Breakup, as captured by my fitbit (opens in new tab)

The biggest change in my life from getting a ChargeHR was realizing that, after 5 years of having a child (and then children) in my daily life, I was wayyyy more sleep-deprived than I realized. The newborn phase was obvious -- you're having to get up every couple hours and getting back to having a "full" night's sleep feels really awesome. But it turns out I _never_ got back to a full night's sleep, because having kids means I wake up earlier than I used to and the result is that I was constantly getting about 30 minutes less sleep than I really needed. I made a change to when I go to bed, and after 4 or 5 days of really getting a lot of sleep it was like going from a foggy day to sunshine in my mind.

(full disclosure: I now work for Fitbit!)

32 years old, only recently made the connection between poor moods and mental acuity and a series of nights with less than 8 hours sleep. :/

Do you have the latest CPAP machine? The latest generation is a dramatic improvement over the older generations, especially with the exhale relief, this yields less discomfort and more compliance. I can't recommend it enough.

I don't know if this helps, but most people have to try a few different CPAP masks before they find one that's really comfortable for them. This is pretty much the normal usage pattern, and most insurance that covers CPAP at all also cover multiple masks, so I don't know why doctors don't push it more.

For the record, there should not be any air hissing out around the edges of your mask. If there is, you either need to get a different mask or at least adjust the straps on your current one. My experience is that full-face masks absolutely don't work with a beard; a nasal pillow mask works much better, but I do need to keep my mustache trimmed short or it chafes a bit.

Also, I don't know much about the allergy angle, but you're theoretically supposed to change the air filter regularly; there might be filter options designed for allergy sufferers.

That's crazy. My restlessness graphs don't look much different than yours -- is the sleep apnea what's waking you up after 5-6 hours?

There is research that shows that at least with outcomes measured by BP, CPAP and mandibular devices are almost as good: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2473494

Based on parallel experiences, having a puppy is like having a kid, except that the puppy is on dog-years time. They first sleep through the night after a month instead of 7, they start to talk back and push limit at 3 months instead of 2 years, ... and whatever else comes after that, since my dog is only 4.5 months old!

It probably diverges at some point. I don't think I have to worry about college applications when my dog is 2.5 years old, but who knows?

Dies the Fitbit track stress levels as a metric, or is it just heart rate?

My wife and I traded off nighttime / early morning duties, and those were nights where I was so zonked she took both. They were glorious.

If you're ever thinking about a dog, this period actually only lasts about a month. After that, the dog starts sleeping through the night, so I now have this pattern that's almost perfectly correlated with when I go to bed. The dog means I always wake up between 7 and 8 AM.

Mine has never registered a stair climb, despite my office being on the third story of the building, and I typically park on the 4th or 5th floor of the garage.

Its sleep stats are also laughable. It's shown me as sleeping right through the time I was showering and cooking breakfast.

I think my best was 125 stories, over a mountain pass.

A few hours' ride is good for 10K steps. I don't know if it depends on the type of engine or motorcycle brand. I'd love to experiment :-)

Right and when they are stuck in traffic on the way to the restaurant while you are waiting, the "break up" probability goes through the roof.

> Communication between the couple plummets, and is usually one sided, heavily weighted towards the side doing the breakup.

I agree with the first part, but am not so sure about the second. If the breaker-upper doesn't want to break up, then I can believe that he or she will communicate more; but, if the breaker-upper does want to break up, then I can believe that he or she might withdraw and communicate less. (I'm not sure which of these you meant by "heavily weighted towards the side doing the breakup".) Certainly, I have seen both kinds of behaviour in my two failed relationships.

EDIT: As overcast (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933670) points out, it's strange to speak of the breaker-upper as not wanting to break up. The distinction I'm trying to draw is still a bit slippery, but I guess I mean to distinguish between wanting to break up (where your partner probably couldn't do anything to convince you to stay) and feeling that you have to break up (where your partner might be able to change to convince you to stay). Jtsummers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933737) puts it better.

It absolutely could. This past weekend I was really worried about getting broken up with. My gf had been withdrawn and was communicating less and acting awkward in various noticeable ways that I interpreted from experience as an impending breakup, especially since she was just about to leave for a week to go to Brazil for a week with 3 single girlfriends who want to party.

I was pretty sure that I was toast when she asked if I wanted to get dinner on Sunday and talk for a little while.

If you had looked at my readings that day, I would have looked like a breaker-upper, I'm sure.

Turns out that she was stressed about work and travel and after we talked about it a little, everything was fine. But damn. I really thought that was over for the better part of three days.

Except it wouldn't work. If Fitbit is collecting my data, and I'm not intending a breakup, then my heart rate now is independent of what my partner will be doing or saying in five minutes when they break up with me. It'd only really be useful if it collected your partner's data and fed it to you.

However, you'll see similar spikes from your partner before any major relationship event. They want you to meet their family. They need to tell you they can't stand your mother and her overbearing nature. They want to move in together or propose. All these would likely look the same (modulo degree) to Fitbit.

But perhaps you were wearing it while murdering your neighbour. By itself it should be circumstantial evidence at best, but it could possibly help pointing the police in the right direction.

> It'd almost certainly require consent or a warrant to get the data (in the US).

The problem is that, as many court rulings have affirmed, in the US it's not "your" data anymore when it gets to the company's servers.

At that point, most companies will hand over everything to a politely-worded request, with only a few actually holding out to the point of a warrant.

> You have no baseline questions and timeline.

I don't think that this will happen, but one can imagine solving this problem by subpoenaing your past FitBit data and social-media record, and correlating the two (by time stamp, which, if maybe not now, then I am sure eventually will be sufficiently fine grained to allow this). I'd imagine that it would be far more accurate than whatever calibration they do now.

If I recall correctly also if you can believe that you can beat the polygraph then it won't work on you.

Newer machines detect clenching and the practitioner will tell you to stop.

Looks neat - will have to see how it compares against https://gyrosco.pe/

I don't think I could ever experience just relief breaking up. It's never that black and white of "I don't want to be around them at all"; you invariably miss the person you were spending all your time with.

Yeah that slower rate for a bit before spiking back up, to me, indicates the reflective questioning of "Why?" that would likely come about after just a shade of downtime.

You'd be surprised how stressful it is to break up with someone.

You don't want to lose a friend but it is in your best interests to do it.

Um, did you see the guy's photo? I'm going to guess no one breaks up with that guy unless he does the old trick of acting like a jerk until the other person wants out.

That sucks, dude. Be well.

He'd have to be pretty cold to post this if the breakup was his decision and not at all mutual. His partner, or those in their mutual social circles, would likely see this. I'm not sure I like the idea of assuming the worst in someone like that.