Overview

Introduction

As part of my graduate school journey, I realize self-care is an important aspect in my overall health with compounding variables that negativey affect my overall mood. As part of my project and experiment, I wanted to understand how sleeping patterns and recreational reading could affect my overall mood. As part of my project, I devised an experiment to see how sleeping earlier and reading before bed can affect my overall mood.

Hypothesis

Being in bed before 10:30pm and reading 30 minutes before bed will improve my overall mood and lower my overall phone screentime usage.

Methods

To create my baseline data, I recorded my daily mood, total minutes slept per night, and phone screentime usage per day for the first 14 days. After recording my baseline data for 14 days, I introduced my intervention by sleeping before 10:30pm and reading at least 30 minutes before bed.

Data

To record data for my experiment, I used three datasets:

• Active Data
  • I used the Daylio app to manually record my daily mood for each observation.
• Administrative Data
  • I used IOs Screentime to track how much time I use my phone daily. The data is recorded as minutes per day for each observation.
• Passive Data
  • I used a sleeptime app on my phone to track how many minutes I sleep per night. the data is recorded as minutes per night for each observation.

Datasets can be found here

Design Considerations

I use my phone frequently before I slept and I am curious to see if there is a drastic impact on my sleeping habits due to this usage.

Dashboard Visualizations

Reflections

Experiment Overall, my experiment intervention showed a reduction of average phone usage. My overall mood also improved slightly. While there may be some subjectivity in how I recorded my daily mood, I felt more positive during the intervention period. On days I did not get as much rest, I felt more irritable which negatively affected my mood. I see my overall phone usage also lowered. While my data does not reflect when I used my phone, I suspsect a large potion of time spent on the iphone is before I go to bed. Although graduate students are pressed for time, the net gains from receiving adequate sleep outweigh staying up to do other things.

Since my intervention is bundled through 2 variables, it may be difficult to isolate what improved my overall mood. In the future, I would use one variable instead to isolate the intervention effect and run a longer experiment to get more consistent results. I would also use more indepth data to see more specific trends.

Class Closing Thoughts This is my first coding class and I learned quite a bit. Learning about different data source and using tools to find some statistical pattern is quite powerful With a bit more practice, I hope to create some models with engaging narratives and visualizations. Overall, I appreciate

I wish this class delved more into statistical toolsets, building custom functions, and cleaning/manipulating datasets.