Amazon has announced a new kind of Wake-up Light slash night light: Halo Rise. It also uses sensors to monitor how your night is progressing, so that you can gain new insights into your sleeping pattern. dr. TechGirl investigates: does it make sense to analyze your sleep?
‘Tonight I’ll crawl under the wool early’. Yes, yes, we know that… Exactly the opposite happens after such a statement. You linger in that movie just a little too long. Your one girlfriend just got dumped and you need to provide mental support. Or you forgot that another package was delivered, and bro, you chose the late delivery time. Life happens to you often. Even if you do go to bed early, there is a good chance that you will still be scrolling, shopping and social media for a long time.
FOMO
Many people have that: not being able to fulfill their healthy plans to go to sleep on time. Call it FOMO, call it a phone addiction, call it being too lively or just cocky: It’s hard to rest your head early. Why should it be any different if you use a sleep tracker? Nice that your wearable can tell you that you have slept for six hours, but your sleep still gets an 8 as a score. While you have seven hours on the counter the night before, but still receive a meager 6.5 as a figure.
What exactly can you do with that information? Even if you could see a rhythm in it, or a cause (such as maybe not eating three cans of Red Bull combined with five chunks of dark chocolate within an hour before going to bed), the chances are that you will actually change your behavior as a result. small. Why? Because sleep is still such a mystery. Sometimes all conditions are perfect and you lie a bit staring at the ceiling, while other times you are sleeping like a log and still wake up dead tired…
Analyzing sleep: yes or no?
In fact, it has recently become known that you can actually get a sleep disorder if you listen carefully to your smartwatch or your Halo Rise. Sleep expert Sebastiaan Overeem tells Nu.nl that the measurements of wearables often raise more questions than provide answers. “People can easily understand what a pedometer measures. But that doesn’t apply to sleep meters. What they measure, how they measure and how the measurement data should be interpreted often raises more questions than answers.”
Moreover, we all know: if you know that you only sleep four hours that night, then you look very different than if you know that you are going to sleep eight hours. You also live it a bit. Have you slept like a baby, but your Fitbit says that your sleep only gets a 6 as a number, then you still get the feeling that you haven’t slept very well at all. We all know someone who isn’t exactly good at being tired (spoiler: all people): it doesn’t necessarily make you a nicer person.
Sleep disturbances
Experts from Rush University Medical College and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have researched it. Based on three example patients, the researchers show that people listen too much to their tracker and this actually causes sleeping problems. They write: “The use of wearable sleep trackers is on the rise, and most consumers are unaware that the claims of these devices often outweigh the science supporting them as devices to measure and improve sleep.”
“More research is needed on whether sleep tracker technology can be integrated into CBT-I, because despite poor validation data, consumers are excited about this technology and often believe that the data closely matches their perception of their sleep. Collaborating with patients to integrate devices into treatment offers the opportunity to improve communication between patients and caregivers and reduce the burden on participants. We also need to be aware of the potential unintended effects on sleep beliefs and behavior.”
Another study also supports this. In Personal Sleep Monitors: Do They Work? we look at what that data about your sleep really means for you. One researcher used five trackers and concluded that only real sleep studies can determine the quality of sleep. “Trying to do that with accelerometers is like trying to measure how well a car drives by looking at the mileage,” said the researcher. The gold standard is a study that combines brain waves, muscle tones and eye movement analysis, plus a live audio/video of sleep. Only then can researchers see exactly what happens during sleep.
In short, take your wearable with a grain of salt more often. It’s okay to have your sleep tracked, especially if you’re curious about the number of hours you’re tapping. But, at the same time, it is even more important to listen to your gut feeling. Do you feel like you’re alive and kicking on four hours of sleep? Go for it! If you think going to bed an hour earlier will do wonders for your night’s sleep, that’s definitely a good idea.
But be honest: do you really need a Fitbit to tell you that?