Suggestions for correlating sleeping with performance?

Question

I've taken a basic statistics course so I have a little background but probably not enough for what I would like to do.

Basically I have two datasets, one of my sleep patterns for the past 2 years and the other is a year's worth of performance data in a video game I play. I would like to see if there's a correlation between the two, but if I did I direct comparison I think there wouldn't be that interesting of a pattern because I gradually have improved over time independent of sleep.

I guess what I'm interested in is there an association between my relative performance on any given day in comparison to how I was doing around the same time. Maybe this isn't possible, but if anyone has some ideas I would appreciate it!

Note: This data set is only of myself so I can't really do a control.

Answer 1

The hard part is operationalizing your independent and dependent variable. That's likely fairly easy for your game performance but harder for sleep data. For this you need to search the literature and see how this is usually done and whether you have the appropriate data to do it in a similar way.

So the main question is to define what 'how you were doing' means.