FN-01Field note 1 of 6 · The fixed sleep window

Does holding an 8.5-hour sleep opportunity at fixed clock times for 14 nights raise my morning readiness score by more than 3 points over baseline?

The least fashionable intervention in this series is the only one that clearly worked.

Effect

Dates

Mar 02 – Mar 22, 2025

Duration

21 nights

Pre-registered primary

Morning readiness score (0–100)

FN-01 · 01

The question

Every module on this platform eventually funnels into the same sentence: sleep is the intervention, and most of what athletes buy is an adjuvant. I have written that sentence enough times that I owed it a test. Not a citation, a test, on the one subject I have continuous access to.

The falsifiable version: in bed at 22:30, alarm at 07:00, every night for two weeks, and my morning readiness score has to move by more than 3 points against a one-week baseline of my normal chaos. Readiness here is the Protocol Lab composite (resting heart rate plus self-rated sleep quality, soreness, and mood, scaled 0 to 100), computed identically every morning before I touch my phone.

FN-01 · 02

Pre-registration

Pre-registration · sealed recordLocked Mar 01, 2025 · 21:47, before the first baseline night

Protocol: In bed 22:30, lights out, alarm 07:00, every night including weekends. No screens in bed. Caffeine unchanged (none, I am seventeen). Training, school, and everything else stays exactly as it is.
Duration: 7 baseline nights logged first, then 14 intervention nights. No extensions, no restarts, no dropping bad nights.
Primary outcome: Morning readiness score, 0 to 100, computed the same way every day from resting heart rate, sleep-quality rating, soreness rating, and mood rating, within ten minutes of waking.
Secondary outcomes: Resting heart rate on its own (the one input my opinion cannot vote on)
Nights the window was actually hit, out of 14
Counts as null: If the 14-night intervention mean lands within 3 points of the baseline mean, this publishes as a null. Trends, vibes, and 'but I felt better' do not count.

Saved as a dated, unedited note before day one. The goalposts above are the goalposts the data was judged against; nothing in this record was touched after the first measurement.

FN-01 · 03

The protocol

The baseline week was my normal life: in bed anywhere between 23:00 and 00:40, wake time drifting with my first class. I logged readiness every morning but changed nothing.

The intervention was almost insultingly simple to describe and genuinely hard to do. I hit the 22:30 to 07:00 window on 13 of 14 nights. The miss was March 15, a tournament travel night, in bed at 23:40; it is in the log, not deleted. Readiness was scored in bed, phone on airplane mode, resting heart rate from a chest strap, the three ratings entered before any messages were read. That ordering matters: the whole instrument is contaminated the moment the day's first stressor arrives.

Window

22:30–07:00

Compliance

13/14nights

Baseline

7nights

Intervention

14nights

FN-01 · 04

The log

The actual daily data, charted with the intervention window shaded, plus the raw log as a table under each chart. Same arrays feed both, so they cannot disagree.

Primary outcomeMorning readiness, dailyscore / 100

The dip at day 15 (Mar 16) followed the one missed window: tournament travel the night before, in bed 23:40. The score noticed.

›View the raw log · 21 rows

Morning readiness, daily, in score / 100. Full daily log.
study day	Date	Phase	Readiness (score / 100)
1	Mar 02	baseline	66
2	Mar 03	baseline	58
3	Mar 04	baseline	61
4	Mar 05	baseline	54
5	Mar 06	baseline	71
6	Mar 07	baseline	57
7	Mar 08	baseline	63
8	Mar 09	intervention	62
9	Mar 10	intervention	65
10	Mar 11	intervention	63
11	Mar 12	intervention	70
12	Mar 13	intervention	68
13	Mar 14	intervention	72
14	Mar 15	intervention	75
15	Mar 16	intervention	71
16	Mar 17	intervention	74
17	Mar 18	intervention	77
18	Mar 19	intervention	73
19	Mar 20	intervention	78
20	Mar 21	intervention	76
21	Mar 22	intervention	79

FN-01 · 05

What happened

Baseline mean

61.4/ 100

Window mean

71.6/ 100

Delta

+10.2pts

Pre-reg bar

+3.0pts

Baseline mean 61.4, range 54 to 71. Intervention mean 71.6, range 62 to 79. The delta is +10.2 points against a pre-registered bar of +3. It also was not a switch flipping: the first intervention week averaged 67.9 and the second 75.4, which is what you would expect if a sleep debt was being paid down rather than a placebo arriving on schedule.

The secondary behaved too. Resting heart rate drifted from the high 50s to the mid 50s across the two weeks, roughly 4 bpm. That number matters more to me than the composite, because it is the only input in the score that does not route through my opinion of myself.

The annoying part, and the reason this entry leads the series: this cost nothing. No molecule, no gadget, no subscription. The least purchasable intervention on this entire platform put up the largest number in this series, and nothing else described in these six entries comes close.

The most boring protocol I own is the only one that cleared its bar by a factor of three.

FN-01 · 06 · Mandatory in every entry

Why this is weak evidence

This section is the module’s actual thesis. The result above is the least important thing on this page; the list below is why.

No control condition

I compared a treatment period against a baseline period, which is the weakest design that still deserves the name. The honest alternative (deliberately wrecking my sleep as a comparison block, mid-season) would be idiotic, so this entry inherits every problem of before-and-after data.

Expectation had editorial control

Three of the four readiness inputs are self-ratings, I built half a platform around sleep, and I wanted this to work. My expectation did not merely have a chance to contaminate the measure; it practically ran the measure. Resting heart rate is the one instrument my hopes cannot reach, and it is the main reason I believe the direction of this result at all.

March is a confound

The baseline week caught the tail of a tournament block; the intervention overlapped a lighter training stretch. Some unknown share of those 10.2 points is regression to the mean plus reduced load, and this design cannot tell me how large that share is.

n = 1, 14 nights

Two weeks in one adolescent is too short and too singular to separate a real effect from a favorable drift. The ramp shape is suggestive, and suggestive is the strongest word it earns.

One primary, still suspicious

I only registered one primary outcome, so there is no multiple-comparisons game to confess to here. I am listing the temptation anyway, because I felt it: by day 10 I was checking secondary numbers hoping for supporting evidence. That impulse is the thing this whole module is designed to contain.

FN-01 · 07

What I would do differently

01A 14-night baseline instead of 7, so I actually know my baseline variance instead of guessing at it.
02An objective sleep measure. Self-estimated sleep latency is autobiographical fiction; even a cheap actigraph beats my memory of falling asleep.
03An ABAB reversal design in the off-season: two weeks on, two off, two on. If readiness tracks the blocks, the seasonal-confound objection mostly dissolves.
04Pre-register resting heart rate as a co-analysis with its own bar. It turned out to be my cleanest instrument and I had left it in the appendix.

FN-01 · 08

The verdict

The verdict, for me

Effect

Effect, with the caveats above attached. I kept the window, readiness stayed in the low 70s for the month that followed, and my price for staying up late now has a number on it: about 3 points of next-morning readiness per hour, and nothing on my phone clears that bar.

As far as an uncontrolled n of 1 can say the word, this one worked.

The non-verdict, for you

For you, this proves nothing. Your sleep debt, chronotype, season, and schedule are not mine, and my expectation was load-bearing in at least three of the four instrument inputs.

What transfers is the ranking argument: the boring intervention earned the first slot in my testing queue, and it probably deserves the first slot in yours. If you run it, pick your outcome and your bar before night one.

Field Notes · FNBack to the results ledgerOpen Next · FN-02Creatine, 21 daysOpen

FN-01 · Cross-references

Where this entry leads

The group evidence, the mechanism, and the instruments behind this experiment live in the other modules.

Protocol Lab · PLThe readiness instrument this score comes fromOpen Science Library · SLSleep: the mechanism behind the one that workedOpen Mind-Body Wing · MBWhy a self-rated score is never a neutral witnessOpen

Education, not diagnosis. This is a student-authored science platform. Nothing here replaces a physician, a physical therapist, or an athletic trainer. Sudden severe pain, numbness, an inability to bear weight, or visible deformity means stop reading and get seen.