Why you need to track your sleep
Among the most popular modern gadgets in the health and wellness sleep tracker category today is the sleep tracker. Accurate sleep tracking will allow you to see if you are sleeping efficiently and continuously. It can also indicate if you possibly have a sleeping disorder that requires more attention and medical treatment.
Getting Enough Zzzzzzzs
According to National Sleep Foundation in the United States, adults from 26 to 64 years old need around 7 to 9 hours of sleep per day. However, getting anywhere from 6 to 10 hours ‘may be appropriate.’ Experts still believe that six hours of sleep is not nearly enough for anyone to ‘recharge’ and function optimally during the day. What’s important is to get enough quality hours of sleep every day.
If you are already logging in the average 8 hours of sleep daily, your next step is to check the quality of your sleep. You might be getting enough hours but not in the quality that your body needs. Observe how there are times when you get a full night’s sleep, yet feel tired and sluggish when you wake up in the morning. This is one of the indications that you are not getting enough high quality hours of zzzzzzs.
There is such a thing as a sleep cycle where you go through stages until you get to deep sleep. You want to get to this stage, or the REM stage (Rapid Eye Movement) stage, for your body to repair itself and give you a mood and mind boost for the next day. You want to get a better picture of how you are sleeping (your sleep pattern) so you can make adjustments or get treatment as necessary.
Tools for Sleep Monitoring and Tracking
Why you need to track your sleep
You cannot possibly monitor your sleep, track your sleep pattern, and measure the quality of your sleep all on your own. Several years back, you would have to be checked-in at a medical facility and hooked up to machines while a technician and a sleep specialist record and interpret the machine readings. Today, various types of devices are available to more conveniently track your sleep wherever you are.
There are different types of devices to choose from depending on what information you want to collect. There are bedside devices and under-the-mattress pads used for tracking sleep, but the most popular ones are the wearables. Personal wearable trackers cost around $100-$200. Cheaper devices can go below $50 while the more expensive ones can go beyond $300. To buy the right sleep monitoring and tracking device, you have to know what features and benefits to look for.
Sleep trackers usually ‘sense’ and log your movement, heart rate, breathing, and other environmental factors like noise, temperature, and light. The data collected by these devices are used to analyze how much sleep you had, how deep or light your sleep was, and how good or disturbed your sleep was among others. Some devices come with apps that put together all the collected data and present them in a more user-friendly and relevant manner — usually using graphs and other visual aids.
Sleep experts, however, claim that trackers do not exactly measure sleep. What they do is monitor certain indicators of sleep such as inactivity, snoring, etc.. Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Sleep Disorders Center director calls it a ‘guesstimate’ of how much you’re sleeping. He still recommends further medical sleep study for a more exact and accurate diagnosis of sleep disorders. The trackers do help you monitor your sleep and determine sleep patterns. You certainly should see a specialist if you notice anything odd in the numbers and graphs in your sleep tracker app.
Does White Noise Make you Sleep Better
Setting Up Your Sleep Stage
Ideally, you should be able to get to the deeper stages of sleep right to the REM stage for your body to fully benefit from sleeping. If you sleep long enough yet not deeply enough, your body might not get the rejuvenation it needs. Such can be observed when you still feel tired after a full night’s sleep. You probably were not able to go through the full cycle.
The first stage of your sleep cycle is the first few minutes of light sleep you experience as you brain waves start winding down. Stage 2 is when your brain waves slow down. You get deeper into snooze-dom in Stage 3 and 4 where it’s harder to rouse you. You body starts repairing itself in these stages. The last stage is the REM stage where you are at your deepest sleep level and it is more difficult to wake you up. This is also where your brain processes information and stores it in your long-term memory bank.
Using a sleep tracker will give you a good idea of how well (or how bad) you are sleeping. Armed with the right information, you can take steps to improve the way you sleep so you can avoid the risks that come with not getting enough sleep such as depression, weakened immune system, memory problems and other health issues.
