Data Diary

• Wednesday, November 25:
  • I went into bed at 1:39 AM and was in bed for 5 hours and 42 minutes. I fell asleep for 5 hours and 31 minutes. I had 5 disturbances while I was asleep, but my sleep efficiency was 97%. I woke up at 7:21 AM and my respiratory rate was 18.8. I was a little tired, I definitely could have slept more.
• Thursday, November 26:
  • I was in bed for 7 hours and 16 minutes and I went to bed at 2:26 in the morning and fell asleep at 2:39. I had 12 disturbances throughout the night and woke up at 9:55, having 6 hours and 44 minutes of sleep with a respiratory rate of 18.6. I slept pretty well besides the disturbances.
• Friday, November 27:
  • I slept from 5:53 AM to 12:30 with a total of 6 hours and 28 minutes of sleep, but I was in bed for 6 hours and 28 minutes.I had 7 disturbances. My respiratory rate was 19.3. My performance throughout the day definitely suffered from my lack of sleep during the night.
• Saturday, November 28:
  • I was in bed for 8 hours and 5 minutes and I fell asleep at 3:45 in the morning. I slept for 7 hours and 21 minutes until I woke up at 11:51 AM. I had heightened physical and mental energy from my 7 hours and 21 minutes of sleep. My overall performance from the day improved my extended sleep.
• Sunday, November 29:
  • I was in bed for 6 hours and 44 minutes. I slept for 6 hours and 5 minutes from 2:54 in the morning to 9:39 in the morning. I had 6 disturbances throughout the night and my sleep efficiency was at 90%. My respiratory rate was at 19.2. I felt like I slept pretty well tonight.
• Monday, November 30:
  • Although I was in bed for 8 hours, I was awake for about 40 minutes before I fell asleep at 3:02 AM. I woke up at 11:08 AM, for a total of 7 hours and 19 minutes of sleep. I got 75% of the sleep that I need with 91% efficiency but I had 7 disturbances. This was the best night of sleep I got.
• Tuesday, December 1:
  • I was in bed for 3 hours and 59 minutes and asleep for 3 hours and 1 minute. I went to sleep at 3:01 AM and woke up at 7:03 AM. I had 5 disturbances, my sleep efficiency was 76% and my respiratory rate was 18.9. Getting only 3 hours of sleep increased my injury for the following day.

Reflection

To quantify, by definition means, “to determine, express, or measure the quantity of,” and self, by definition means, “an individual’s typical character or behavior.” A quantified self is self-knowledge through self-tracking. We are all being surveilled, whether it be by walking past a street camera, or using a credit card at a store, or tracking yourself while sleeping. Despite the fact that it may be scary or just weird to know that we are constantly being surveilled and tracked, it is not always bad. We need this surveillance to know the truth. To know what is actually happening in our lives and how it is affecting us. We rely on this information as a society to live and function the best way we can. To prove this, I used a tracking device called WHOOP, to track my sleeping patterns and how it affected my everyday life.

WHOOP tracks your physical activity, sleeping habits, blood pressure, breathing rate, heart rate, digestion, and more. All my information from the watch was immediately transferred to an app on my phone where I can check all my statistics. The watch is nice because it does not only track how long you sleep for or when you were in the deepest part of your sleep, it uses all your vitals during your sleep to compare how it affected you the next day. It also shows how what you did during the day affects your sleep. With this information I am able to determine exactly why I was not at peak physical ability during the day and what to do to make sure I am the next day. For example, on Friday, November 27, I did not sleep enough and the app told me, “You only got 5:53 of the 9:59 you needed. Performance suffered as a result,” and then proceeded to tell me all about my vitals from when I was sleeping. The next night I slept more and so my performance improved. I need this to improve on my daily life and to make sure my body is staying healthy.

Some sleep tracking apps that I have used in the past only require you to put your phone close to you while sleeping and from there, it documents your sleep. The WHOOP watch is different because it is not close to you, it is on you. It is the closest you can get to a tracking device, without implanting some sort of chip. “The WHOOP Strap 3.0 collects physiological data 24/7 to provide the most accurate and granular understanding of your body.” Although, in Juli Zeh’s, The Method, citizens do have to have a chip implanted in their arm to be tracked and to optimize the citizens’ health and daily life. The citizens are constantly being tracked, every second of every day of their life. Why were the citizens in The Method constantly being tracked? The same reason that we track ourselves, to optimize our health and ultimately, our lives. Juli Zeh agrees that, “Health is a state of complete physical, spiritual and social well being – and not the mere absence of disease,”(Zeh 1). It is scary to think of a world where we are forced to give our health information by a chip in our arm, but really it is necessary to track these aspects of our life. “Science tells us that you don’t get stronger in the gym (that’s what breaks you down), you actually get stronger during rest. Sleep can be the forgotten third of your life. It’s the period to repair, regenerate and prime your mind and body for peak performance. WHOOP measures not only how long you sleep, but the time spent in each stage to better understand sleep quality. The WHOOP Sleep Coach tells you exactly how much sleep you need to reach your desired performance level the next day.” Maybe it should not be a chip in our arm, but with an app like WHOOP or any tracking app, it is important to better our health and lives. 

As a result of WHOOP not just being an app on the app store, and it being a watch, you do have to pay for it. Though, the app comes free with the purchase of the watch. Being that the app records so much, there are some limitations, like the cardiovascular load. WHOOP announced that, “WHOOP Strain, reported on a scale from zero to 21, measures the total cardiovascular load experienced over a specified period of time – such as a workout or day – normalized such that a 21.0 represents the maximal cardiovascular load that could be attained in a day.” So really, the max for the cardiovascular load is the healthy amount you should be using a day. There are some more memberships you can sign up for different accesses to information, but the sleeping tracking portion is free.

In Kathrin Roeggla’s, We Never Sleep, citizens are in a constant state of pressure to work a twenty-four hour work cycle. Taking a break or breather is very much looked down upon, it is actually credited when one goes days or weeks without sleep. The value of these people’s whole lives are changed because of why they are being tracked. So in We Never Sleep, the people are praised for their lack of sleep and recognized as a bad worker when they do sleep; their constant tracking affects everything they do. “She wanted to stay in touch with herself, in fact, immediately… she had no regrets, she wasn’t sorry she wasn’t there anymore,”(Roeggla 8).I think that this book brings out some unfortunate situations in the world that we live in. There are some careers that carry so much work and it is expected that the employees never stop doing it, because when they do, they fall behind and someone else can take their position. In that case, I think that the book brings out an exaggerated mental and physical problem in the workplace. Nevertheless, We Never Sleep, in a darker way, shows how important it is to track sleep and help. Sleep is so necessary and tracking how we sleep is just as crucial. 

Not all students in my group tracked their sleep, but the ones that did had a very similar approach. We agreed that tracking sleep is so important for everyday lives and health. Other students in the group were still in agreement that a lot of data was tracked and that it is actually pretty important to know what is being tracked. 

As a society and as a person, we rely on our sleep information to live the best life we can and to stay as healthy as we can. The quantified self has proven through many different ways of tracking, that we are living in a world of surveillance. Technology has allowed us to prevail and better ourselves as a society. If everybody embraced the technological world we are living in and used these resources to help ourselves and everyone else, society as a whole could have the potential to become great. Looking at We Never Sleep and The Method, we are able to compare them to the world that we live in and see just how important and useful self tracking our sleep is in our world today. We have the chance to better ourselves in every way, why not take it? 

Works Cited:

Labs, DI. “The World’s Most Powerful Fitness Membership.” WHOOP, 2 Dec. 2020, www.whoop.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiAwrf-BRA9EiwAUWwKXky5drRFVvkuQ0iHRNKZ6-MVjKk_0c5JfpO2wMPBjsipe_4E1OAY_xoCfKQQAvD_BwE. 

“Self.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quantified. 

“Quantified.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quantified. 

Röggla, Kathrin, et al. We Never Sleep. Ariadne Press, 2009. 

 Zeh, Juli, and Sally-Ann Spencer. The Method. Vintage Books, 2014.