Does sleep tracking work

Sleep trackers are all the rage right now, but do they work? Here’s what you need to know before you start using them.

Sleep trackers can tell you a lot about your sleep.

Sleep trackers can tell you a lot about your sleep. They can tell you how long you slept, how many times you woke up and when. They can also measure the quality of your sleep by recording how many times throughout the night that you stopped breathing. Most importantly, they will track how much time was spent in deep sleep vs light sleep.

Sleep trackers can help you be more aware of disruptions in your sleep.

Sleep trackers can help you be more aware of disruptions in your sleep. If you’re having trouble sleeping, it might be because of a disruption in the sleep cycle. The most common disturbances include:

Stress and anxiety (the stress hormone cortisol is released during the day)
Food choices (low-carb diets may cause insomnia)

Sleep trackers won’t tell you how well you’re actually sleeping.

Sleep trackers can tell you how long you’re sleeping and what time of day it is when you’re asleep, but they won’t be able to tell how well or poorly your body is actually functioning during those hours. The sleep stage data that comes out of a tracker could be helpful in terms of understanding how much time was spent in deep sleep versus light sleep, but it doesn’t give any information about what those different stages are supposed to look like for a healthy person.

If you have an underlying medical condition, a sleep tracker can’t diagnose it.

Sleep trackers can’t diagnose sleep apnoea, insomnia or other medical conditions. If you have concerns about your sleep, please see your doctor for a proper diagnosis and treatment plan.
Sleep trackers can help you identify issues that may be causing you to not sleep well. For example, if your tracker shows that you’re restless at night but only wake up once or twice every night–and never feel tired in the morning–it could mean that there’s something else going on besides just being awake too long (like anxiety).

Some sleep tracking apps are more accurate than others.

The accuracy of your sleep tracking app depends on how many sensors it uses, how accurate those sensors are and how well you follow the app’s instructions. Some apps use only one sensor (such as heart rate or movement) while others use multiple sensors like sound, temperature and humidity. The more information an app can gather about your body during sleep, the better picture it will have of what’s happening while you’re unconscious in bed–and therefore more likely to identify when something goes wrong with your rest cycle.

Some apps also require users to manually enter information about themselves before bedtime (like age or weight) so that their sleep patterns can be tracked over time; others do not require any input from users at all beyond setting up an alarm clock function if needed.

Sleep tracking apps and devices can give us good insight into our sleep patterns and habits, but they have some limitations too.

Sleep trackers are not medical devices, so they can’t diagnose an underlying medical condition or tell us what’s causing a sleep problem. They also may not be 100% accurate at measuring things like heart rate or respiration (breathing). But if you use your tracker consistently over time, it can help you understand how much time you spend in different stages of sleep–REM (rapid eye movement), light and deep–and whether those amounts vary from night to night or weekdays versus weekends.