graphical evidence of my destructive patterns

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I'm a little screwy when it comes to sleep. But up until now, the only proof of this has been merely anecdotal; I'll have told you stories about that time I blacked out in lecture after weeks of getting 2 hours of sleep a night, or the time I fell asleep during my tutorial at Oxford (yes, it was a one-on-one session with my professor; yes, he noticed me dozing off - lucky for me, he was sympathetic)... I'm a night owl through and through, and even having a 9am-6pm job has done little to abate that.

Well, yesterday I was informed of a pretty extraordinary application. Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that tracks your body movements during your sleep. And because movement patterns supposedly vary according to each phase of the sleep cycle, the iPhone's accelerometer is able to graph out your sleep cycle throughout the night. The app then uses this to set a window of time that precedes your scheduled alarm time so that it can wake you up during the period in which your sleep phase is at its lightest (i.e. you're close to waking up).

Pretty sweet, eh? Undoubtably, there's no way this application is going to be anywhere near as accurate as having probes attached to your head to monitor brainwaves, but this is still a really awesome tool. I downloaded it right away and tried it out for the first time last night.

If this thing is even mildly accurate, then I'm fucked. Take a gander at my graph (you can send the graph from the app to your e-mail, or share it on Facebook).




Sleep statistics for 29 - 30 Sep (Thu).

Went to bed / woke up: 12:24 AM / 7:55 AM
Total time: 7h 30m

Analysis made by Sleep Cycle.

Truth be told, it seems like it takes a couple of days for the app to calibrate itself according to your movements, but still... I'M IN DEEP SLEEP EVEN IN THE MORNING??? NOT fair. But it might explain why it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE for me to wake up in the morning. I've had trouble my entire life trying to wake up early. So has my mom. And I told her frankly that one of my biggest motivators for trying to go back to grad school is that my crazy sleep habits were fucking made for academia. You know, in addition to my desire to learn about the contemporary languages and literatures of immigrant communities travelling westwards........(i promise this comes first, benevolent gods of grad schools. please admit me.) And she supports me 100%! Man, I love my mom.

I wish the movement patterns as measured by the accelerometer were also taken into account in this graph. Naturally, there are a lot of inaccuracies and flaws with this app, but as a bare indicator, it's pretty freaking cool. And, in my case, depressing, because now I have a graph that just screams LOOK HOW FUCKED YOU ARE, CHUMP.