More on the "challenge" of sleeping from the WSJ. Might be of particular interest to those who like to record and measure their performance and compare their stats with strangers.
Getting a good night’s rest becomes a new sport with spreadsheets, strategies and efforts to conk out…the competition. ‘His sleep scores are still neck and neck with mine.’
Extract:
What if sleep isn’t just our body’s way to repair and re-energize, but a game we are playing to win?
Sound like a bad dream? Maybe. But for millions, chasing winks with the latest sleep-measuring technology has become a nighttime sport, complete with sleep scores and strategies on how to best sack the competition. Some people are even, well, losing sleep about whether they are sleeping up to their full potential.
Mike Skerrett, a 27-year-old television writer in Los Angeles, wears a Whoop band to track his biometrics constantly. (“I take it off sometimes in the shower,” he clarifies.) The device, popular for measuring workouts, says it can track rest cycles when worn at night, helping to “optimize your sleep performance.”
Ready, set, sleep!
He has deployed tactics including blackout curtains and taping his mouth shut to max out his sleep score on Whoop’s app.
“I can see that on days when I tape my mouth during sleep, I have a 7% higher recovery score in the morning than on days when I don’t,” he says. “I implemented these changes partially to chase the higher score on the app, and, it also does change the feel of the night’s sleep, for the better.”
He admits his preoccupation with proper shut-eye may have taken a turn for the obsessive.
...
Sleep gadgets aren’t new. Many restless dozers have drifted beyond counting sheep and sipping herbal tea to the growing array of sleep-oriented “wearable apps, or bedtime products, including white-noise machines, lulling lights and robots that one can cuddle for relaxation.
Now, Type-A Z-seekers also want to conquer bedtime with the dedication (and lingo) of ultramarathoners.
“I am disciplined and competing my ass off to get somewhere between eight and seven hours every night,” Michael Gervais, a performance psychologist who advises chief executives and Olympic athletes, said on his podcast recently.
“Ten years ago, a lot of people would beat their chests and say, ‘I’m a grinder, I’m working on five-and-a-half hours of sleep,’” Gervais says. “Now, more people are attuned to the science, which shows that if you want to live a good life, prioritizing sleep will be one of the best practices you can do.”
