I keep an eye on my sleep data, and I wonder how I compare against others, what does “Good” look like for the various sleep levels.
E.g. my deep sleep is rarely above 30 minutes in a night where I sleep for about 7 hours. REM and core are usually about 2 hours and 4 hours respectively give or take half an hour.
What constitutes a good night’s sleep?
I would expect more deep sleep.
Is anyone else seeing different?
How are you tracking your sleep?
This is from a company (that was a non-profit before?), but it stills seems informative:
I’m in your ballpark. Historically I only registered a lot of deep sleep if I’d been sleep-deprived and was catching up. I’m feeling the most rested in my life this year.
I don’t have immediate access to the sources and so I’m doing this from memory. When it comes to sleep tracking, the Apple Watch is the least accurate of the popular tools, i.e. Oura ring, …
So I would take the data from the sleep tracking with a massive grain of salt. That said I do find the data mirrors how I feel when I wake up.
For deep sleep it typically ranges from 35-50 minutes per night.
I stopped tracking my sleep with my Apple Watch, because I felt it was doing a rubbish job. Even though I was wide awake for three hours in the middle of the night, for example, the watch didn’t even notice it. I know it’s anecdotal, but I doubt that the Apple Watch could track these things with any precision. Moreover, I suspected that tracking my sleep would worsen my insomnia. The more you worry about these things, the more you risk having insomnia. So I stopped wearing it while sleeping.
I had insomnia problems for at least a year and now I think its under control. (Not because I stopped wearing the Apple Watch, but an online coach helped.)
What constitutes a good night sleep? It depends. One thing I learned recently is that not everybody needs 8 hours of sleep. That’s a myth. If you wake up refreshed, you had a good night sleep. For my part, 7 hours or 6 1/2 hours of sleep is plenty enough.
The specific bands of sleep quality aren’t good objective measures on any particular day, but the deltas over time are helpful.
Comparing between people is probably meaningless. Much more important is in seeing trends or how activities affect your score.
AFAIK , the Apple Watch uses heart rate and movement to “guesstimate” how well I sleep. I tried it for a while when the feature was first introduced but gave up after a month or so.
Apple Watch I wear overnight.
Writing from memory, DC Rainmaker makes the general observation that the major sleep trackers get the time slept in the ballpark. The details of the sleep are inaccurate and inconsistent.
I think I have seen this on occasion if I lie very still. As such, if I am really awake, I tend to move my lower arm a little to “clue it in”.
But… I’m also convinced that times I think I was awake, I really wasn’t. The classic scenario is waking at, say, 4am and then “not getting back to sleep again” before properly giving in at 6am. The sleep data shows I was awake for maybe an hour, and then I’d drop into shorter periods of sleep.
One thing I know about myself, for sure, is that my own perception of time is completly bunk!
As others have said, it’s not about getting the “right” numbers, it’s about trends over time. Same with the newer Vitals measurements. The only time I have had alerts from Vitals, other than it noticing really short sleep periods, it told me my breathing rate was high and/or so was my wrist temperature. Well… these happened in the few weeks I had a nasty cold. So… QED?
I capture my sleep data using both my Apple Watch and Ultrahuman Ring Air. It is fascinating to see that the results from these two regularly have huge discrepancies! One will score me as 80+ when the other scores the same night’s sleep down in the 40s or 50s.
I noticed the same thing between the Sleep++ readiness score and Apple Sleep score. They’re measured on different criteria, so the scores are different.
I find Apple’s sleep score to be simplistic and unadaptive (I.e. I can’t set the required duration to 7 hours. Which is my perfect amount of sleep) and it pretty constantly gives me good sleep scores. When I went to bed and Interruptions as the other metrics used.
Sleep++ uses Heart Rate Variability, Resting Heart Rate, and sleep duration. I find it more representative of how I feel in the morning and I really wish (psst @ismh86) that I could have it on a widget.
You can, now. If you have a Sleep Schedule.
In the Settings app, under Focus, Sleep, scroll down to Next Schedule and tap it. Then at the bottom of the next screen, tap Schedule and Options. Under Additional Details you can set a Wind Down period and also your Sleep Goal.
Why they bury it so deep I don’t know, but I came across it recently and changed mine to 7.5 hours. You can change it to anything from 4 hours to 12 hours in half hour increments.
Interesting, I used Sleep++ and found the use of Heart Rate Variability and Resting Heart Rate to give completely inaccurate scores for me. I’d feel great in the morning and all day, but because of those two factors (which have very little scientific basis) Sleep++ would tell me I had a horrible night and was not at all ready for the day.
I find Apple’s score almost always right on the money for the way I feel.
That’s funny because I’m the other way around. Apple’s sleep score is rarely below 90% for me, but some mornings I feel terrible and after checking the Readiness score it reflects the way I feel.
I’ve been wearing an Oura ring for six years; starting with the Gen 2, upgrading to Gen 3. (They’re now on Gen 4.) They aren’t cheap, but when someone noticed me wearing mine not long ago and asked how I liked it I answered that if I ever lost it I would buy another.
From what I’ve read, the Oura ring always ranks as the most accurate tracker, second only to laboratory somnography. Because it’s a ring, its sensors are where blood vessels are closest to the skin surface. For this kind of tracking, a ring will always be superior to a watch.
That said, it’s very difficult for any of these devices to distinguish between deep sleep and REM sleep and for this reason Peter Attia (peterattiamd.com) has said that he doesn’t put a lot of stock in the actual deep sleep number. Perhaps it might be more meaningful to look at deep and REM in aggregate.
I think @tomalmy makes a good point. Watching the trends in your own data will be far more meaningful than trying to compare with others.
