It’s a Numbers Game

Kate Hook - 23 Mar 18

I’ve always been a measurer. I’ve gone through life selecting hobbies that were supposed to start off as fun, but which have ultimately ended up with me measuring success against progress. And the quickest way to suck all the joy out of any hobby is to start attributing numbers to it.

I may have been eating fresh, healthy and adventurous new meals inspired by my slimming club… but there’s a number on the scales that’ll tell me if I’ve succeeded or failed each week. Improved my life expectancy by doing a Saturday morning parkrun? I’ll be given a time later that day that will tell me how fast I was. Whilst parkrun is a run and not a race, it won’t stop me poring over the time, wondering if I could’ve gone a bit quicker, and vowing to improve upon it next week. Fun is dead – long live the statistic.

So it was hardly surprising that with a new baby arriving on the scene, I would naturally start to measure a whole host of new things surrounding this monumental life change. Alongside the technology I’d installed to track how many feeds he’d had, or how many wet and dirty nappies I’d changed (yes there are actual apps for these things!) the key statistic I became fixated on was the amount of sleep – or lack thereof – that I was getting.

My trusty Fitbit, ever helpful with its sleep tracking feature, would assist me in this task, monitoring how much shut-eye I was actually getting and then presenting me with my results in the morning. If I’d miraculously managed 7 hours (For clarity – this is 7 hours cobbled together in bits and pieces over the night) then I’d be praised with a little green star on my home page…. Congratulations! You met your goal! It would say. And I’d be chuffed to have smashed a stat, hit a target.

If Jude had one of those nights where he woke up and cried every hour because he didn’t quite understand the world yet, then I might’ve scraped 4-ish hours. You didn’t meet your sleep goal blinked a little sad-faced emoji.

But don’t worry…to conquer the lows of being sleep-shamed by my own electronic device, I’d have the option to click on a link where I could peruse some “helpful” hints and tips to achieve a better quality sleep.

Apparently I should be going to bed at the same time each night, misting my pillow with lavender, ensuring all distractions are eliminated (might struggle with that one seeing as babies are for life, not just for Christmas) and be mindful of my caffeine and alcohol intake. This last one made me laugh the loudest.

Ultimately, I knew precisely why I hadn’t slept well and who was responsible. I would bury my nose into the neck of the beautiful little sleep-thief curled up next to me and inhale deeply, stealing all of his new-baby-just-woken-up smell. A smell that only a mummy could love; the scent of fabric softener from his tiny pyjamas, mixed with the slightly acidic aroma of night time reflux. And despite the fact that my eyes felt grittier than a Lynda La Plant drama – all was immediately forgiven, no matter how many sad faced emojis I’d accrued.

Not that this stopped me obsessing over the amount of sleep I was getting, mind. When I upgraded my Fitbit I got one that could give me even more stats to fuel my obsession. Oh yes, this gadget could even tell me what type of sleep I was getting! 3 hours light sleep, 1hr REM sleep, and only 12 minutes deep sleep! What?! Isn’t deep sleep is the one that restores all your brain cells? 12 minutes? Jesus, how am I not medically dead? Maybe I’m on the brink of death – or a breakdown. Maybe that’s why I found the TV remote in the freezer last week, or why I couldn’t remember my own date of birth when I had to fill in the electoral register form.

So, with this wealth of data available to me at the touch of a button, I approached “Project Sleep” with gusto, delighted that I now had all these slick stats at my disposal.

Lovely Patient Husband (LPH) has been in the spare room for a good few months now. He’s not been banished or anything. It’s a mutual decision that we’ve arrived at because this arrangement allows him to get a full night’s slumber so that he can come home after work and take over kiddo-duty. Some nights I have literally thrust our son into his startled arms as he’s walked through the door, and stomped upstairs for a bath or a snooze, before he’s even had a chance to put down his laptop bag.

A good night’s kip also allows LPH to function in his job while he’s there. Oh, and to drive to his place of work without falling asleep at the wheel and colliding with a lorry  – something else that my mind likes to play out at about 3am. Another top tip to help with restful slumber (strangely, not featured on the Fitbit’s Sleep Insights) is to not continually re-enact the tragic death of your partner at ridiculous hours of the night. Who knew?

So back to being knackered and very, very ratty. So ratty in fact, that you could stick some whiskers on me and relocate me to a sewer. One night at 9pm I yawned out some words that sounded vaguely like “God I’m knackered!”

“You must be. I know how you feel, me too” proclaimed LPH. Bless him. He thought he was showing empathy. Maybe even a bit of solidarity in a right there with ya buddy kind of way. Oh, what a mistake.

Because f**k right off! Nobody was going to steal the exhaustion crown from me! It was mine and I’d bloody well earnt it with every unsociably timed breast feed, every time I woke to a cough or snuffle in the night, every time I got up for a wee and couldn’t drop back off to sleep until I’d heard him breathe for a bit. This title was mine, and I wasn’t up for sharing…

“You f****ng what?!!” I scoffed. “You don’t know what exhausted even is! Look at this…. Go on…look at it. LOOK AT IT!!” I yelled as I thrust my phone, with its affirming Fitbit sleep stats in his face like a demented banshee. “18 minutes of deep sleep! 18 bastard minutes!”

As LPH stared at me with a look that I can only describe as imminent fear for his wellbeing, it dawned on me that perhaps tracking my sleep when I had a new baby could actually be doing more harm than good. After all, if you’re tracking your weight, or waist measurements, or run times then in theory there’s an element of control there. You can usually exert some influence to make the numbers swing in the direction that you want. With a baby, it’s all totally on their terms – do I realistically have any control over how well a newborn sleeps? Probably not – I’d be a multi millionaire if I did! So why am I punishing myself by bothering to measure it?

Sometimes I feel like I’ve had a decent night’s sleep. I feel refreshed, alert and ready for the day. Then I check my stats – CRASH – back down I come. Only 5 hours. Well that’s it then –  I can’t possibly feel this good on 5 hours, it must be a false positive. Activate ratbag mode.

I sometimes wonder whether ignorance is, in fact, bliss. Are we better off being in the dark about certain things?

Recently two of my good friends have been totally on point with their diets and exercise routines, to the extent where their before and after pictures would be totally Insta-worthy, if they were the type of people who’d spend time Insta-bragging about it instead of just getting on with it, obviously. Their body shapes have transformed beyond recognition and they’ve needed to buy teenier tinier clothes. So they’re ecstatic right? Well yes, they were….until they made the fatal mistake of playing the numbers game.

“I felt thinner today” sobbed one friend. “My clothes felt looser, I wasn’t bloated, so I was convinced that I must’ve lost at least a few lbs. Stepped on the scales – EXACTLY THE SAME!” she lamented.

“That’s nothing” exclaimed my other friend. “I haven’t weighed myself in nearly two years, but I had to be weighed at Boots today and I’m not much different from when I started my fitness journey two years ago! It’s actually soul destroying. What’s the point?!”

You’ll kindly note that both of these ladies have dropped several dress sizes, have seen their times to run a 5k plummet week on week, they’re smashing it on the fitness front, and have built so much muscle that I’m surprised they’ve not had to get planning permission…yet despite this, the scales hover judgementally in the background like some kind of pagan god, needing to be appeased and obeyed with human sacrifice.

So why are we always looking to piss on our own party? Why can’t we just enjoy things for what they are, without trying to obsessively measure things?

Once upon a time, a retrospective measure of something really killed the joy for me, when it turned out that the marathon I’d done in 2015 had actually been measured incorrectly and as a result, no longer stood! Oh yes, for three years, from 2013 to 2015 the Manchester Marathon route had unwittingly been 380 metres short, meaning that over 24,000 people (me included) hadn’t technically done a marathon! Do a marathon – nobody can ever take that glory away from you, they said. Ahem….

Now rationally, I walked (ok, hobbled) WAY more than 380 metres back to the car park after the race, and had also walked a significant distance to actually get to the start line. So did I cover 26.2 miles on foot that day? Yes I did. Did I well up with tears when I saw that my mum and sister had made a good luck sign near the halfway point, which spurred me on to keep running? Yes I did. Did I feel amazingly proud of myself when I crossed the finish line, despite all my blisters and chafing? Yes I did. But did I run a marathon? No, I did not. And in the blink of a measurement, my achievement disappeared quicker than the Mars Bar in my post-race goodie bag.

I guess the moral of this tale is that measurements are great for some situations (like, erm, mapping out a marathon route!) but completely pointless in others. If it’s not within your sphere of influence, or if it will inevitably lead to you feeling worse if the numbers don’t swing in your favour, then step away from the stats – your self esteem and your sanity will thank you for it!

Kate Hook

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