Fitbit sleep tracker - useful?

steve2kay

Hello all,
I'm thinking of getting a fitbit tracker for my wife. She's not trying to lose weight, isn't actively monitoring her calories in/out and isn't on any particular health drive. She does meet a personal trainer once a week for strength training to help her with back pain.

However, she often talks about being tired, not getting enough quality sleep, having no energy etc. She's taking other steps to improve this (vitamin D, iron supplements etc.). Her personal trainer also recommends various nutritional things to try.

I was wondering what benefits having a fitbit would be to her. Would it just tell her she had a restless night, or would she be able to do something with the information? Like track it to what she eats, how active she was in the day etc.

I guess I've sort of answered my own question there, but what experiences have people had of using fitbit to improve their general wellbeing rather than specifically weight related?

Thanks, Steve

Mokey41

It only tells you how many times you wake in the night so not really much useful information there. Does she snore? Someone with sleep apnea will wake multiple times a night and never feel rested. My hubby dragged around for years until we finally got him to go for a sleep study. He's on the high end of the scale for stopping breathing and waking through out the night. He has a CPAP now and says he's never felt better. It might be worth doing a sleep study to find out why she's waking.

Amitysk

I have found it to be helpful to wake up and see that I was restless 45 minutes out of the 9 hours I was in bed. I then can go back to the day and look at what I ate, what my general activity was, look in my journal to see my emotional state...

Good luck!

steve2kay

Does she snore?

Nope, but she does talk a little which is quite funny. I think part of it is that she's more anxious when she's tired, which makes her sleep less so it's a bit of a spiral.

I thought that maybe having information and being able to correlate sleep patterns with food/exercise during the day would help, but then I'm a geek for numbers.

Thanks Amitysk, did you find this information helped you to change anything that made sleeping better?

jvbrooks

I've found it very useful as you can analyze trends over time, including, for example, how long it takes to go to sleep and how much sleep you actually get. If you're constantly waking up in the middle of REM cycles, you know something's the matter, for example, and if you know how long it takes you to get to sleep (for me it's 4-7 minutes), you can better plan your sleep cycles.

Fitbit is very useful for sleep tracking.

abickford82

I have a BodyMediaFit and love it. Like a FitBit, but I highly recommend either one. I've had mine since February, and I've been able to track my sleep. I lost a bit of weight over the years, but fell off last year, and I got back on track this year. My sleep was all over the place, and I was able to improve my habits. I started taking melatonin but found I'd wake up 4 hours later wanting to be up for an hour or so (this is even after an hour or so of daily exercise).

Between the monitoring, I've found that no caffeine after 2pm (I go to sleep around 10), and eating a banana before bed really helps. Some people really have the habit of becoming dependent on melatonin so I stopped taking it.

lstroth1

It is also useful to look over a month and see when you have the most sleep vs the least sleep. I find that my insomnia is worst the week before and week of monthly cycle.
It isn't the most accurate picture of sleep but it does give you a heads up and it does seem to correlate with what my husband reports ie: my being restless a lot.

I have a fitbit and a smartphone. I find myself checking what my daily steps are often and then getting up and doing something to increase them. Gadgets help me, they might help her too.

steve2kay

Thank you everyone for the replies.
It looks like it might be interesting to help her see patterns in her sleeping so I think I'm going to order one.
Now I just need to work out which one.
Thanks again.