Bro-Science tip of the day:
Subtract one hour from the amount of sleep you think you got.
After using the SleepCycle app almost every night for three years, I can support this claim with consistent evidence.
The app tracks your time spent in deep and shallow sleep and gives you incredibly useful data: sleep quality, time in bed, time spent asleep, etc.
One of the most shocking discrepancies I notice each night is that my “Time asleep” is always an hour (or an hour and a half) less than my “Time in bed.”
This makes sense. Not only does it take us a while to actually fall asleep, but once we do, we inevitably toss and turn and half-wake up in the middle of the night or in the morning.
When you think you’ve gotten 8 hours, you’ve really gotten 7. Don’t rely on when you think you went to bed and when you think you woke up. These are rarely accurate.
For me, this was a hard pill to swallow. I had to accept the fact that I needed to start going to bed even earlier if I wanted to achieve the amount of hours of sleep I desired.
Last night, I “went to bed” at 9:42pm. I “woke up” today at 6:45am.
Time in bed: 9 hours, 3 minutes
Time asleep: 7 hours, 56 minutes
Get some sleep.