What 2 Years of Sleep Tracking Taught Me About Mood and Energy

For two years, I rated my sleep, energy level, and subjective sense of happiness every day on a 10-point scale. It may not be the strangest thing in my spreadsheets, but it is definitely one of the most useful. In this article, I’m sharing those accumulated data as monthly averages.

Over that time, my sleep score rose from 6.8 to 7.7, while my energy level increased from 7.0 to 7.9. My sense of happiness became not only higher, but also noticeably more stable.

The main shift did not come from rare “perfect” days, but from a sharp reduction in bad ones. My conclusion is simple: good sleep stopped being a “tax” on normal life. It did not just add new happy moments—it stopped stealing ordinary good days from me.

What I Started Measuring, and Why

As is probably already clear from this website, I’m a big fan of measurement. It has always been more interesting to me not just to feel something, but to try to capture it, compare it, and watch it over time.

Even before I bought a Whoop, I had a simple idea: to start rating my condition every day in a way that was subjective, but systematic. Since the beginning of 2024, every morning at about the same time, around 9 a.m., I’ve entered three scores into a spreadsheet on a ten-point scale: how well rested I feel, what my energy level is, and, most interestingly, how happy I feel. Yes, this does mean I was putting my happiness into Google Sheets like a man with a perfectly normal relationship to data.

Over time, I added other metrics too, but those belong in a separate discussion.

At first, it looked like a simple experiment driven by curiosity. I wanted to understand whether these records could reveal anything beyond random fluctuations in mood and well-being. Nearly two years later, what I’ve accumulated is no longer just a habit of noting things down, but a long enough observation series for patterns to start coming through.

That is exactly the data I’m showing in this article. Below, I’m showing daily ratings converted into monthly averages.

Of course, this kind of system does not claim medical precision and does not replace objective metrics. But that was never its purpose. I did not need a perfect instrument. I needed a simple, repeatable way to observe myself. When you rate the same state every day, in the same format, and at roughly the same time, subjectivity stops being chaos and starts becoming a signal. Not an absolute one, but a useful one.

Why Average Values Do Not Show the Whole Picture

If you look only at average values, the changes do not seem all that dramatic. Sleep improved by a few tenths, energy did too, and happiness did not double either. On a chart, it all looks calm.

But in real life, shifts like that feel stronger than they look in a table. When you start having more days you rate as an 8 or a 9, that begins to change the overall background of life.

I never give a 10. I always feel there is still room to do better. But even without any 10s, an increase in the number of genuinely good days feels very noticeable.

That is one of the main features of this kind of tracking: the average may move only slightly, while the subjective experience of life shifts much more strongly.

How Poor Sleep and Alcohol Affected My Good and Bad Days

Sometimes one day explains a chart better than an entire month. I remember March 17, 2024, well. I met up with friends and decided to mix prosecco with a couple of cocktails. After that, I felt noticeably worse in terms of happiness for about four days in a row, and good sleep only returned roughly a week later.

It was after episodes like that that I began to see even small amounts of alcohol as a factor that could steal not just one evening from me, but several of the days that followed.

But alcohol was not the only thing that mattered. Even poor sleep on its own made me noticeably less happy. Over time, I kept seeing the same pattern more and more clearly: a bad night meant lower energy, worse mood, and a weaker sense of inner stability the next day.

In 2024, I had only 9 days when I felt genuinely happy. At the same time, I gave my happiness low scores 39 times. And almost every time, it happened for one of two reasons: either after a sleepless night or after alcohol.

In 2025, the number of genuinely happy days rose to 27. Of those, 10 fell in the first half of the year, when I had only just started tracking the link between alcohol, sleep, and well-being more carefully and had cut my alcohol frequency by about half, while 17 came in the second half of the year.

What looks even more important is the other side of the picture. In the first half of 2025, I had 20 “unhappy” days. In the second half, I had only 3. And that was exactly how it felt in practice: not just as a few successful days, but as a more even emotional baseline, more energy, and far fewer crashes in how I felt.

This is where, in my view, the main limitation of averages becomes obvious: they show the trend, but they do a poor job of conveying how the actual structure of life changes.

Why Poor Sleep and Alcohol Hit Energy and Happiness So Quickly

Poor sleep hit my energy and my sense of life so quickly not only because I had simply not slept enough. After a bad night, the whole day itself began to feel heavier. Things I would normally digest without much trouble suddenly irritated me more, tired me faster, and required more internal effort.

At the level of research, this is quite logical. Sleep deprivation and fragmented sleep are linked not just to fatigue, but also to weaker emotional regulation: higher negative affect, a lower positive baseline, and poorer tolerance for ordinary irritants. In other words, after a bad night, it is not only energy that drops, but the basic ability to experience the day as normal.

With alcohol, the story is even more deceptive. It does not always wreck the night in an obvious way. Sometimes it seems as if you slept more or less fine because you fell asleep quickly and without much suffering. But the problem is that alcohol worsens the actual structure of sleep: systematic reviews show that it shifts and shortens REM sleep, and the effect is visible even at relatively small doses and becomes stronger as the dose increases.

So from the outside, the night may look tolerable, while recovery is still worse. In real life, it feels simple: the next day there is less clarity, less stability, and less sense that you are okay.

That is why the connection to “happiness” does not feel forced to me. Research usually uses terms like positive mood, wellbeing, or life satisfaction rather than the word happiness, but the meaning is the same: when sleep is regularly disrupted, subjective quality of life declines too.

What Actually Changed: Not the Peak, but the Floor of Life

If I describe the main effect as honestly as possible, it was not that my life suddenly filled up with ideal days. What changed was not only the number of peaks, but the quality of the baseline.

I did not wake up one day as a new person whose life is always great. But gradually there were fewer days when poor sleep, alcohol, or the combination of the two left me feeling wrecked, irritable, or internally depleted for no obvious reason.

That was the most important shift. When only the peak improves, you occasionally get a very good day, but the rest of the time things stay more or less the same. When the floor rises, the structure of life itself changes: fewer crashes, fewer sharp setbacks, fewer days you simply have to wait out.

Based on my data, more stable sleep and a more careful relationship with alcohol did not make me constantly happy, energetic, and invulnerable. But they did something else: they reduced the frequency of bad states.

One extra ideal day is nice. But 30 days without an internal collapse already change everyday life itself.

That is probably why my main conclusion from these nearly two years sounds quite simple: sleep did not so much add “super days” as stop taking ordinary good days away from me.

What Seems to Have Actually Moved the Needle

If I look at these nearly two years honestly, the shift did not happen because of one single trick, but because certain factors that were regularly breaking the system began to decrease.

Three things had the biggest effect:

• less frequent alcohol
• a more stable sleep schedule
• less overload and internal noise

Over time, I started to see them as one bundle: alcohol, an irregular schedule, overload, and poor sleep rarely work separately. Usually, they amplify each other. And once I started removing them systematically, my daytime state began to change systematically too.

Questions and Answers

1. What matters more for well-being: sleep duration or sleep regularity?

Both matter, but in real life, regularity is often underestimated. You can sometimes get enough hours on paper, but with an irregular schedule still end up with weaker well-being and a less stable emotional baseline. A useful reference here is the review “Monitoring Daily Sleep, Mood, and Affect Using Digital Technologies and Wearables: A Systematic Review”. It shows that sleep parameters are consistently linked to daytime affect, and that sleep itself more often predicts the following day more strongly than the other way around.

2. Why does it sometimes feel like I slept fine after alcohol, but the next day still feels weak?

Because falling asleep quickly and recovering well are not the same thing. Alcohol may make it easier to fall asleep while at the same time worsening sleep architecture, especially REM sleep. The best reference here is “The effect of alcohol on subsequent sleep in healthy adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis”. It shows that alcohol delays REM onset and reduces REM duration, even when the night seems tolerable from the outside.

3. Is there any point in keeping subjective ratings like this if it is not a lab and not a medical device?

Yes, if you do it consistently. Subjective ratings do not replace diagnostics, but they can still be very useful for spotting recurring patterns. A good example is the study Day-to-Day Variation of Subjective Sleep Quality and Emotional States among Healthy University Students, which found that daily changes in subjective sleep quality were linked to next-day emotional states. That matters because it shows that even simple self-ratings can capture meaningful day-to-day changes, not just noise.

4. If I slept too little on weekdays, does catching up on sleep on the weekend help?

Partly, yes, but it is not an ideal substitute for a normal schedule. A strong recent reference here is “Association of weekend catch-up sleep with depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis” (2023). It showed that moderate weekend catch-up sleep in people with weekday sleep deficits is associated with a lower risk of depression, but excessive “catch-up sleep” does not provide the same protective effect.

5. What should I change first if I see too many “weak” days in my own life?

I would start not with anything exotic, but with three things: alcohol frequency, sleep regularity, and the overall level of evening overload. Scientifically, that looks quite logical: as shown in “Monitoring Daily Sleep, Mood, and Affect”, sleep is tightly linked to daytime affect, and the meta-analysis “The effect of alcohol on subsequent sleep” confirms that alcohol can worsen the actual structure of sleep even at small doses.

Conclusion

The main value of this experiment was not that I came to understand sleep better as a topic. It was something else: measurement sharply reduced the space for self-deception.

When you look at the same metrics for months or years in a row, it becomes harder to explain your crashes away as randomness. Patterns become visible. Triggers become visible. Consequences too.

And over time, an interesting loop formed here: the more carefully I looked at the data, the more clearly I understood what exactly needed to change. And the more I changed, the more clearly I could see it in the data. The spreadsheet stopped being just a way of recording my condition. It became part of the change itself.

That was probably the real point of the whole story: observing myself was not just describing my life, but gradually changing it. And sleep stopped being an abstract health topic and became a manageable variable in real life.

My Deep Dives On Sleep, Stress, and Performance

These articles look at sleep not as a soft wellness topic, but as a system that directly affects recovery, stress resilience, and performance under pressure.

• Sleep Rituals That Actually Help Before Bed Why better sleep starts before you get into bed — and why a good evening routine is less about comfort and more about shutting down light, stimulation, unfinished thoughts, and emotional carryover.
• Digital Cortisol: My Phone Cutoff For Better Sleep After 40 How evening overstimulation and constant input keep the nervous system activated and disrupt recovery.
• Why Sleep Loss Makes Leaders Worse Negotiators How sleep deprivation reduces cognitive flexibility, weakens judgment, and affects performance under pressure.
• Why Entrepreneurs Sleep Worse Under Stress And Overthinking Why unresolved decisions, pressure, and the “founder mind” make it harder to switch off and recover at night.

Disclaimer

This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice.

This material is based on my personal observations, subjective tracking, and analysis of research. It does not replace a doctor’s consultation, diagnostic evaluation, or personalized recommendations from a qualified specialist. My experience is N-of-1, not a universal instruction for everyone.