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I’ve been tracking my sleep for years. Not just duration—architecture. Deep sleep percentages, REM latency, heart rate variability during N3. The usual. And for a while, it worked. I felt sharper. Recovered faster. The numbers improved.
Then, last winter, I hit a wall. Not fatigue—something subtler. A kind of emotional flatness. Not depression, exactly. More like the colors had been turned down. I could still function, still perform, but the edges of things felt dull. Conversations lacked friction. Music sounded like it was playing through a thin membrane.
I dug into the data. My deep sleep was up. REM was stable. Sleep efficiency hovered around 92%. All the metrics that were supposed to matter were where they should be. So why did I feel like I was operating at half-volume?
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The answer, when I found it, wasn’t in the sleep stages. It was in the transitions between them. Specifically, the micro-arousals—the brief, subconscious wake-ups that most trackers ignore. Most people have 5–15 per night. I was averaging 30. Not enough to disrupt sleep, but enough to fragment the experience of rest.
Here’s the thing: those micro-arousals aren’t just noise. They’re part of how the brain regulates emotional processing. A 2019 paper in Sleep Medicine Reviews (though I hate citing years) found that people with higher micro-arousal rates during REM reported lower emotional reactivity the next day. Not because they were well-rested, but because their brains had been practicing disengagement. A kind of overnight emotional habituation.
I’d optimized my sleep into a state of mild dissociation.
The fix wasn’t more sleep. It was less control. I stopped tracking for a month. No alarms, no apps, no interventions. Just letting the system drift. The micro-arousals dropped. The colors came back. But my deep sleep percentage fell by 8%.
This is the tradeoff no one talks about: the more you optimize a biological system, the more you risk optimizing away the things that make it feel alive. Sleep isn’t just about recovery. It’s about responsiveness—to stress, to joy, to the unexpected. When you smooth out the rough edges, you might also smooth out the texture of experience.
I don’t know where the balance is. Maybe it’s different for everyone. Maybe it shifts with age, with stress, with what you’re trying to preserve. But I’ve stopped assuming that "better" sleep metrics mean better sleep.
Some nights now, I wake up at 3 a.m. and lie there for 20 minutes, listening to the house settle. It’s not efficient. But it feels like being awake.