However, not all movement during sleep is bad, and a certain level of it is natural. For some people, that might be true, as many sleep disorders are characterized by excessive movement during sleep. Wearables assume that if you're moving around at night, you're probably not sleeping as soundly as you could. However, if you're a naturally restless sleeper or someone who moves around a lot during the night, nighttime movement data can be deceiving. Most such devices use accelerometers to track movement both when you're awake and when you're asleep. Let's first talk about devices like Fitbit's Alta HR wristband. How can you track your sleep at night?Ĭonsidering the nuanced differences between sleep stages, it's tricky for modern wearables to accurately track sleep. Aside from diagnosable sleep disorders, a number of things can wake you in the middle of the night, including too many alcoholic drinks before bed, not enough exercise throughout the day, and spending too much time on your phone or tablet before turning off the lights. However, waking up for long periods of time, or waking up multiple times each night, can be disruptive to the entire sleep process and your productivity the next day. In fact, even the heaviest of sleepers can be technically awake at points during the night and not even know it. While some of us are dead to the world when we sleep, only to be awakened by the blaring sounds of an alarm, others wake up frequently. Just as important as sleep stages is the number of times you wake up during the night. While the recommended number of hours of sleep per night varies by age, the National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours of sleep per night for regular adults ages 26 to 64. If you only have three or four hours of rest, you may not fit in enough sleep cycles for your body to fully repair itself from the day before. Typically, we experience light, deep, and REM sleep as a cycle, and we go through multiple sleep cycles each night. It's important to experience all three sleep stages, which is why getting enough time to sleep is crucial. The first time you enter REM sleep after going to bed could last just ten minutes, but as the night goes on, your body enters longer periods of REM sleep. The longest REM sleep phase can last an hour, but the body builds up to that amount of time. Since the brain is more active during REM sleep than the other two stages, your body changes during REM, increasing your heart rate and brain activity while your eyes move rapidly as you dream. REM sleep is the stage we hear about most often because it's known as the stage in which we dream.
You'll spend most of your night in light and deep sleep, as REM sleep periods tend to be shorter. Your body falls into deep sleep typically after 10 to 15 minutes of light sleep, and this is when the body repairs itself from the day before. Light sleep occurs soon after you fall asleep and your heart rate and body temperature go down. Understanding how well you slept on any given night depends on your time in light, deep, and REM sleep.
Wrist sleep monitor full#
While motion is an indicator, it's not the only metric you should track to get a full picture of how well you slept. Most wristbands monitor sleep now, and there are even specialized devices that go on your head or bedside table that can also keep track of how long and how well you sleep each night.īut sleep tracking isn't as simple as step tracking, and you need more than a simple accelerometer to measure it accurately. Fitness trackers didn't always monitor sleep, but the feature is now a sought-after staple in most devices, as sleep is just as important as exercise to a healthy lifestyle.
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