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And so my internal monologue continues until 3:00, 4:00, or even 6:00 A.M., rotating through images, ideas, commitments, anxieties, and fantasies.

This mental slide show is combined with perverse sleep yoga: sometimes the twisted- into-a-pretzel posture, sometimes lying on my back like Dracula in mock-paralysis, and always ending in the fetal position with a pillow or arm between my knees. Fetal position never works, but I continue to try it, like a full-bladdered dog scratching at a door that never opens.

I have insomnia. Horrific “onset” insomnia.

My father and my brother are the same. It’s not because we’re stressed out, necessarily, it’s not because we’re not tired. It’s because we just can’t freaking fall asleep.

So, in the interest of finally getting a good night’s rest and helping others with insomnia, I tried everything from folk remedies to smart drugs, from light therapy to fat loading.

Now I can say that I had chronic insomnia.

The Hidden Third of Life

Is good sleep a simple matter of length, the longer the better?

If you’ve ever needed a nap after sleeping too much, you know it isn’t that simple. Let’s look at the problem through an easier question: what is bad sleep?

• Taking too long to get to sleep (“onset” insomnia, my major problem)

• Waking too often throughout the night (“middle” insomnia)

• Waking too early and being unable to get back to sleep (“terminal” insomnia)

The challenge for a self-tracker is measuring things when drooling into a pillow. I could record the times when I got into bed and when I woke up, but I couldn’t pinpoint when I fell asleep, much less what happened while asleep.

Taking courses like “Biology of Sleep” at Stanford University didn’t fix my insomnia, but the academic searching did help me formulate more specific questions, including:

• For memory consolidation: how much REM sleep am I experiencing?

• For tissue repair: how much delta-wave sleep am I experiencing?

• For both of the above: am I experiencing sleep apnea?

The problem with testing these in a proper sleep lab (the test is called a polysomnogram) is that you generally have at least 22 wires attached to you to measure brain activity (EEG), eye movements (EOG), skeletal muscle activation (EMG), heart rhythm (ECG), respiration, and sometimes peripheral pulse oximetry.

Guess what? No one can sleep in a weird lab with 22 wires attached to them on the first night. So the data are terrible. But let’s assume you try. The second night, you come in after an all-nighter and crash within minutes like a post–sugar high two-year-old. Double-bad data.

To really test and tweak things under realistic sleeping conditions, I would need a pocket-sized sleep lab.

That didn’t happen until 2009.

My First F*cking Sleep Lab

JULY 2009

“You should try what Brad Feld used. He has some gadget to measure your sleep,” offered one of my friends.

This caught my attention. I had been bitching about my insomnia after another horrible night’s sleep, and I’d also been meaning to reach out to Brad.

Based out of beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Brad is a venture capitalist and angel investor famous for (1) his incredible track record and (2) dropping F-bombs on business panels.1 Exhibit A: He was one of the few initial backers of Harmonix Music Systems, which he helped raise $500,000 in financing. They bled money for almost 11 years. A fool’s errand! Then, in 2005, it had a small (sarcasm) video game success called “Guitar Hero.” It sold in 2006 to Viacom/MTV for $175 million.

Brad’s contrarian decisions often follow an elegant logic that others only pick up on well after the fact.

If he had found a tool for sleep analysis, I wanted to know all about it.

Of Motion and Waves: The Tools

Brad’s obsession ended up being the Zeo. It would be my first legitimate, next-generation sleep gadget.

Then I added more gadgets.

In the subsequent four months of testing, I also used heart-rate monitors, thermometers, continuous glucose monitors, two movement-detection devices