Introduction
For this exercise, the behavior I wanted to change was to sleep early (by 10:30pm). I was only able to achieve this in two out of the three days I measured myself.
Day 1: 10:20pm
Day 2: 1:06am
Day 3: 12:14am
In order to dissect the causes for sleeping late, I created a connection circle and a fishbone diagram. The fishbone diagram helped me to enumerate and categorize all the potential causes for sleeping late, while the connection circle allowed me to draw causal links between different causes and see which causes might me the leading culprits.
What did I discover?
From the connection circle, one thing that stood out is that there are many arrows leading into anxiety, which leads in sleeping late. Many times, I may sleep late as a direct cause of pressing matters like needing to meet a homework deadline, but other times, these causes contribute to my sense of anxiety which prevents my mind from turning off at night because I find myself thinking about these things. Even though there are many lingering things in my life (e.g. job search, travel planning, etc), there is one thing that I can do to address how it impacts my sleep and that is to control my anxiety around things that are in the works.
What would I do differently next time?
In order to gather more granular data on the cause for sleeping late and what might be on my mind right when I’m going to sleep, I would like the measure the activities that I do close to when I go to sleep (e.g. whether I’m doing homework late at night, trip planing, etc) to see how those factors impact my sleep.
