Hours of sleep each day since last November. (Where there are no lines in the chart, it is a missing observation, not zero hours of sleep.)
During these 343 days, I slept a total of 2,612 hours, or 7 hours and 37 minutes a day. On days when I slept over 10 hours, it is probably thanks to a lengthy nap.
I was curious how hours of sleep affects my outcomes of interest, and it turns out it does not at all. A really interesting and surprising finding is that even with wakefulness, there is nearly zero correlation. I do not interpret this to mean that I can get as much or as little sleep as I want and feel equally awake and alert the next day, but that if I sleep a reasonable amount (as I do nearly every night) then it really makes no difference.
...On the other hand, maybe there really is something to polyphasic sleep.
So if how much I sleep has no effect on my wakefulness, then I ought to be able to sleep less and be more productive, right? Apparently not. The very subjective rating "Growth" asks me to combine the quantity and quality of all the things I learned and experienced today into a 1 to 10 measure of how much I "grew". Again, zero correlation with hours of sleep. This is really surprising and a little discouraging. How could it be that the number of hours I am awake is uncorrelated with how productive I am? Something stinks, but I am not sure what.
It seems unsatisfying and counterintuitive to suggest that the amount of sleep I get makes no difference; sleep is central to human existence, so it must have a meaningful effect on something. All I can say is that, of the outcomes I would expect it to influence, no effect shows up in the data. Probably things would be different if I forced myself to sleep much less than my body wanted to, but when getting an amount of sleep close to what the body wants, differences in amount of sleep do not seem to matter. What this means practically about how I should live my life (or you yours), I've no idea.
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Earlier:
Analyzing my weight
The evolution of tracking myself
