Everyday I wake up and check my FitBit. What kind of sleep did I get? What’s my sleep score and how many hours and minutes did the Bit think I was asleep?

Everyday there is an advertisement (of course) to try the “premium” version that promises more insights. These are troubled times, reports the app, so they are graciously offering a 90 day free trial. Maybe it was 60 or 30. I don’t remember. I typically dismiss that shit cuz I’m not interested in paying for “insights”. But yesterday I took the bait.

Friends, if I could only remind myself to cancel the subscription before the free trial runs out, it will be a miracle indeed. So what does one get for 9.99 a month? In short, a breakdown of the sleep score calculation. It’s based on movement, heart rate, and what I can only guess is some science stuff that shows how much REM sleep I’m getting.

More specifically, the three categories are: Time asleep, deep and REM, and restoration. Last night my score was 82 (which is good).

50% of the score is based on time asleep. I scored 43 out of 50. I wonder how many hours you have to sleep to get all 50 points? (I was 2 minutes shy of 7 full hours).

25% of the score comes from how much deep and REM sleep you get. Last night I scored 19 out of 25 and had 1 hour and 11 minutes in these stages of sleep. Deep and REM are different stages and they must add them up.

The last 25% is restoration which sounds nebulous but it’s actually the most interesting to me. You wear the FitBit all the time so it’s always collecting your heart rate. Walking, workouts, couch time, sexy time, and during sleep. It uses this to calculate your resting heart rate. This is a good indicator of heart health by the way.

When you sleep, your heart rate is also being measured and the calculation for restlessness is based on the percentage of time asleep when your heart rate was above and below that resting heart rate.

My resting heart rate used last night was 62 bpm (beats per minute). I spent 79% of my sleep time below that threshold and the other 21% above. Somehow that equates to 9% restless and a score of 20 out of 25. I’m not quite sure what the math is behind that but it’s cool right?!

It IS cool. But is it 10 bucks a month cool? I don’t think so. I mean, unless I can actually have some insight on how to improve my score (besides sleep aid drugs), it’s just numbers. Still, worth getting the free trial to learn these little details. Thanks FitBit!

Now to the second half of this blog post which answers the question… Why so restless?

The answer is dreams man.

The dreams I had were not nightmares. Just slightly disturbing. I can recall three distinct scenarios.

Dream One: Princess KK took over my job leading the team and I did some unsavory things that I felt guilty about. Not sure if I tried to sabotage her efforts in some way as that was not revealed in the dream. All I know is that I felt bad about what I had done and tried to confess to her.

This one is so spot on with my current work sitch. Not the sabotage part but KK has taken her place leading the team and I feel a bit minimized and unimportant. Perhaps I was dreaming of ways to usurp her authority and that’s what made me feel guilty. I’m only human right?!

Dream number two: My ex friend Erika’s husband was in some room with me and I was trying to explain to him how his dog (they always have big dogs) was also owned by my friend Kevin. Kevin named the dog Husker and the dog had become racist. I was apologizing for that too, as if it was my fault the dog had undergone these changes. Why in the world would I feel guilty about that and need to apologize??!! Stupid dream!

Dream number three was pretty basic. A girl from my past, let’s call her “the wild card”, cuz she was bat-shit crazy contacted me out of the blue. Maybe it was a message that popped up on my phone. She was like “hey, what’s up?” And I was immediately in a fix. Do I respond? What could she want? Why now after all these years? Didn’t she put me through enough? Why was she still in my contacts? My curiosity wanted to respond but I was afraid that would lead to a rekindling of our friendship and that’s a big fucking Pandora’s box. That’s all I remember.

That one makes sense too because I have an app on my phone called “GroupMe” that some of the MFAers in my class use to message each other. The only other thread I have in that app is one with the Wild Card. I was super surprised to find that when I downloaded the app and logged in last December during Residency that my history had been retained. My last message from said girl was April 1, 2011. The group thread was called “People Who Like Dancing”.

Yeah, we had some good times but I’m the end, I could not handle the responsibility of her. Gawd, that sounds terrible. I swear I’m not a bad person. Despite my dreams trying to convince you otherwise. Ha!

Yesterday I was looking closer at this thread and showing my daughter Z and asking her if she remembered the girl and her son (who was my kids’ age). Z was only 9 at the time and remembered enough to agree with my decision to cut ties. She said “yeah mom, good call.”

But those dreams!!! No wonder I was restless. Still, a sleep score of 82 is not bad. Whatever. 🤷‍♀️

It’s Friday and I’m teetering on the edge of the number of hours I’m supposed to work this week so imma use that as an excuse to get out of a late afternoon torture session thats all about estimating story points. It’s a dev thing. I’m not a developer so I don’t have much to contribute anyway. Though I could dial in and try and sabotage Princess KK. If my dream came true, I could call myself clairvoyant.

Ok. That’s enough nonsense for one day. If you got this far, I commend you and your attention span!

Happy Friday Ya’ll
~Miss SugarCookie