Sleep Optimization
This is essay 6 of 7 for The Tech Progressive. Join the conversation in the build_ Discord.
Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep brought a lot of attention to sleep. It’s full of good general advice for sleeping more and better. But a big book is not necessarily the ideal format for implementing a program of behavior change. It’s a lengthy exploration of many reasons that sleep is important and ways to sleep better. But what does a person do with that information? Where do you start? You need a specific program to drop into and check into every day. You need feedback. A book doesn’t provide that.
Fortunately, every bedroom can be a rudimentary sleep lab now. There are mass-market devices, smartwatches and others, that provide fairly accurate, detailed sleep information with minimal effort. The average person can simply wear their smartwatch to bed, check their sleep score and its components (sleep duration, sleep quality), and make note of what seems to affect their sleep. You can see how your amount of exercise, which is often tracked in the same app, affects your sleep.
If you want to take it to another level, you can add your own metrics to go with your sleep score and see how they affect each other. You can track your amount of caffeine consumed and when. Exist can pull in metrics from sources like Fitbit and Apple Health and generate reports and find correlations. An upcoming release will enable entering custom metrics like the amount of caffeine consumed.
Sleep score doesn’t seem to have quite the popularity that step count does. According to an article from 2021, 74% of Apple Watch users use the step counting feature, while only 18% use the sleep tracking feature, though sleep tracking was up 3 percentage points in 2021. People might have generally gotten a little more conscious of their bedtimes and amount of sleep in the last few years. There are small things like the sleep schedule and reminders to start winding down on iPhones. Generally, it seems people might be shifting somewhat from bragging about how little they sleep to bragging about how much they sleep.
Sleep has become another thing to track and nerd out on. Perhaps the pandemic encouraged people to refocus on the basics and take care of themselves.
Whatever the case might be, sleep seems to be getting more attention, and people seem to be getting better results, now that sleep tracking has become cheaper and more convenient than ever. It’s not hard to imagine a point when smartwatches are so useful and cheap that most people use them (current US market penetration is around 15%). We’re rapidly approaching that point. This could be a great help to our sleep and health in general.