How we sleep is unbelievably important. Getting too little sleep not only makes you feel lousy and cranky, but it’s also linked to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and even early death. Sleep is especially important for Aspies. This is because Aspies generally experience greater stress in our lives and sleep helps us vent this buildup of stress energy.
Since Fitbit began tracking sleep stages in March 2017, it has collected data from 6 billion nights of its customers’ sleep. This is a gold mine — by far the largest set of sleep data ever assembled. (This data is anonymous and averaged; it’s not associated with individual customers’ names.) “It’s a really, really exciting and really rare data set,” Fitbit data scientist Karla Gleichauf says. “It’s probably the largest biometric data set in the world.”
The measurements include not just how long you sleep, but what stages of sleep you experience. Each morning, the Fitbit app shows which parts of the night you spent in REM sleep (the vivid-dreams stage, good for mood regulation and memory processing), in deep sleep (good for memory, learning, the immune system, and feeling rested), in light sleep, and awake. (It’s always disheartening to see how much of the night you waste in little one- or two-minute wake-ups that you don’t even remember.)
But wait, there’s more. The Fitbit app also knows your gender, age, weight, height, location, and activity level. Therefore, the company’s data scientists can slice and dice its massive sleep database in fantastic ways. They should be able to tell us who sleeps more: men or women. Northerners or Southerners. East Coasters or West Coasters. They should be able to calculate our national average bedtime. They should be able to draw all kinds of conclusions about the way we sleep — and what’s good for us.
Source: What Fitbit's 6 billion nights of sleep data reveals about us
The article goes on to describe some of their findings, such as
Women sleep 25 minutes longer a night than men. They average six hours and 50 minutes of sleep a night, whereas men get only six hours and 26 minutes. Neither group gets anywhere close to the recommended eight hours a night. Women also get about 10 minutes more REM sleep than men every night, too — a gap that widens after age 50. The news for women isn’t all good, though: They’re 40% more likely to suffer from insomnia — trouble falling asleep — than men.
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09 Aug 2019, 10:31 am
