Walter Reade .net

In yesterday’s post, I provided the two key elements for getting a good night’s sleep (for me, at least): 1) total amount of sleep, and 2) amount of deep sleep.

Getting enough total sleep is pretty straight forward to understand (if, perhaps, not always easy to achieve). But the data from yesterday showed I need about 60 minutes of deep sleep per night to feel totally refreshed the next day. The problem is, I only get about half that (as shown in the table in the first post of this series).

I decided to dig a little deeper (ha!) into my sleep data to see if there were any noticeable trends around deep sleep. I used the detailed sleep data that was included in the Zeo data export from the web to build the graph below. It shows the probability I’ll be in any particular sleep phase as a function of hours into sleep. In other words, when during the night am I in deep sleep?

The light gray color means there was no data available, e.g., I was already awake of the sensor wasn’t transmitting because I took it off.

The dark gray shows awake time. This shows, on average, it takes my about 10-30 minutes to fall asleep. This isn’t probably too accurate since I’ll often thumb through an RSS reader on my iPhone before deciding to actually go to sleep. The data also shows there is about a 5% probability at any point through the night that I’ll be in a wake state.

The light (ha!) green shows the probability I’ll be in light sleep. It’s obviously the bulk of my sleep.

The medium-green shows when I’m in REM phase. It’s interesting to see the strong peak about 3 hours into sleep, where there’s a 50% chance I’ll be in REM. It then levels off to about 30% for the rest of the night. But after 6.5 hours, the relative probability of REM increases. I believe this is typical.

Lastly, the dark green shows when deep sleep is most likely to occur. The largest peak is about an hour into sleep, where there is a 25% chance I’ll be in deep sleep phase. There is a second, smaller peak around 3.5 – 4.5 hours.

So, what now? I’m really not sure. I’ve looked around and haven’t found much of anything that suggests a way to increase deep phase sleep. I’ve already looked at a number of indicators associated with the Zeo sleep data I collected along with the sleep journal information, and I see absolutely nothing that suggests how I might get more deep sleep. I’ll probably figure out a way to collect more data going forward to help in maximizing deep sleep.

One possible solution would be a polyphasic sleep pattern. Since a large chunk of deep and REM sleep occur in the first 3.5 hours of sleep, would I do better to break my sleep up into two blocks of 3.5 hours? I’m not sure this is practical, but I might give it a try sometime.

So, that’s it for this round of sleep analysis. I’ll probably take another stab in 6 months or so. I have to put in a plug for the people over at Zeo. I appreciate how approachable and helpful they’ve been! Thanks!!

When I started analyzing the sleep data, I was very interested to see if particular phases of sleep correlated more closely to how I felt the next day. Yesterday, I showed some ways the data could be simplified. Today, I’ll use the data to make a complete model.

To understand the relationship between each parameter, I performed a partial least squares (PLS) regression using the data. This is a fairly-high powered method of multivariate analysis that is particularly suited for large sets of variables. As an alternative, I could have reduced my variable set to those identified in yesterday’s post and used a simpler analysis method. But PLS is the best way to a robust model using all of the available data.

For the PLS analysis, I used SIMCA-P+ v.12.

Below is the PLS Loading Plot from my sleep data. The black items are the predictors (i.e., x-variables) while the red items are the predicted (i.e., y-variables). Similar to a PCA plot, the items furthest from the origin of the plot have the most influence. Once again, we see clustering of Total Z, Time in Light, and ZQ.

The analysis clearly demonstrates that Total Z and Time in Deep are the two factors that are most necessary to feel rested the following day.

With this information, I used SIMCA-P+ to construct a model based on the two sleep factors – Total Z and Time in Deep – to predict Day Feel. (I used only Day Feel 1, since it was representative.) The resulting model is shown below.

This plot shows the next day’s feel as a function of the minutes of total sleep I got (ranging from 3-9 hours) and the minutes of time in deep sleep. It clearly shows that Time in Deep is a very important factor. In fact, getting an extra 15 minutes of deep sleep is the equivalent to getting an entire extra hour of sleep!

What do I conclude from this?

1. I have to get the right amount of Total Sleep AND Deep Sleep to have a good night’s rest.
2. Getting extra Total Sleep is relatively straightforward (if not always easy). But, I need to figure out how to get adequate Deep Sleep!

Tomorrow, I’ll dive a little deeper (pun) into my Deep Sleep data, and post my next steps and outstanding questions.

Yesterday, I posted averages for my sleep phases, namely Time to Z, Total Z, Time in Light, Time in REM, Time in Deep, Time in Wake, Awakenings, and the ZQ score. Next I started looking into the data provided by my sleep journal.

The MyZeo web application lets you track a number of things in your sleep journal, the most relevant to this analysis are the Morning and Day Feel scores. These are qualitative scores from 1-5. The Morning Feel is an indicator of how well you feel you slept (Poorly to Very Well), while the 3 Day Feel indicators track how you feld during the day in regard to: 1) Irritable vs Easygoing, 2) Unfocused vs Focused, and 3) Tired vs Energetic.

Since there were so many different factors to consider in both the sleep phase data and the sleep journal information, I performed a principal components analysis (PCA) to see I could reduce the number of variables that could represent the data to a few key elements.

Again, I used JMP v.8 to do the PCA. Without going into the details of interpreting the results, the graph below shows the following:

ZQ, Total Z, Time in Light, and Time in REM are all correlated [blue arrow]. In other words, I don’t need to look at all 4 variables to understand my sleep. This suggests that I could use the single variable “Total Z” and keep most of the prediction power, with the added advantage that it is easy to measure and understand.

Another possibility for simplification is around the “Day Feel” indicators [purple arrow], which all track together, suggesting that, e.g., if I’m going to be tired, I’m also going to be unfocused and irritable. (Note: Anecdotal evidence from my family suggests the data may be accurate!)

It’s also worth noting the analysis indicates “Time in Wake” correlate to “Awakenings,” which seems to make perfect sense. In addition, “Time to Z” (how long it took me to fall asleep) is not at all correlated to the other variables, and has a very weak effect, as noted by the short length of the arrow.

Summarizing today’s insights:

• The data suggests that the number of variables used to represent my night’s sleep can be simplified to a few key elements.
• The same is true for the output of my sleep, in other words, how I feed the following day.

Tomorrow, I’ll explore whether it’s possible to build a predictive model that can tell me exactly what type of night’s sleep I’d need to maximize how I feel the next day.

I’m one of those people who needs more sleep than I get, so I’m always interested in finding ways to improve the quality of my sleep. Earlier this year, I purchased a Zeo, which is a small device that measures and records your phases of sleep. You can upload this data to a website which also allows you to manually log a number of other factors associated with sleep in the form of a sleep journal.

I just completed 100 days of recorded data on the Zeo, and I thought it was time to look for some overall patterns. While the website provides a number of simple ways to do this, I decided to download the raw data and analyze it myself.

Overall Numbers

To calculate top-level results for the 100 nights of data, I took out any nights that were statistical outliers (i.e., the headband fell off, etc.); there were only 4 that were obvious outliers.

Here’s what an “average” night looks like, broken down by sleep phases. The majority of the sleep I get is in the light phase, then REM, and deep, with only a small amount of wake time. (Evidently, most people are awake for short periods like this, even if they don’t remember it.)

I also calculated typical ranges for each phase of sleep. The median is the most likely value I would experience for phase. The range is the bottom 10 percentile of the data to the top 90 percentile. In other words, 80% of the data fall into this range, so it is a good representation of the spread of “typical” results look like for me.

For those interested in such details, the distribution analysis above was performed using JMP v.8, and I’ve provided a screenshot of the output if you’d like to take a look.

There is nothing in these results that are particularly revealing. It’s when I compared the sleep phase data to the sleep journal information that things got interesting! I’ll post those results tomorrow.