Birdy Roberts
Tracking how often I wake up
at night compared to the
National average of others.
Waking up at night Over the summer, I recognized I was having trouble staying asleep. Whether it be waking up because it was hot, cold, bad dreams or random noises in the middle of the night, I could not stay asleep. I was constantly getting poor sleep no matter what changes I made and this was an opportunity for me to track those changes.
My data was tracked by the Sleep app on my apple watch. This app tracks the overall time I spent asleep along with the amount of times I had woke up. According to my data, on average I was woken up 5 times for at least 30 minutes every night.
There seemed to be a slight increase of times I woke up during the second week, but it slowly went down for the rest of the month. I noticed that the first two lines of data were from the start of semester when I was settling in. The increase in stress from starting classes could have definetely been a factor in my poor sleeping habits at the time.
Similarly, the last two data points are from when I had my routine in place. This made it easier for me to have my workload managed which was able to lower my stress levels.
National Statistics A 2010 study found that among 8,937 people, ages 18 and older, 36% reported waking up during the night at least three times per week. The reason for waking varied between person, but it is most common to wake up during N1, also known as the lightest stage of sleep.
There is no specific number that portrays the average amount of times certain age groups wake up. People tend to wake up because of disturbances, temperature, crazy dreams, pain, or insomnia and the amount of times vary greatly depending on the night. It is hard to track something like this because of how different each persons body is and how it will respond to certain things. We all don't sleep in the same conditions, so results vary.
Staying asleep It is a well known fact that you should be getting at least 8 hours of sleep in order to function correctly throughout the night. During the week of September 5th-11th, I tracked how many hours I slept each night.
I was successfully able to meet the recommended hours on most days except 3, where I got around 6-7 hours. Though suprisingly, I recognized that I had spent 40+ minutes awake on days I had over 9 hours of sleep!
I had tried a lot of different things to help me stay asleep. These methods included taking sleeping medicine, changing my own perscription dosage, getting off my phone before bed and wearing an eye mask to bed. These all did not help unfortunately, but a lot of research shows that those are some of the main causes for difficulty sleeping. I ended up being able to sleep like usual once a lot of my personal stress went down.
Sometimes It is important to look into and try out different methods to help this issue before you ask for professional help.