I’ve been trying to improve my deep sleep for the past ~2 months by throwing everything I could at it:
- same bed, sleepwear and finger ring
- no partner or pets
- A/C set to 18C
- daily resistance training
- grey-out curtain + eye mask
- nasal irrigation before sleep
- 33dB NRR earplugs
- weather (I’ve been living in Medellin, “the city of eternal spring”)
- no daily stimulants; only rare social drinking
- f.lux or equivalent on laptop and smartphone
- occasional intervention: Spectra479 blue blocking glasses (didn’t seem to make any reliable difference)
- dinner intervention: timing, and with or without carbs (didn’t seem to make any reliable difference)
The average deep sleep duration has been 48 minutes, but I got variations from 0 and 10 to 82 and 89 minutes, without doing or not doing anything special I could put my finger on.
Clear correlations are rare and not that useful:
- alcohol reduces sleep quality (duh); but not always… some Sangria at dinner knocked my deep sleep to 23 minutes, while a few glasses of white wine + 2 gin&tonics + 1 beer were followed by 52 minutes of deep sleep. Offset by club dancing that night? Who knows.
- being sick (cold or stomach flu) reduces sleep quality
- sleeping on couches sucks
- just sleeping more tends to result in more deep sleep and higher readiness (duh), but again, not always
What’s more frequent is the complete lack of correlation. Average or lowest heart rate don’t correlate with deep sleep. Got 89 minutes once, with AVG HR 63 and lowest HR 57. Another night, AVG HR 61, lowest 50, deep sleep only 53. Another, 62/56, deep sleep 38 minutes. I don’t know how to control the HR anyway. All those nights were following resistance training days including 30 minutes of walking (10 uphill).
My last hope is sleep timing. I’ve only gone to sleep (way) after midnight, but even 2am vs. 6am doesn’t correlate with anything:
After getting only 10 minutes of deep sleep one night when I have kept all the variables I could think of as constant as I could, I wrote this in my sleep log:
10 minutes deep sleep and 50 the night before? What the FUCK have I done wrong?!
So color me a skeptic. If you’re looking for a more enthusiastic crowd of Oura users, head on to the Facebook group.