Sleep, Glorious Sleep

Almost two months ago, I switched from sleeping about 8 hours a night, to sleeping about 9 hours a night. I did so for two reasons.

The first was an article in the Stanford Alumni Magazine. An issue over the summer had a piece on a sleep study that had been conducted on a group of Stanford varsity athletes. The experiment got some of the athletes to try to sleep an extra 1 or 2 hours per night. The ones who did so showed statistically significant improvement in athletic performance.

The other reason is the data that I record each and every day on Twitter. I was noticing a certain pattern concerning sleep.

To explain the pattern, I'll start by pointing out that generally speaking, I eat no wheat, sugar, or cow dairy. I haven't done so for a year.

But, now and then, I go "off the wagon". Maybe eat a dessert or some bread. Maybe drink some wine.

I noticed over the past year that whenever I would "cheat" like this, the cheating would show up in the data that I tweet. Specifically, I would notice that my weight would go up, and my belly would go out.

Then, over the next few days after cheating, I'd "clean up my act", and go back to my pristine diet. But my body would not reward me. Instead, these elevated weight and waist numbers would hang around for a few days despite my food "piety".

It was like my body had bcome a hyper-sensitive one-way ratchet. One moment of eating poorly seemed to wipe out weeks of eating well. I was developing a theory of food saying that as we age, we become extra sensitive to eating badly.

But after a few days of elevated numbers due to cheating, my numbers would suddenly drop back to normal one morning. I started noticing that the mornings on which these sudden data drops occurred would be the mornings that I slept in, sleeping 9 or 10 hours.

Reading that Stanford Alumni article, and considering the above pattern, I put two and two together, and switched to sleeping 9 hours (go to bed @ 9pm; wake up 6am).

Two months into this, I report the following: I can cheat with impunity again!

That is, I can imbibe some wheat, a little sugar and/or a bit of cow dairy now and then, and sleeping 9 hours, my numbers in the morning won't reflect that cheating. It's as if my body is "sleeping off" the toxicity, granting me a mulligan.

In fact, my numbers for waist are so stable now that it's boring to record. Since July 27, when I started sleeping 9 hours, my waist has been 32 inches almost every day - with no variation.

I have graphs showing my data over time (OK, so I'm a dweeb). In those graphs I run trend lines, to normalize out the jitter in the data.

But since I started sleeping 9 hours, I don't need no stinkin' trendline - my data is a trendline. It's so fricking stable it's boring.

What with curing my lifelong belligerence, and now immunizing myself against dietary cheating, I'm running out of challenges. The danger of hubris setting in is on the horizon.

I need a new challenge!