Things That Put Me to Sleep (According to my Fitbit)

One of my daughters (and her new fiancé!) got me this for Christmas this past year.

If you’re not familiar with the gadget, it’s a Fitbit. It tracks the number of steps I take in a day (10,288 two days ago, but only 6,635 yesterday because I got lazy and opted out of walking Giant Dog 😉 ), how many calories I burn, how many active minutes I’ve had in a day, and so on. I never thought I’d like something like this, but I’ve honestly grown to love it. It’s making me more aware of how much time I spend in a chair as vs. doing something (such as moving).

It’s ironic, then–and somewhat hilarious, that the more I do, the more convinced my Fitbit becomes that I’m sleeping my life away. According to it, I snoozed an astounding 15 hours and 4 minutes the other day!

(And here I’d been thinking insomnia was an issue. 😛 )

So what’s the deal? Is my Fitbit faulty? Am I a closet narcoleptic? Turns out it’s neither. You see, one of the features of my particular model is a “manual sleep mode,” which lets you tell it when you’re going to go to sleep. (Given that it automatically tracks sleep as well, I’m not sure why the designers felt it necessary to include the manual mode, but there you have it.)

And how do you put it into manual sleep mode? By tapping on it several times in rapid succession. Simple…and simply duplicated by a variety of everyday, mundane tasks. Here are the activities I’ve discovered so far that put me to sleep:

1. mincing garlic and/or herbs
2. pushing a shopping cart across a tile floor
3. using power tools (drill, reciprocating saw)
4. applauding at a concert.

You can take yourself out of manual mode by tapping in the same way, which is what I did for the first few weeks, but I’ve given up on that because half the time, I don’t even notice when I’ve gone to sleep anymore. I just slip in and out of naps over the course of the day, secure in the knowledge that I’m getting way more rest than I thought I was (or even thought possible 😛 ). Insomnia? What insomnia? According to my Fitbit, my problem is keeping my eyes open at all!