![]() Jason Doescher, MD, chief medical officer for MOBE, an online wellness platform for people living with chronic conditions, has recommended the Withings Sleep Analyzer to patients in the past. Keep in mind that this sleep tracker is designed for individual use. It records your sleep cycle, heart rate, and any breathing disturbance and automatically sends the information to your app via Wi-Fi in the morning. It doesn’t matter whether you sleep on your back, stomach, or side-this pad placed under your mattress will get the information it needs. As a bonus, you can easily share a PDF of that data produced by the app. The device works by measuring changes in noise and pressure throughout the night to measure potential disturbances. If you appreciate data and lots of it, you’ll be fascinated by what you learn after a few nights on the Withings Sleep Tracking Pad. These items also vary on the number of people they support, the type of data collected, and other features available.Ĭan take a few hours for sleep data to show up on the app The right type of sleep tracker is a matter of personal preference but the rule of thumb is to choose whichever model will cause the least amount of interference. Whatever the cause, it can be helpful to be able to track your sleep to see what you get up to at night and what adjustments you can make to improve your overall sleep quality and potentially even your mental health.įortunately, you no longer have to spend the night in a sleep lab to get data like that because there are a variety of sleep trackers available, either as wearables or other forms of technology. There are also situations where a person might think they’re sleeping well, but, following observation, find out that their sleep is disturbed regularly by everything from nightmares, temperature fluctuations, or conditions like sleep apnea. And it’s not just a lack of sleep: poor sleep hygiene-including not sticking to a sleep schedule-can also make us feel worse. ![]() "Do you feel well rested? Do you feel sleepy during the day? If you were to have a nap, how long do you think it would take you to fall asleep?" he asks.If you’re someone who reliably gets restful nights of sleep, then you may not fully realize how detrimental insomnia or disrupted sleep can be to your physical and mental health. You may be the best judge of your sleepĪs a rule, Dr Reid advises against looking at your daily numbers, and to listen to how you subjectively feel. Over the course of the night, and with each subsequent cycle, you should also expect your deep sleep to decrease, while REM sleep increases. "Within each cycle, you should be getting some light sleep, deep sleep, light sleep and then REM sleep, in that sequence," he explains. Sleep occurs in "cycles" that last somewhere between 60 and 120 minutes. This means it's not really possible to say whether a particular amount of REM or non-REM sleep is "optimal".Ī more important measure, Dr Cunnington says, is how someone "sequences" through different sleep stages throughout the night. ( Getty Images)Īs Dr Reid explains it, the amount of sleep we get on a day-to-day basis changes in response to what's going on in our bodies. "But this has a drawback for shift-workers, or anyone outside of a nine-to-five schedule, who will be sleeping or napping during the day and need credit for that.įemales tend to report poorer quality and more disrupted sleep than males. "If you're only looking for sleep at night, you're less likely to have an embarrassing error where you say somebody was asleep in the afternoon when they were just kind of sitting around," she says. Some, for example, will focus almost exclusively on picking up overnight periods of sleep. So they went a little heavy on the 'sleep pedal'."ĭr Walch adds that devices will also differ in terms of how much they are programmed to pick up on sleep or naps that happen outside of "standard" bedtime hours. "To be clear, Garmin nailed every sleep in that paper," she says. ![]() In fact, standard actigraphy outperformed Garmin devices at accurately identifying periods of wake in a 2021 paper. However, she says, that has not automatically translated into a big leap in accuracy. Dr Walch says we should be asking how accurately devices predict when we are awake, versus asleep.
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