Sleep & Whoop

I'm starting on a journey and want to share as I go. But, first, a little context...

I don't sleep much - haven't for as long as I can remember and it's kind of been nice. Until it wasn't. And then it was bad. Really bad. While a lot of people might think they don't need much sleep, in actuality they do. Only about 1 to 3% are capable of surviving on 5 hours or less of sleep according to the Wall Street Journal article so odds are you are NOT one of them. Basically, that means the rest of us are left to be sleep-deprived zombies.

Hacking my sleep has been a journey for me. I've tried polyphasic sleep, every medication that they had (up to about 5 years ago), vitamins, minerals, crystals, powders, pillows, and masks. One time I even made myself stay up for 73 hours straight - don't do this, it's awful, in an attempt to reset my circadian rhythms. (Didn't work btw)

Needless to say, I'm always intersted in trying something new when there's a possibility to gaining insight in my patterns and challenges. So I jumped on the latest in wearables, Whoop, when my friend Rex Miller introduced me to it. It's like most other wearables in how it attaches but the thing that caught my eye was the charging. You don't put it on a charger, you put the charger on it with their battery pack. Was kind of a "duh" thing but precisely what made me realize that I'd be able to use it for sleep tracking - 100% up-time (or as close to it as I care to have). It was something my Apple Watch couldn't pull off and my Fitbit just wouldn't stick around for. Not sure how the analytics themselves are going to go but I guess that's what an experiment is; a test.

And so now, I set off on my next adventure with a new sleep study and my newest device in hopes of learning more about myself and my sleep challenges. I realize that there's no silver bullet or magic device that's going to help here but my hopes are that more information will help me to refine my efforts towards finding better sleep.