With regard to sleep tracking apps, I have Idiopathic Hypersomnia, a rare sleep disorder that causes excessive daytime sleepiness, sleeping for long hours, sleep “drunkenness”, central sleep apnea, and resulting short term memory problems. I’ve used literally every sleep app I could get my hands on and they are all terrible. I’ve used the Fitbit and Apple Watch heart monitors, the cpap machine’s app (Philips), and medical grade, at home ones.
Most of the apps that supposedly track sleep cycles do so in very lackadaisical fashion. They measure small variations in heart rate to determine the sleep stage you’re on, but I’m the ultimate edge case and they all ways fall short. Even medical grade sleep monitors stuff ends up not working right because half the time it thinks I’ve gone into cardiac arrest because my heart rate falls so low (The random 3 hour block of time in the night being reported as “deceased” was a little jarring).
Sleep comes (perhaps too) easy to me, but my partner is not so lucky. She used to obsess over the sleep tracking stuff until the Apple Watch where it just measures time asleep, a way more measurable and meaningful metric. I mean, what are you going to do with the knowledge of being in deep sleep from 1:28am until 2:09am? Nothing. You cannot control it or will it to be better, practicing good sleep hygiene by going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time is way more important than knowing the stage of sleep you’re in at any given part of the night. The most rested I feel is when I have a consistent sleep routine, and contemporary medical advice supports this.
Ditch the sleep apps that track your sleep, it’s just another thing to worry a about.
You certainly can. For example, drinking a single beer before going to sleep correlates not with shorter sleep, but much less deep sleep in my case. Just measuring the time asleep would tell me drinking doesn’t affect my sleep at all, which is not true.
Another anecdotal data on the effect of alcohol : I use a Garmin watch constantly, and it measure what they call Body Battery,(https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=VOFJAsiXut9K19k1qEn5W5) which is a proxy for overall energy level, based on Heart Rate Variability and stress levels.
It's not the most scientific and precise measurement, but from my experience is seems to correlate pretty well with actual 'feeling energized and well' or 'feeling tired and out of energy'.
One of the most interesting information I got from it was how drinking alcohol affects my sleep : on a typical day, I go from 100 to 25, and then a night of sleep gets me back to 100.
If I drink even moderately, a night of sleep gets me back to 50 max, and sometimes can even pin down my body battery levels for a few days if it's a long drinking night.
Most of the apps that supposedly track sleep cycles do so in very lackadaisical fashion. They measure small variations in heart rate to determine the sleep stage you’re on, but I’m the ultimate edge case and they all ways fall short. Even medical grade sleep monitors stuff ends up not working right because half the time it thinks I’ve gone into cardiac arrest because my heart rate falls so low (The random 3 hour block of time in the night being reported as “deceased” was a little jarring).
Sleep comes (perhaps too) easy to me, but my partner is not so lucky. She used to obsess over the sleep tracking stuff until the Apple Watch where it just measures time asleep, a way more measurable and meaningful metric. I mean, what are you going to do with the knowledge of being in deep sleep from 1:28am until 2:09am? Nothing. You cannot control it or will it to be better, practicing good sleep hygiene by going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time is way more important than knowing the stage of sleep you’re in at any given part of the night. The most rested I feel is when I have a consistent sleep routine, and contemporary medical advice supports this.
Ditch the sleep apps that track your sleep, it’s just another thing to worry a about.