Latest / Ryan's Journal / Sleep Data, Oxygen Debt, and the Hidden Work of Recovery

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Sleep Data, Oxygen Debt, and the Hidden Work of Recovery · Ryan's Journal

• 0:07
  like, you, you look at the chart on the screen, right, and it,
• 0:10
  it literally looks like, um, like icicles hanging off the edge of a roof.
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  Just these sharp, crazy blue spikes dropping down into nowhere.
• 0:19
  icicles from the rooftop.
• 0:20
  Yeah!
• 0:21
  Exactly!
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  The, uh, the clinical phrase for it is literally the occurrence of multiple
• 0:26
  clustered episodes of deep oxygen desaturation, also called sawtooth pattern or
• 0:33
  icicles from the rooftop pattern.
• 0:35
  Like, your blood oxygen level, your SpO2, just, just plummets down to like 82
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  percent over and over again during REM sleep while you think you are just,
• 0:44
  you know, peacefully sleeping.
• 0:46
  It is, uh, it is honestly terrifying when you first see it on paper.
• 0:50
  Because clinicians, when they evaluate overnight pulse oximetry,
• 0:54
  they track this specific metric called T 90.
• 0:57
  Which, um, T 90 is literally just the percentage or total time spent under 90
• 1:04
  percent blood oxygen saturation throughout the night.
• 1:08
  And, and like, when I first started tracking my own recovery data,
• 1:11
  comparing my wearable multi tracker against an actual medical grade pulse oximeter,
• 1:18
  my, my T 90 was sitting at like 40 minutes.
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  Forty agonizing minutes every single night where my blood oxygen was dipping below
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  safe biological thresholds, and I had no idea.
• 1:30
  Wait, wait, 40 minutes?
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  Forty minutes under ninety percent?
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  Forty minutes, Justin.
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  Every single night.
• 1:35
  That is, uh, that is wild!
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  That is like, okay, you know back in 1875 when Edward Whymper was climbing
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  Chimborazo?
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  Up at like 19,000 feet in the Andes?
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  He wrote down these intense journals about acute mountain sickness,
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  describing how his head was throbbing, his limbs felt like lead,
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  and his cells were literally starving for air because of the extreme altitude.
• 1:57
  But, like, you were not climbing a giant mountain in Ecuador!
• 2:01
  You were just lying in your bed under a cozy duvet in fluffy socks doing that exact
• 2:06
  same damage to your body!
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  I, I really was.
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  It produces the exact same physiological nightmare.
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  Cellular hypoxia, massive surges of adrenaline and cortisol as your brain panics and
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  kicks your heart into overdrive just to wake you up enough to clear your airway.
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  Your body is basically running a forced marathon at extreme altitude without
• 2:28
  supplemental oxygen, except you are completely unconscious.
• 2:32
  But then, after I worked with my sleep doctor, adjusted my sleep position,
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  optimized my recovery routine, and dialed in positive airway pressure,
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  I watched that T 90 metric drop from 40 minutes down to, um,
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  down to zero.
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  Zero minutes under 90 percent oxygen saturation.
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  Zero!
• 2:52
  Man, that is huge!
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  See, that is what gets me.
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  Like, society loves to hype up people climbing Mount Everest or getting a platinum
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  record on the radio or whatever, but, like, keeping your body at 98 percent oxygen
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  saturation through eight continuous hours of uninterrupted sleep?
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  That is a quiet, heroic feat right there.
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  That is real survival.
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  It really is.
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  It changes how you wake up in the morning.
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  When your brain actually gets oxygen all night, the morning grogginess just
• 3:20
  evaporates.
• 3:21
  It really makes you rethink how we measure like, success or whatever,
• 3:25
  you know?
• 3:25
  Like, everybody is so obsessed with hustle culture and billable hours.
• 3:29
  Right, exactly.
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  Institutional standards and corporate culture measure human worth almost entirely by
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  visible output, like how many hours you sat at a desk or how many emails you
• 3:40
  answered.
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  But when you look at medicine, at the clinical standards, they look at things like
• 3:46
  the Apnea Hypopnea Index, or AHI.
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  In sleep diagnostics, having an AHI over 30 events per hour is classified as severe
• 3:56
  sleep apnea, where your body is constantly waking up to breathe.
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  Under five events per hour is considered normal, healthy biological baseline.
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  Moving someone from severe apnea down below five, getting a single peaceful nine
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  hour night of deep oxygenation, that is a massive neurological milestone.
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  Yeah, because, like, think about how crazy it is that we can even measure that right
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  now in our bedrooms!
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  Like, before 1974, nobody could track this stuff without like,
• 4:24
  cutting you open or sticking big needles in your arteries, right?
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  Mm, arterial blood gas draws.
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  Super painful and totally impractical for monitoring sleep at home.
• 4:34
  Right!
• 4:35
  And then this Japanese bioengineer, Takuo Aoyagi, invents pulse oximetry in 1974 by
• 4:42
  using red and near infrared light absorption through the tissue!
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  Like, red light shining through your fingertip to read the color of your blood
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  pigment because oxygenated blood absorbs light differently than deoxygenated blood.
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  That one simple piece of tech completely transformed medicine.
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  It took this invisible, silent suffering happening in the dark and made it visible
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  science.
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  It gave us a lens into our own inner biology.
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  And when you bring that tech into modern wearable biometrics,
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  it turns each of us into self experimenters.
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  Tracking your red light saturation curves, optimizing your sleep environment,
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  using red light therapy before bed to prime mitochondrial function,
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  all of that allows you to take control of your health.
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  Reclaiming a full REM cycle or recovering from years of built up sleep debt is not
• 5:32
  some frivolous biohacking vanity project.
• 5:35
  It is profound self advocacy.
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  It is taking responsibility for your cellular health.
• 5:40
  Man, absolutely!
• 5:42
  Like, recovering your sleep and reclaiming your oxygen at two in the morning is just
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  as historically monumental as breaking a world record in sports.
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  It is like a personal world record for your own heart and brain.
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  It really is.
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  A quiet, invisible victory that extends your life.
• 5:59
  Man, well said.
• 6:00
  Good talk today, Roxanne.
• 6:01
  Good talk, Justin.
• 6:02
  Talk soon.