by Nike Kuschick
#informationGraphics #productDesign
You are squeamish
Did you know that plants can suffer from jetlag? Just like you, they have a biological clock, that adapts their behaviour to the day and night cycle. This was discovered about 200 years ago by watching mimosa plants. Have you ever owned a mimosa? Spoiler: they are very hard to take good care of. And so is your chronobiologic health.
What is it?
Are you always tired on Mondays? Do you often suffer from migraines, insomnia or lack of focus? And do you want to change that? Adapting to a more regular sleep cycle may be the first step. Mimosa is a tool that helps you to understand and analyze your sleeping habits.
Why?
Like a Mimosa (or every living organism) you have a biological clock inside you. But unlike most plants and animals, we humans have distorted our Natural Rhythm by staying up late on weekends, working night shifts and staring at blue screens all day. But our bodies depend on having time to rest. Mess with your rhythm and it is going to mess with you!
A lot of your general wellbeing and health traces back to how much and how regularly you sleep. Sleep is a factor that a lot of people are making far too many compromises on. This not only leads to symptoms like lack of focus, migraines or insomnia, but it messes with our metabolism too and therefore increases the risk of more serious health issues.
But in order to switch to a more regular sleep cycle, it is very helpful to know where you are starting from. By tracking your sleeping pattern on a daily basis, you automatically pay more attention to it. The visualization will most certainly give you new insights into your habits.
And it’s fun too!
What does your sleeping pattern say about you?
It doesn’t matter if you like to stay up late or go to bed early. As long as you do it regularly it won’t make a difference on your circadian health. And don’t worry if you think that you would sleep too much! Some people just need more sleep than others. Therefore, the mimosa infographics only focus on the deviation from your individual average sleep cycle.
By doing that, the results are more comparable to each other. But note that it is still not helpful to compare your outcome with somebody else’s. But it IS helpful to compare your own results to see your progress.
This visualization works both by giving you a first impression of how regular your cycle is and by giving you an actual insight into your data. It displays the standard deviation from the factors “bedtime”, “rising time” and sleep duration”. The rounder, the more regular. In addition, the thin black lines show the minimum and maximum of each value.
To make the results even more comparable, the mimosa score translates the visual pattern into a number. The lower the score, the more regular tho sleeping pattern. Because it is most important to get the same amount of sleep every day, the variable “s” has a greater impact on the outcome.
How will Mimosa help you?
Mimosa is not going to solve all of your problems. But it can be helpful to evaluate if your sleeping habits have an effect on them. Or the other way around: If you notice, that you sleep irregularly, you may question yourself what is causing that behavior and start working on that.