So many health and fitness devices measure your sleep. But what can you do, armed with that information, to actually improve your sleep? While I have high hopes for the future, the reality today is that figuring out how to improve your sleep based on data you collect takes real work. But it can be done. It helps if you have a hunch as to what might be affecting your sleep. It also helps to collect a lot of data—more data than you might think you might.
Collect Sleep Data
To analyze your sleeping patterns and quality, you first need to collect sleep data. There are a number of different devices that can monitor your sleep (I've listed and described several of them on page 2), based either on motion or both motion and physiological data, such as heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin temperature. At the most basic level, these devices will tell you when, during the night, you toss and turn or wake up. They also generally give you a sleep efficiency score, which is the amount of time you spent asleep over the total time you were in bed, given as a percentage.
Collect Additional Data to Correlate
The problem is that knowing what times of night you tossed and turned, or how much time in bed you spent asleep or awake, isn't enough information to guide you to make changes that will help you sleep better.
You need to collect other data about your life, too, that can affect sleep so that you can look for correlations and test hypotheses about what affects your sleep.
Dr. Robert Oexman, director of the Sleep to Live Institute, says there are three main factors that affect sleep:
- behavior,
- environment, and
- sleep equipment.
Behavior comprises things like diet (including caffeine and alcohol consumption, and the times of day when you consumed it) and exercise, as well as whether you go to bed at a consistent time. Environment is what it sounds like: temperature, light, noise, air quality, etc. Sleep equipment means your bed, pillows, and the like.
Oexman and his institute work with Kingsdown, a company that makes smart mattress and the Smart Bed Match system. With these partners, they're solving the equipment part of people's sleep problems. Equipment is one of the trickier pieces, because once you buy a mattress, you generally stick with it for years.
Environment and behavior, on the other hand, are more changeable. We have more ability to change them. As such, most people who are hoping to increase their sleep quality start by collecting information about their behavior and environment, and then making hypotheses and looking for correlations that support them. Within those two umbrella points are many more data points, such as:
- food intake and time,
- alcohol intake and time,
- consistency of bedtime and wake time,
- amount of screen time within one hour of going to bed,
- amount, type, intensity, and times of exercise, and
- ambient noises (white noise machines, neighbors, street noise, pets, children).
Even stress, allergies, and pain, which aren't "behaviors" or "environmental factors" exactly, can affect your sleep. Those sorts of data can be hard to track, but even quantifying them on a scale of one to five and jotting it down in a note (most sleep tracking apps and fitness tracking apps have a generic notes section) can give you some data to examine.
As much as equipment is a more difficult factor to adjust night to night, don't overlook it. Having a comfortable mattress, pillow, bed frame, and even sheets and blanket could be just as important to your ability to sleep well as getting enough exercise.
Some of the sleep sensors mentioned on page 2 also collect information about your behaviors and environment. Other ways to get them are to use apps that help you log information, everything from MyFitnessPal for keeping track of your diet to workout apps like Strava for monitoring how much intense activity you get on different days.
Make Hypotheses, and Look for Correlations
There is a bit of guesswork involved in improving your sleep quality. Let's say you think consuming too much caffeine is preventing you from sleeping well. You need to track your caffeine intake and your sleep quality, and compare them day by day.
During this time, you should continue to track other behavior and environmental factors, too. Even if you're not looking for correlations right now between, say, the amount of screen time you have (blue light emitted from screens can inhibit melatonin production) and whether you fall asleep quickly that night, you'll want this data later if your first hypothesis doesn't pan out.
Some apps make the process of looking for correlations better—Jawbone UP and the UP Coffee app for instance do a great job together (more details on the next page)—but many don't. You really need to have an idea of what you're trying to find before you start looking. But the more data you have collected, the likelier it is you'll eventually find a pattern.
Pro Tip: Some Movement is Better Than No Movement
One assumption people have is that they should be very still while they sleep. After all, sleep reports from fitness trackers generally see movement as bad. Dr. Oexman points out that having no movement at all while you sleep is actually a bad thing and can lead to pain. Your body needs to move and readjust throughout the night to avoid being in one position too long. Your vertebrae in particular need occasional motion.
So when you look at your sleep data and try to optimize your sleep, know that you're not aiming for total stillness. Little movements throughout the night are ideal.
Devices for Measuring Sleep
There are many sleep trackers and devices on the market, many of which I've had the pleasure of testing. They collect different kinds of information, but the reports tend to be similar. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few of my favorites.
Devices for Measuring Sleep
Withings Aura. One of the newest sleep trackers on the market is Withings Aura. It's a three-part system, comprising a mattress sensor, bedside device, and mobile app. The mattress sensor, which fits beneath your mattress, records sleep data and sends it to a mobile app. If you use other Withings health and wellness products, such as the Withings Pulse O2( at Amazon) fitness tracker, you will have more information to about other habits that could be affecting your sleep, such as whether you were especially sedentary on a day before you slept poorly. Now, the bedside device is the coolest part of the Aura, but it doesn't do anything at all in terms of helping you figure out what's effecting your sleep. It's a lamp, and alarm clock, and white noise machine. The lamp projects light of different colors to help produce or inhibit melatonin, depending if you're trying to fall asleep or wake up. As a white noise machine and alarm clock, it plays different sounds to lull you to sleep and shake you from a slumber gently. It's very cool, and could be helpful to you, but that part of the Aura is not a diagnostic a tool.
Basis Carbon Steel Edition($199.99 at Basis). The Basis band is a wristwatch fitness tracker that includes sensors for measuring your heart rate and skin temperature, and that data combined with motion data can determine your light sleep, deep sleep, and REM cycles. Basis generates a pretty detailed sleep report. And because it's a fitness tracker, you also see other details about your day and how active you were. I love that Basis automatically—without you having to do anything—figures out when you are sleeping, walking, bicycling, or running based on the physiological signals and motion data, although once it thought I slept through a movie. I must have been sitting really still. Another cool feature of Basis is that its online dashboard and mobile app reward you for habits, rather than one-time events. Rather than earning a badge for sleeping well one night, Basis rewards behaviors that you do consistently over time.
Jawbone UP24( at Amazon) and Jawbone UP($28.49 at Walmart). Both of the Jawbone UP devices are bracelet-style activity trackers that guess at your light, deep, and REM sleep cycles based on motion alone, and some experts question whether the data are accurate because there are no physiological signals to help support the conclusions. In any event, Jawbone does show you graphs of your sleep data that are easy to understand, and there's one related app that is really brilliant at isolating one factor—caffeine—that might be affecting your sleep.
You use the app, called UP Coffee, to manually log your caffeine intake, and then it assesses how different amounts of caffeine affect your sleep, based on information from your tracker. I never thought I was sensitive to caffeine, but UP Coffee showed a remarkably clear correlation. On days when I had more caffeine, I slept less at night. One night when I conked out hard and stayed that way for more than eight hours (that's championship-level sleeping), I just happened to have had very little coffee and tea that day. I really wish they'd make a similar app for alcohol, which can cause people to fall asleep easily, but sleep terribly or wake up frequently in the night.
Fitbit Flex($62.99 at Amazon) and the Fitbit One($329.95 at Amazon) . The two prominent Fitbit trackers that are on the market right now, the Flex and the One, both track sleep, and rely only on motion. Neither attempts to guess when your REM cycles happened, sticking instead to when you are sleep, "restless," and fully "awake." What's beneficial about Fitbits, though, is that the Fitbit platform and app lets you record so much other data about your activities, food intake, and so forth, and that centralization of information may make it easier to correlate data and draw hypotheses about what's affecting your sleep.
Misfit Flash (due out in October). The very inexpensive, $49, and soon-to-appear Misfit Flash is a stylish little activity tracker that can measure sleep through motion alone. If you want more detailed readings, you can pair the Flash or its predecessor the Misfit Shine($79.97 at Amazon) with the Beddit mattress sensor system. The $149 Beddit system is similar to Withing's Aura mattress sensor (though the Beddit does not come with the bedside lamp/alarm clock/white noise machine, which I thought was the best part of it). The Beddit records and uses more information than the Aura, however: respiration, heart rate, movement, snoring, and ambient sound. PCMag analysts have not yet tested the Misfit and the Beddit together, as we are awaiting a review unit.
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