Bobbing for Sleep

At the recent Quantified Self Conference, my friend Seth Roberts talked about his on-going attempts to improve the quality of his sleep. Recently he's had great success improving his sleep by standing on one leg — more specifically, standing on one leg with the knee slightly bent, bobbing up and down slowly until the leg is exhausted, and then doing the same on the other leg. He does this three times a day. (See his blog post to learn the history of this technique and his results.)

I've decided to give this a try. I've had some trouble sleeping well, and this seems like it should be easy to try. If it improves my sleep, wonderful! If not, no harm done.

Using Tonic for this Experiment
I can use Tonic to help me with this experiment: to remind myself do the exercise, to keep track of my exercising, and to track the quality of my sleep. This is easy to set-up in Tonic.

Bobbing Exercise — These screens show how I've set up the tonic for "1-Leg Bobs" and one of my entries. I've used the Notes section to remind myself that I'm to do the exercise "to exhaustion" and not for a pre-determined length of time.

Sleep — These screens show how I've set up the tonic for "Sleep" and one of my entries. I've used the Note section to describe the scale I'm using to rate the quality of my sleep.

And here's what my daily schedule looks like. Seth says to have at least 4 hours between the exercise sessions, so I've set up reminders appropriately. I may do actually do the exercises earlier or later, but the reminders will help when I get too busy and might forget.