What a Month of Sleep Tracking Actually Taught Me

I strapped on a tracker expecting graphs of triumph; what I got was a month of gentle accusations. The data did not make me sleep more - it made me notice what I traded sleep for.

The clearest pattern was embarrassingly simple: evenings with a glowing laptop cost roughly an hour of deep sleep, while evenings with a book paid it back. Weekends did not 'catch up' - they just shifted the debt.

I keep the tracker, but its real feature turned out to be the boring bedtime reminder. The strategy that worked was not optimisation; it was going to bed on time like a sensible adult.