Values tracker & Sleep Experiment

11/14/22
I’d previously tried this exercise where you sort a stack of cards with different values on them. They have things like “Peace”, “Helpfulness”, “Security” written on them, and you sort them by how important each is to you. The point of it is to give yourself an idea of what things you find most meaningful, and so you can pursue those things and hopefully make your life seem less loser-y. You can try it yourself here.

My plan is to weekly track how satisfied/engage I feel in each of my top 10 values. I also added a few other questions to gauge how things like work, time off affect my perception. This is what what I came up with looks like:

My tentative plan is to do this for 3-6 months or so, and if I find it helpful I may do it indefinitely and, if not, I’ll stop.
First log day: 11/14/21
Re-evaluate: 2/14/22

9/25/22
I completely forgot to re-evaluate after 3 months. The positive is that I’ve got about 10 months of weekly information, the most simplified version distilled below:



I haven’t done too deep of a dive into what I have so far beyond this. My general takeaways thus far:
-as expected, my work hours correlates strongly to my work stress. It correlates less strongly with my average values score each week, though somewhat inversely

-my satisfaction with my values was pitifully low, rarely breaking 5, and didn’t change much over the course of the record, trending downwards slowly

The 3 lowest were creativity, creation, and humor (with curiosity and gentleness far behind).

-the highest of the bunch of genuiness, followed by hardwork. In retrospect, hardwork is probably underrated, as I’ve worked pretty hard objectively. I think part of the self-reporting is that a chronically negative person prone to hating on self, these scores are likely all deflated than reality. There’s a personality test on 538 that I took and the results are pretty uninspiring. I brought this up to my friend Peter and we took the test on behalf of each other, and the results were much more normal and less depressing to look at. I suppose the difference here is that here I’m rating my own satisfaction and fulfillment and the main point is to quantify my own subjective experience — whereas with the 538 personality test, the goal is to be objective as possible in describing your behavior.

-I didn’t go through any of the major (and minor) life events and see how they affected my scores

-my values average rarely exceeded 4, but there are times when my own holistic satisfaction rating reached as high as 7. Some potential reasons are that happened to be in a good mood / less stressed as I was making the rating. I could also be finding satisfaction in life that’s outside of the values, meaning that while I don’t feel fulfilled along those axes, I’m finding some other sources contentment outside my selected values.

My goal for the next 2 months is to have in-bed time reach 8.5 hours per night when possible
Ideally I’d reach my natural sleep each night, but that involves factors outside my control. The only factor I can control is my bed hours.
Re-evaluate 11/25/22 (or whenever I remember)

12/11/22
Here’s how things changed after spending the last ~2.5 months trying to ↑ my in-bed time:


Main takeaways:
-It’s not easy to really increase your in-bed time. My average ended up being 7.6 hours per night. I could go back and check, but I’m fairly certain the big hit I take is on my 24 hour call nights where I’ll get some sleep (~4 hours or so) and then fail to recoup any the post-call day.

-I was relatively consistent week to week. I never average below 7.2-ish in any week and I had 2 weeks where I was 8.0 or slightly higher

-I was probably getting somewhere around 7 hours per night previous to this, so I’ve been sleeping on average about 36 minutes more. 36 doesn’t seem like a whole lot but, still:

-Sleep good? Overall increase and increase in each value. Some of it surely bias because obviously am not biased and am expecting improvements, but seems pretty sizable.

-Again, I don’t know how accurately my numerical grades are in actually reflecting how much of a presence these values have in my life. I feel it’s often affected by how pessimistic I feel overall.
It has some element of accuracy though, my biggest gainers were hardwork, competency, and health. All 3 of which, having 2 months time to look back, I would’ve pegged to be the biggest changes.

-Confounders: prior 2 months, was still in earlier stages of training. Less stress overall now currently could add to the ↑ in numbers.
Flip side is I started taking 24h call during this last period, which presumably would make life suck more and the ↑ was despite this.

Despite my goal being 8.5 hours in-bed time, was not able to achieve it too consistently, which is OK.
I’d like to keep allotting 8.5 hours and importantly, post-call days to sleep at least some amount of time in the morning.

Plan to re-evaluate in about another 2 months, around mid February.

6/14/2023
Changes over the last 6 months

Asterisks // Context:
-About 3 weeks where I did not record in-bed hours, which cumulatively probably would lower my overall average.

-Main life events (or lack thereof) — moved to new apartment, had about 1.5 vacations (3 weeks), no regular dating or relationship, took x 2 exams, read this book Atomic Habits and have been trying to apply.
Also coincided with New Years so had resolutions related to lucid dreaming and working out.

Takeaways:
-Overall sleep decreased slightly by the numbers, but likely more than expected given uncounted weeks. However, overall satisfaction were relatively unchanged, and even slightly positive.
Subjectively noticed poor mood and slow productivity on heels of a weaker in-bed time.
I think optimal in-bed time is likely 8.5 hours with a goal sleep time of 8 hours.

-Gains in values were relatively modest, with most increases in genuineness and growth. Both under 1.0.

-Ketamine was about 1 month ago, and noticeably higher scores across the board across all values. Felt noticeably more buoyant the week following, but unclear if increases since then are true or just anchoring off the previous week.

-The areas of my life that I think are going “well:”
-Lucid dreaming is one of the main New Years goals that I’ve kept pace with.
-Feel like I’ve been looking healthier/ stronger upper body-wise despite some nagging knee and R forearm injuries.
-Made a list of life bucket / goals that I’ve been trying to keep a side eye and keep pursuing.

Going forward:
-Goal in-bed time 8h30m, adjusted for call, probably 8h-ish.
-I think more broadly, want to build identity as someone who sleeps/dreams and is observant.
Re-evaluate during next vacation (I think in about 2 months)

12/24/23


So looking at the past 6 months (basically June 2023 to now):
-had brief fling with girl
-saw ex-girlfriend, decided again it would not work, then back together again
-tried IM ketamine and light IV ketamine and became sick for a week afterwards (unrelated)
-started 2nd year of training
-had a 2 week vacation in which I didn’t go anywhere

I suppose this page has become less of a pure sleep and values tracker and more of a general life update and goals page.

For reasons not particularly clear, basically across the board my values scores have increased. Possible reasons:
-genuinely more satisfied with life/ things are more fulfilling
I don’t feel as if I’m happier, but I could easily be misremembering and underestimating how dissatisfied I was in 2022
-I’m making ratings while seeing previous weeks numbers and anchoring higher

I think my general attitude has been better about things and perhaps I am more optimistic, which is why the numbers are better.
However, I don’t have any real changes in how I spend my time or the activities I do, which I think would be the main part that would really make a positive difference.

Sleep has been lower, I think likely a combination of a full year of call perhaps, plus the extra calls from the June-Sept stretch.

4,000 Weeks and Atomic Habits were both really helpful books in my opinion and I think they impacted the way I see things and do things quite a bit.

Going forward:
-TBD sleep goals. I think my current amount of ~7.2h per night is a little low but not drastically low. I think it’ll be healthy to shoot around going to bed at around 9pm and then extending my alarm clock to closer to 5:35am or 5:25am depending on which site and rotation I’m on.
-Want to have things that genuinely increase my value scores beyond me just being more optimistic about things.