As you probably have gathered, I’m a data guy. I love to measure things. Once I’ve measured them, I can spend countless hours analyzing the data. I’ll slice it into different segments and see what I can learn from the patterns. I track my weight, body fat percentage, and BMI. I collect data regarding my blood sugar to help monitor and manage my diabetes. I used to record every bit of food I ate to help with my diabetes management. I track my exercise, including how long I workout, the intensity, the type of exercise, and how I felt about it. I collect all sorts of weird data, and if the collection is easy enough, I end up with mounds of data to analyze.

My latest endeavor has been to collect data regarding my sleep. I didn’t set out to track sleep, it was a curious side-effect of having a tool that would do it already ingrained in my life. I had a FitBit Flex for a while before I discovered that I could track my sleep with virtually no effort. On June 30 I will have been tracking my sleep with my FitBit for two years. That’s 731 nights of data!

The process couldn’t be easier: Tap on the FitBit a couple times when I’m going to sleep, then tap a couple times when I wake up. The FitBit software immediately does it’s magic and provides me with a report of my sleep just minutes after I’m awake. As a visual guy, I loved the graph that breaks my sleep into times when I was asleep, restless, and awake. When I first started tracking my sleep, I was a mess. I was getting up several times a night and there were enough times when I was restless that I wasn’t that rested when I would start my day.

There were several strategies that I tried to improve my sleep:

• Switched sides of the bed with my wife
• Ran the fan more often
• Stopped eating & drinking after 10pm
• Implemented f.lux on my computer and Night Shift on my iOS devices
• Stopped using electronics of any sort 30 minutes before going to sleep
• Journaled right before going to bed
• Installed a new mattress

Each step seemed to help, and in total my sleep has gotten a lot better. Throughout, I continued to track my sleep with my FitBit, but I felt like I was missing something. After hearing about Sleep Cycle on numerous podcasts, I decided to give the app a try. I figured I’d use it in parallel with my FitBit and see if there was anything that I could gather from Sleep Cycle that I didn’t get from my FitBit.

The very first morning I was stunned. The information provided by Sleep Cycle was dramatically different than what I got from my FitBit. Whereas in FitBit you can see how long it took you to get to sleep, and home many times you were disturbed (awake or restless), that data was visually presented as single events. In contrast, Sleep Cycle actually shows a graph of how deeply I slept, and gave a much more complex view of the quality of my sleep.

Below are two graphs of the very same night. As you can see, the data is presented entirely differently.

I love the ability to look at the very same data in two ways. Having this data (and the graphs to represent it) has allowed me to assess how I feel in the morning and the objective measures of those nights. To take it a step further, I try to think about what I did the day (or night) before a really good night and determine what I did right. Likewise, I assess my bad night to see what things I probably shouldn’t be doing.

I realize that sleep tracking isn’t for everybody. Not everyone has a FitBit, but most everybody who’s reading this probably has a phone. The Sleep Cycle app is available for iOS as well as for Android. The basic version is free, with the option to upgrade to a paid version that allows for much more complex data analysis. While I’m not a huge fan of having my phone near me at night (I used to charge it in another room of the house), the fact that you put the phone face-down on the nightstand has meant that it’s not much of an intrusion during my actual sleep.

I’m still tracking my sleep with both SleepCycle and my FitBit and will probably continue to do so for a while. If you’re looking for a way to assess how you’re sleeping, either or both of these might be a good fit for you.