Interesting article on sleep tracking

I'm not a subscriber. What did it say?

NorthCascades wrote: »

Weird, I'm not a subscriber either, but it's probably a thing where I haven't used up my free articles yet.

It reminds us how sleep tracking works, and suggests that we use it like calorie tracking, in that its job is to make us aware of patterns. It says to ignore the time spent in sleep stages because actually measuring that requires knowing what's going on in your brain, and instead looking just at how much sleep we got overall and trying to build context around that.

Having had the opportunity to go through an in-hospital sleep study while wearing my watch . . . so true, IME. The sleep tech - who'd been watching my brain waves, heart beat, blood ox, breathing patterns and more all night - and I just laughed and laughed at what the tracker thought.

Perhaps they're closer for more average people - as trackers can be in general. But I've had chronic sleep interruption insomnia for couple of decades. I wake up multiple times a night, usually go right back to sleep. Usually the tracker sees none of that, thinks slept through. I already knew it wasn't insightful, because of time periods where I was in bed, wide awake in the AM, but fairly still (maybe answering texts or something) and it thought I was asleep. It's also thought I was awake, when I'm pretty sure I was asleep for a long stretch. In that context, believing it knows when I'm in light-deep-REM sleep? Nah.

The irony is that they may be worse at reading people who have sleep problems, could benefit more from actual information.

It would be easy to believe them, if a person slept through the night, and it got the start/end times pretty close, maybe.

I will say that how much trouble I have waking up in the morning does seem to be strongly correlated with how much REM my Garmin thinks I got. My sleep and wake times are pretty consistent so that's not generally what makes the difference. Maybe it's just making a lucky guess lol.