What You’re Missing In Your Sleep

At school, my friends had a running joke that I was always tired.

I said it at the end of the day, during class, over lunch, at break time, before school and often knew I’d be tired the next day too.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t sleeping a lot; waking up at 7am to catch the bus to school but staying up until midnight, or later, playing games on my iPod or reading.

However, it wasn’t until my friends started pointing out that I found out how often I was complaining about my state of tiredness. Sometimes I wasn’t even tired but it had become a habit and my natural reflex whenever the conversation lulled.

I know that I’m very lucky. I’ve never particularly struggled to sleep in my life or had the bad physical symptoms of tiredness. Apart from the occasional all-nighter for last-minute deadlines, I always get a good number of hours in. Despite that, my friends were all under the impression that I couldn’t sleep at all.

I realised that I needed to stop saying I was tired.

After a couple of weeks of catching myself whenever the words “I’m tired” were about to slip out of my mouth, I was close to giving up on my whole regime.Friends had noticed that I wasn’t saying it as much, teasing me when they caught me mid-act. However it was still happening a lot more than I liked to admit.

What changed?

This was when someone suggested I actively tracked my sleep.

They showed me my phone’s bog standard health app, which I hadn’t realised was even on my phone. We found it had a sleep tracking option and I haven’t looked back since.

I set a daily notification up that would remind me to input the number of hours I had slept. Every morning I would put in the number of hours I’d slept, consciously reminding myself that I had slept between the recommended number of hours.

By setting myself up for the day with the knowledge that I’d slept enough, I didn’t feel justified in saying that I was tired. Not only that, it also held me accountable when I didn’t sleep enough.

It helped me both to break the habit and to start paying attention to my sleep patterns.

Since then, I’ve drifted in and out of the habit of tracking my sleep. The mindset shift had occurred and I was putting myself in the best place for success by sleeping enough.

I started recording my sleep again in August and have kept it up for the past 7 months. The advances in technology mean that the number of graphs have gone up, and its satisfying to see the changes week from week. It has also made me more aware of my mood shifts that result from not sleeping enough or sleeping too much, enabling me to find the best number of hours that keeps me the most productive and least grumpy.