sleep more or less the same amounts - jock or nerd - and being into sleep is not exactly the same as going to the gym and seeing those weights and reps go up: you may become more aware of your sleep needs and habits, but there are very little gains to report. For example, I don’t foresee that my average will improve beyond that one hour going forward. And should it? Should I sleep 9 or 10 hours? Will that make a palpable difference? At what point do I sleep too much?

From all those things I tried, here’s what’s probably going to stay in 2025 and beyond:

• Oura’s sleep tracking is seemingly better than the Apple Watch’s, but I do not think I will buy another ring. I’d rather buy a new Watch since 300€+ for a ring is pretty expensive (even though I love that Oura is made or at least designed/engineered in Finland). But as long as this ring works I will use it.
• I will also wear my Apple Watch, because it can wake me up without making sounds and I like to have a fallback if I forget to put my ring on or whatever
• Rise has great sleep debt tracking and puts this measure front and center, but it’s too expensive for what it offers. However, since sleep quality scores are so useless, I might end up buying another year, since Oura’s app doesn’t include sleep debt at all and Autosleep/Sleep++ only works with my Apple Watch (and has problems tracking fragmented sleep, see above).
• Taking melatonin on most week nights and wearing a sleep mask.

P.S.: I also recently learned that according to Apple Health I may have sleep apnoea. Which is not the same as snoring, if I understand correctly. I will have to look into that, since this might also impact my sleep.

This is why I like tracking biometric data: It’s an opportunity to look into something health related that might otherwise go unnoticed or even if it is noticed its relative severity is too unclear to act upon it. This sleep apnoea thing might also lead to nothing or only very little, but I’m doing something about it, because my health data suggest that I should consider it. Otherwise I would’ve probably thought “everbody snores” and let that be the end of it…

DailyDogo 1106 🐶

Mastodon (Adrianna Tan) made me aware of this today:

I cried watching this. mental health and compassion is so important. If you’re not the one struggling today, maybe a loved one is. Transpose this, so you’re compassionate towards others in this case.¹

KC Davis also has a Website.

P.S.: The usual disclaimer about Ted talks applies: They are meant to make you emotional and the ideas shared may be less unique, less mind blowing, etc. than they seem at first. But that doesn’t make this simple reminder and its particular spin on care tasks less important (IMHO). But take this in with an awareness of its framing.

DailyDogo 1105 🐶

I do not hate my live at all. It’s a pretty good live. As with all lives there are ups and downs, of course, but all in all: pretty good. But. The amount of shit I have to do and don’t want to is astounding.

DailyDogo 1104 🐶

Well, that was fun. #papersinsystems

Last week was somehow very unproductive at work. I guess free time was somewhat more exhausting than usual. We had a guest over and cooking and cleanup took me much longer than usual. So I slept less, which in turn meant I couldn’t concentrate, which meant I had to work longer, which meant cooking and clean-up took longer… rinse and repeat.

Although I slept badly on the weekend, too, I seem to have more brains so far.

DailyDogo 1103 🐶

DailyDogo 1102 🐶

DailyDogo 1101 🐶

DailyDogo 1100 🐶

DailyDogo 1099 🐶

DailyDogo 1098 🐶

DailyDogo 1097 🐶

“Things are inevitable and there is nothing you can do about it”, is at the core of the The Fatalistic Turn. But the answer to this doesn’t need to be acceptance. It just has to be an answer.

It could be “F**k You Optimism”:

We need this kind of radical hope now more than ever. Not because it will save us – no one is coming to save us – but because the alternative is paralysis. The systems want us to feel small, powerless, apathetic. —JA Westenberg

And another quote:

Even when it feels futile. Especially then. Because in a collapsing world, defiant hope might be the only thing worth holding on to. —JA Westenberg

• Thread (for easy reading) on Mastoreader
• First post in the thread

DailyDogo 1096 🐶

Kinda along the lines of Paradigms Are Strategic Tools:

The social media researcher Erin Kissane reminds us that the current terrible landscape of the public social internet is made and sustained by people and that this too shall pass:

The dangers of the situation are obvious and real, but it matters that we remember that the world’s big platforms are steered not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gold-rush-addled dorks whose sometimes-well-meaning employees are stuck frantically LARPing world government on internal forum software. […] But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn’t guaranteed. […] So the necessary counterpart to understanding that the Dark Forest Internet complex obscures the arbitrary and temporary nature of the current situation might be accepting that there is no moral arc of the world. Our systems bend toward justice when we bend them, and keep on bending them, forever. — Against The Dark Forest

The article is well worth a read.

I did not agree with everything in it though. The dark forest framing is, I think, less flawed than is claimed. I especially think that Maggie Appleton’s framing as expressed in her drawing is great. Because it incorporates not only the forest and the cozy web, but also an undergrowth made of digital gardens, newsletters and RSS Feeds. So public spaces that are nonetheless somewhat hidden. This layer is missing in Kissane’s text as is the dark web (where morals are decomposing) under the cozy web.

I think the impulse here is to point out that the forest was planted and won’t last forever. And I think that is a missing piece in this metaphor.

But. What I will always disagree with is to frame the expression of a system as a simple question of choice, of good vs. bad intentions. A system as is described in this image is not easily changed.

Given all of this, it seems questionable for technologists to cede the territory of the public internet to their fellow-but-worse technologists and the predatory forces they assemble and arm. […] The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn’t between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that.

I find the insinuation here questionable. I am a being of the undergrowth. I love the small and indie web. Calling me unpolitical or a non-combatant because I am not re-inventing or re-design social platforms and am therefore basically an enemy, seems wrong. Maybe this is not what has been said, but I kinda got the impression. “Don’t be a badger!”, it is demanded. But what if you are a badger? I am all for digital spaces reimagined as public goods, but to think that it could only happen in the forest layer and if you’re not into forestry (but rather into gardening or whathaveyou) you’re doing it wrong, is naive to me.¹

Furthermore it seems that just because current iterations of the big social media platforms might die, that we’re not finished dealing with the nature of complex systems itself and therefore the flaws of platforms - the hate, the predators, the data capture, etc. pp. - are not something you just “design out” of them in the next iteration. Because you can’t. And I don’t mean that you couldn’t make changes to the current crop of platforms, but change in any direction you want to take this, is a fickle thing: Exert too much control and it becomes oppression and people will switch platforms. Exert too little and it turn into a free for all and people will switch platforms. Give too many tools to people and the platform will appear too complex. People will switch platforms. Give no tools (or not the right ones) and the platform will appear too restricted. And on and on. Current platforms form a delicate balance. They are the result of a lot of fine-tuning and what is a viable social network will have to play within the realm of possible viable platforms.

So as I said above: Just “unfuck the networks” is a naive notion. It’s a systems as imagined vs. systems as found “fallacy”: A distinction made by Richard Cook that I’ve found very helpful to explain what is missing from people’s arguments who are about ideas and propose solutions mainly based on (new or reframed) ideas only: A system found is a freaking mess. And so is the dark forest that is the publicly visible internet.

So, I guess, what I’m saying is that a forest is not designed but maintained by its inhabitants. And this maintenance is also not done on the whole thing at once by only well meaning, well educated and wise deers and squirrels (people and institutions). The internet is a wilderness. And as such it will always include predators: skilled and unskilled ones, big ones and small ones. Some we recognize as part of the forest, others we think of as “meta predators”. It is therefore also not a controlled or a flawless place where you can just be and do, guaranteed free from harm. This is exactly a thing that is more possible in smaller, more constrained places.

The social internet doesn’t “simply exist” for us to just inhabit, true. It is made, yes. By us. Partly yes. But it being made doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exhibit the qualities of complex social systems.

DailyDogo 1095 🐶

DailyDogo 1094 🐶

“…will discuss our polycrisis, and the swift and holistic reform of global governance institutions that is needed to respond to these urgent transnational and planetary challenges we are facing…”

My whole live has been spent living with the apparent blindness these sentences express. Activists of the alarmist school: There is no swift and holistic reform coming! How can you be interested in change but not understand this? Or if you do: Why not be honest with fellow non-alarmist activists?

EDIT: “My whole live has been spent living with the apparent blindness these sentences express.” What I mean: So many well-meaning people I have encountered - directly or indirectly - seem to believe this is possible. What is interesting: This cry for swift action, makes me think that there must be a sound argument for the plausibility of said swiftness. But those arguments never survive closer inspection (by me, that is to say: they do not seem more plausible), so it’s hard to know how it would feel to be able to believe it. The only reason I know of is that it is only ever said strategically and not ever actually meant. So it’s similar to what protest actually is about (not rational discourse in order to convince fellow citizens, but disruption).

DailyDogo 1093 🐶

Python really is almost on par with Javascript as regards to reinventing wheels.

Venn diagram taken from this awesome overview of python tools.