How did you sleep?

I picked up a FitBit in late December. It's been useful to track my steps, my blood pressure and sleep patterns, but not very informative in other areas - it doesn't have pre-sets for yoga or meditation, for example.

Wearing the fitbit to check out my sleeping patterns has been revealing. When I check in the morning I can see data on how many hours of deep sleep, light sleep, REM, and awake time was spent in the different sleep stages.

Previously I would feel short-changed if I only got 6 hours sleep, but then I noticed on those nights I often got the same hours - or even more - time spent in deep sleep. Recovering from sickness I allowed myself a good ten hour sleep one night, and then realized oversleeping may have yielded 'good' numbers but left me feeling groggy.

It was also reassuring to see how my numbers compared to others of the same age and sex.

On the negative side, the fitbit would flash a light and I thought it might actually be waking me up throughout the night. A couple of nights the data wasn't captured because battery life was low, and I felt a bit cheated. Even more of an issue was that syncing my device to answer the question, "How did you sleep?" became a morning ritual. Shouldn't I be relying on my body to answer the question?

So this weekend I took the device off entirely. I had  fabulous sleep - one of the best ever. I was a tad regretful I didn't have the data of my best sleep ever in a long time to compare with previous nights, but then I just had to laugh.