Tag: sleep apps

Can Your Sleep Tracker Make Your Sleep Worse?

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If you are the type of person who becomes more anxious when you Google your headache symptoms, or fixates on whether your retirement fund went up a percent or down a percent…you probably aren’t a candidate for a sleep tracker.  It could make your sleep issues worse, and that can happen more quickly than you realize.

Why?

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Because the information from a wearable device or the app on your iPhone isn’t as actionable as the designers want you to believe it is.  After all, that doesn’t move products.  You will have a lot of data to digest, and some of it is useless, some of it is helpful, and some of it is only valuable when looked at in the context of your day, your week, and with your attitude attached to it. When the device assesses the data, it is making assumptions about you.  You, and your sleep issues, are probably more unique than they think.  The stress of not knowing what to make of the data, or getting it wrong and taking useless or counterproductive actions, could mess with your sleep.

What good sleep looks like isn’t distillable to only the data.  This is why getting a polysomnograph at a facility that does sleep studies doesn’t tell you how to fix your sleep.  It simply doesn’t.  More often, your data tells the clinicians about what you don’t have.  Nice for them to know.  You don’t have OSA, and you don’t have a neurodegenerative disorder.  You still sleep poorly, and you still want help for your sleep.

Understanding the psychology of sleep, as well as the biology of sleep, will help you more.  And if you are someone that has to do things “right”, worries that every cough is TB, or whose day is sunk when you calculate that you slept less than the recommended 7.5 hours…toss that tracker in the nightstand drawer.  It could make you stay awake tonight, wondering if your sleep issues are killing you, making you a bad parent/partner/friend/employee, or if those numbers are an indication that you already have some dread disorder.

Want to feel good about yourself and your sleep?  

Do sleep coaching with me!

 

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Sleep Trackers: Do They Help? Should You Get One?

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Many of my new clients tell me that they have been using sleep trackers and sleep apps that promise to measure sleep.  They aren’t always certain that the information they receive is accurate or even useful.  They want to know my opinion(s).  And anyone that knows me is aware that if you ask my opinion, you will absolutely receive it.  In detail.

Well…..

These are mostly either apps that sense your body movement while you are in bed, or wearables that monitor your heart rate, breath rate, and more.  Some are attached to CPAP machines.  What they DON’T measure is what a somnograph does:  brainwaves.

They can’t measure brainwave activity.  That happens in a sleep clinic.

This means that your app and your wearables are using secondary signs of sleep to provide feedback about your sleep.  Not getting the whole story makes taking action harder.

This is like checking the shelves in a store to measure whether the business is making money or not.  Something is selling.  Money is changing hands.  Whether or not profit is being made can’t be definitively determined by shelf stock numbers.  You have to look “under the hood” to know for sure.

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This means that you need to take an app’s/wearable’s interpretation with a grain of salt and interpret the interpretation.  This confuses people, and they often prefer to take the readouts and the interpretations at face value. Do that, and you could end up with inaccurate beliefs about the quality of your sleep.  In both directions.  Without somnography, we have to look at your subjective sense of being rested and renewed, your sleep diary and compare it  with your chronotype, and your overall ability to function during the day.

This is one of the best reasons to get a sleep coach.  We drill down and work with you so that you can eventually do your own assessment of your sleep.  You learn so much about sleep that you can figure out how to tweak things months after we finish our CORE sessions.

Being able to look “under the hood”  tells us a lot more about the quality of your sleep than a sleep tracker can offer you.  After all, the older you get, the more likely it is that your sleep issues are complicated.  There is no way that a movement sensor or a breath counter is going to help you solve a complex problem.

So What Can a Sleep Tracker/Sleep App Do?

  1. Motivate you.  Some people like to have numbers.  They like something to record or graph.
  2. Provide information to your doctor or sleep coach.  They have the training to interpret the interpretations.
  3. Give you early warnings that your new sleep plan isn’t working, or your new medication/ CPAP machine isn’t giving you the results you want.
  4. Remind you how important sleep is to your health.  Life is complicated.  Keeping sleep as a priority isn’t easy when you are being pulled in a million directions.  Your app/wearable is a reminder that sleep is important.

Want more information about sleep coaching?  Get in touch with me!

 

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