Item — HN Reader

I had a similar epiphany a few years back when I started wearing a step-tracker/sleep monitor.

It was kinda interesting to see how many times I woke up, or track hours, but to be honest I realised after a few months that when my tracker said "You had good sleep", or "You had bad sleep" I was already aware - I woke up smiling, or grumpy depending on how I'd done.

I didn't ever look at the data and think "I want to go to bed now to catch up on the four hours I missed yesterday". I continued to have mostly consistent hours, but if I was doing something interesting I'd stay awake, and if I was tired I'd go to bed earlier naturally. The graphs and data wasn't providing anything of value, or encouraging me to change my behaviour in any significant way.

4 comments

I've found one very interesting thing from these trackers - namely how even small amount of alcohol destroy sleep quality metrics. One beer is enough for my sleep scores to drop by like 20-30% and it's consistent and reproducible for me every time. Whether it actually matters - I don't know, but it made me drink much less (from maybe once a week to maybe once every two months) which is good outcome I guess.

Eh, I found several interesting things from various tracking tools. Take a nap? Sleep is destroyed this night. Exercise in the evening? Same. Not something I’d pay attention to without noticing the chart afterwards.

There’s also the motivation factor. I’m not sure of the total %, but I certainly did some exercising just to fill the daily goal. Nothing life-changing, but for the price of a cheapo apple watch se once every 5 years or so, more than worth it.

It’s not unlike simplistic time tracking on my iphone. I spent a lot of time on bullshit websites. Obviously I knew it was happening, but the sheer magnitude was surprising. It’s akin to acute pain letting you know there’s a health problem vs something brewing in the background that you are vaguely aware of, but have no motivation to truly care about - one is far more noticeable than the other

Same. I had a Garmin for about 6 months and I eventually just stopped wearing it and sold it. Knowing how many steps I took today, checking it several times a day to see if I was meeting my goal, knowing how many vertical feet I skied.. none of this data ended up meaning anything to me.

The best use I got from my Apple Watch was to use the companion app of my gym routine tracker (to track current loads and personal best) and play music so I didn't have to bring the phone to the gym.

That was it, I got extremely annoyed by notifications so over time just disabled them. Also for some reason the heart rate monitor glitched a couple times, got alerts about my BPM at 180+ while I was sitting on the couch.

Eventually I just stopped using it and now sits in some drawer.

Being aware, and being aware that you are aware are very similar things that are subtly different.

I was aware that alcohol affects your next day, even a little. That's because people always say that alcohol is bad for you (surprise surprise). I heard this, so you could say that I was aware. I generally thought about this as "a hangover is bad for you." and was somewhat dismissive of the "even a single drink has a bad effect" mantra.

I did some experimenting, and slowly realized that even a single drink can indeed have an impact on the next day. It's not a hangover, but an impact that I could feel nonetheless. I needed to do some light stats and a lot more journaling to build this awareness. I am now aware that I am aware.

> an impact that I could feel nonetheless. I needed to do some light stats and a lot more journaling to build this awareness.

If you could feel it why beed the stats?

I don't think I was clear.

There is a difference between knowing something, and believing it to be true.

I know that sometimes I feel good when I wake up. I know people say that drinking makes you feel not good when you wake up, sometimes.

It takes a bit of observation and some statistical sampling to connect those two together. Now I know it, and also believe it to be true.

Perhaps "aware" vs "aware that I am aware" was a bad way of phrasing it.

It's like any good cryptographic challenge - easier to validate the answer than to come up with it from scratch