A client and I are targeting when she wakes up in the morning. This is a meaningful goal for her as she wants to rise early in the morning and have a better start to her day.
(I will focus on behavioral sleep measures and not the intervention in this article.)
At the core of any sleep intervention, is identifying a measure that is sensitive to her sleep quality, when and if, they do change.
Behavioral Sleep Measures
Sleep is difficult to measure because you need to define sleep onset and sleep offset. Fortunately for us, sleep researchers and consumer-based companies (e.g., Fitbit, Apple, WHOOP) do the heavy lifting for us.
So, I just use their algorithms and definitions of sleep and begin data collection with BehaviorFit clients.
The following are two key behavioral health measures that provide actionable insight for any sleep program.
Measure #1: Track Average Wake Up Time
Entering a time of day is a headache for any spreadsheet – whether it be in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. To curtail this problem, we convert the wake-up time to a decimal.
The client follows these steps to gather this information on a daily basis:
- Open Fitbit App
- Gather Wake Up Time
- Enter time into spreadsheet
- Another column in the spreadsheet converts the time (“8:45am”) to a decimal (8.75)
- Count/Average/Sum the wake up time as needed..
The decimal is important so that the measure can be used for other analyses and insights on her behavioral sleep program. When looking across several Alarm goals, I make a table like this:
Cells are color-coded for ease of analysis. Also, the numbers in the top row correspond to the days of the week (1=Monday, 5=Friday). Across the various alarm goals, we notice that Tuesdays (“2”) have been the most consistent, earliest wake-up time (7.67 or about 7:35 am on average).
Measure #2: Latency To Rise
Ah yes, the dreaded snooze alarm. How soon do you rise after the alarm goes off? That is the core of this measure.
This measure is the difference between when:
Latency To Rise = Alarm Clock Time – Wake Up Time
This equation produces one of three different values:
- A (negative) number means that you wake up before the alarm
- A (0) number means that you woke up when the alarm went off
- A (positive) number means that you woke up after the alarm
Similar to the table above, I can organize the latency to rise values like so:
Green values are good, red values are not good (as defined by the client). Historically, waking up on Fridays is difficult for this client. Each number is the average “latency to rise” across the intervention and day of the week.
Sleep Measurement In Action
These two sleep measures are at the core of coaching through sleep goals and assessing how to intervene next. This client has a goal to progressively shift her sleep window; sleeping from 12-8 to 10-6.
The client and I systematically work through these measures to chip away at her ideal wake-up time and sleep strategy.
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