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If you struggle to sleep as much as your body needs, then you might be tempted to use a sleep tracker. Here’s what you need to know about these devices.
Technology really is amazing these days. You can use it for almost anything, including lowering your health risk. Poor sleep or lack of sleep is one of the biggest and most underrated health risks in the world. It can cause a range of health problems and is often ignored or minimized. It’s important that you identify and reduce or eliminate this problem. However, if you use a sleep tracker, it just might make things worse.
Around one in three people have trouble sleeping regularly. The human body needs between 7 and 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. This amount varies by age and individual differences. If you don’t get enough sleep, you may experience:
Clearly, this is a serious health risk that needs to be addressed. And if you’re like most people, you may try using a sleep tracker. These devices are everywhere these days, but they may not be as helpful as they seem.
There are a huge range of sleep trackers available now. But are they really worth the time and effort? A sleep tracker doesn’t actually improve your sleeping patterns in any way. In fact, seeing how little you sleep may actually increase your anxiety and worsen your sleeping problems.
This doesn’t mean that sleep trackers are worthless. You need to know the extent of a problem to change it effectively. So, if you aren’t sure how much you’re sleeping, then a sleep tracker may help to fill in those information gaps. However, this only applies if the sleep tracker actually works, and there’s some question about that.
First and foremost, a sleep tracker must be accurate to be useful. Sleep trackers work in a couple of different ways. Most are worn on a wrist like a watch. Some of them monitor your body movements. The idea is that you’re mostly still when you’re sleeping. These sleep monitors use this measurement to estimate how much of the night you spent asleep.
Other sleep monitors measure your heart rate or oxygen saturation levels. These measurements are used to estimate how much time you spent in each stage of sleep. As you sleep, you move through different sleep stages. There’s a light sleep stage, the rapid eye movement (REM) stage and the deep sleep stage. All of these stages are essential, but the final stage is the most restful. A sleep tracker that measures your heart rate or oxygen levels uses changes in these rates to estimate time spent in each stage.
Notice that these measurements only estimate your sleeping time and sleeping stage. This is where the problem lies. In sleep labs, polysomnography tests are used to identify sleep disorders. These tests measure:
This is the only accurate way of measuring whether you’re awake or asleep. It also helps identify different sleep stages. And as it turns out, sleep trackers aren’t nearly as accurate as these official tests.
There haven’t been many studies comparing official tests with consumer sleep trackers. However, a recent study has found that sleep trackers that measure movement and estimate wakefulness are only accurate 78% of the time. And the accuracy drops to 38% when measuring how long it takes for people to fall asleep.
This study shows that using movement to identify sleeping patterns is a fundamentally flawed idea. The same applies to using movement to identify sleep stages. Even sleep trackers that use heart rate and oxygen saturation aren’t accurate.
There are numerous reasons for these inaccuracies. Firstly, there is the nature of the connection between these metrics and sleep. Movement, heart rate, and oxygen saturation are connected to sleep, but the connection isn’t a strong one.
A low heart rate or little movement doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re asleep or in a certain sleep stage. For example, insomniacs tend to be very still when they sleep. This doesn’t mean they’re in a certain stage of sleep, it’s just a general tendency.
Secondly, flaws in the technology tend to further confuse the results. Taking the pulse, heart rate, or oxygen levels at the wrist is notoriously inaccurate. And using this information to estimate your health risk is a recipe for disaster.
What all this means is that a sleep tracker may cause more harm than good. They can cause stress and unease as well as give you incorrect information. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use them, however. You just need to know how to use them properly.
A sleep tracker can be used to monitor any sleep pattern changes. This is particularly useful if you’re taking steps to improve your sleeping patterns. You can use a sleep tracker to measure sleep patterns before, during, and after these changes.
Just remember that any changes in your sleeping patterns are likely to be small. Sleep trackers often miss them, which means you won’t recognize any improvements. So, don’t rely on these devices to determine your health. And remember that the worse your sleeping patterns are, the more inaccurate the devices are likely to be. In these situations, see a medical professional rather than relying on promises made by creators of sleep devices.
If you’re concerned about your blood pressure or any other aspect of your health, use HomeLab to help you keep track of your condition and any changes you make to your life.
Tags: Health Risk, sleep, sleep tracker
