“He who does not risk, will never drink champagne” - Proverb
Sometimes, we take a chance on something without knowing if it’ll pay off—that’s exactly how I felt when I first strapped on my Whoop. I even sent a photo to a friend, thrilled to use his promo code (and hey, I’ll shamelessly link mine here too!). I checked my metrics the next morning, thrilled to start tracking my sleep, and within the week, I was convinced: monitoring my health was the key to achieving my fitness goals, running that half marathon I’d been talking about, and—most importantly—finally sleeping well. It felt like the start of my own Rocky-style transformation montage. Over the past three years, I’ve felt the rewards of using Whoop, but recently, I had the urge to dig deeper with a data project to analyze my journey, especially around fixing my sleep schedule. I wrote this piece to show why monitoring and prioritizing your sleep is one of the best investments you can make—if not today, then definitely by tomorrow.
Most of my life, I only slept when absolutely necessary—I’d rather stay up partying, have a few late-night brews with my friends, play video games until dawn, and prioritize anything but sleep. Eventually, all those late nights caught up with me, and I started having trouble falling asleep. I wondered if it was just a lack of hours in the day or if there was something wrong with me. So, I checked Google Search Trends to see how “sleep” had trended over the past 20 years. Turns out, the top search query was “can’t sleep” or some variation of that, and seeing it wasn’t just me struggling was a relief, so I went back to business as usual.
Top Search Queries Related to Sleep
Even after I had Whoop tracking my every move and telling me that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I still didn’t feel the incentive to change anything. I was fully committed to my lifestyle, which didn’t seem all that unhealthy to me. I was working out, building up a career, and having a great time—just like everyone else, or so I thought. But when I realized that simply monitoring my health wasn’t enough to make a real difference, I decided to try something revolutionary: going to bed early.
Metrics and Hypothesis from Whoop
Of all the metrics Whoop tracks, I chose my total sleep duration and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as my focus for this analysis, I chose HRV to measure against my sleep duration because it’s often regarded as a solid indicator of overall health, reflecting stress levels, autonomic nervous system balance, cardiovascular health, and sleep quality. Put simply, the higher your HRV on a given day, the better the state of your health. Going into my analysis, I hypothesized that the more I slept, the higher my HRV would be.
Quick Note: I’m not a health professional, and HRV alone shouldn’t be taken as a health diagnosis. This analysis is a personal project to explore how sleeping earlier might have positively impacted my health.
Analyzing my sleep & HRV
I thought wearing the Whoop would be the hard part, but I was way off. I assumed that tracking my sleep would somehow make me sleep better, with no extra effort needed. Reality hit when, in my first month, I discovered I was averaging a daily sleep deficit of 3 hours and 27 minutes. After a year, it worsened to 3 hours and 42 minutes. I wasn’t getting any healthier and clearly missed something important.
I always thought 6 to 8 hours of sleep was ideal, and with so much to do in the day, I usually settled for 6 hours. In the graph below, you’ll see I didn’t reach a 7-hour sleep average (Y-axis on the left) until May 2022—9 months into my Whoop journey. Interestingly, that’s also when my HRV made its biggest improvement. Motivated, I aimed to sleep earlier, but life got in the way (I moved), and I delayed my plan.
By July 2022, I was back on track, only to relapse by September. Over the following months,I kept going through a similar cycle. It wasn’t until May 2023, where I finally began to consistently sleep close to 7 hours or more—and I’ve maintained it since. My HRV is far beyond the 140 mark it started at in August 2021, and I feel more energized and better overall.
Was it all a coincidence?
Looking back, it’s great to see that making the adjustment to sleep earlier was paying off in terms of getting more sleep. Later on I also made some other lifestyle adjustments beyond going to bed earlier like: drinking less alcohol, avoiding blue light before bed, and, believe it or not, not checking my phone for 30 to 60 minutes after waking up. Even though the metrics I chose to focus on showed that sleeping earlier and other sleep hygiene habits were paying off, I still needed to answer the following question:
Did going to bed earlier significantly increase my sleep, and did that impact my HRV? Or was it all a coincidence?
Since HRV and sleep duration used different units of measurements, I had to standardize them for a comparison to understand whether their peaks and troughs were related. I used Z-scores as a way to achieve this and plotted the results in Graph 2.0. Essentially a Z-score let me know how my HRV was impacted as a result of sleeping more or less hours.
For example you can see that after May 2023 both the bar chart and line graph stay above zero more often than they go below it. This means that both my sleep duration and HRV were above my all time averages for each respective metric. In other words, since starting to consistently sleep earlier in May 2023 I started seeing a statistically significant improvement in the amount of sleep I was getting and my HRV scores.
Final Thoughts
While I may not be sipping champagne to toast my improved sleep, changing a lifestyle I was so accustomed to felt like a genuine risk. As I explained in my analysis of sleep duration and HRV, there were several setbacks along the way, with plenty of times where I slipped back into old habits. But this data analysis revealed that going to bed earlier and some additional lifestyle changes had a big payoff, both in the amount of sleep I’m getting and in my overall health.
Interestingly enough, remember how I said the top related search queries to sleep are “can’t sleep” or some variation? Remember how it gave me some relief for my troubles when I first started this journey? Well I recently looked at the same search trends I first searched up in August 2021 and turns out that this trend has been on the rise since. So if you are someone who relates to anything that I said in the opening paragraphs, then give going to bed earlier a shot. Who knows you might feel better the next morning and at the latest, you can give it a shot tomorrow.
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