Anthony Marino

Writing at Deep Sleep Daily

About

Operations manager, suburban Atlanta. Forty-six. Spent the better part of fifteen years convinced that running low on sleep was just part of the job.

There is a spare bedroom in my house in Smyrna that has quietly turned into something between an office and a testing room. Standing desk in the corner with a second monitor that usually has sleep tracker history on it. One shelf reserved entirely for supplement bottles, arranged in the order I tested them. Blackout curtains I put up during an early experiment in optimizing the sleep environment. Nightstand with a lined notebook and the USB cradle for my smartwatch. My wife considers the whole setup excessive. She is not wrong.

The testing started about two years ago, at first without any plan to write about it. Three in the morning, can't sleep, writing down observations gives the wakefulness something to do. The notation was simple from the start: what I took and when, rough impressions of how long falling asleep seemed to take, how many times I woke up, a morning score against a consistent baseline. Cross-referenced against the smartwatch data when the watch had something to offer. Consistent enough, across enough weeks, to start showing patterns I could actually trust.

Sleep debt accumulates the way project debt does. You can't schedule a recovery sprint and come out even on something that's been building for years. That framing stuck because it matched what I was seeing in the notebook: the deficits ran deeper than I'd assumed, and adding supplements on top of an underlying pattern was slower going than I'd expected. Most things did nothing consistent. A few helped reliably. One caused 2 AM wake-ups so predictably I started flagging the nights in red before I'd even identified the connection.

A colleague named Russell, who approaches everything with a spreadsheet and a standing list of objections, has been a useful check on patterns I think I'm seeing. If something in the data can survive his questions, it's probably a real signal and not just wishful thinking from someone who wanted the supplement to work.

Felicia, my neighbor, works rotating hospital shifts and has her own complicated history with sleep. She'll knock at odd hours because she assumes I'm probably awake, which is usually accurate. She has tried roughly half of what's on that shelf and comes back with sharper opinions than mine. Barrington, from a local wellness forum, was the first person to explain to me why tracking wake-time consistency matters more than just logging total hours. That reframing changed what I was looking for in the data.

What's here is two years of notes and tracking from someone with an operations background and no training in sleep science. For persistent sleep problems or anything touching your health, a doctor is the right first call. This site covers what one person tested, observed, and wrote down.

My wife sleeps without any apparent effort and has no idea what the problem is. She considers the notebook excessive. She is probably right about the notebook.

Articles by Anthony Marino

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