What to track and why
1) Number of hours in bed
You might want to start taking note of what time you get into bed and what time you get out of bed.
Why?: If you’re working on getting more sleep, the first step is making sure you’re in bed for enough hours to get the hours of sleep you’re shooting for. It’s hard to sleep when you’re still wandering around the house checking email or brushing your teeth. Make a note of what time you went to bed and what time you got up in the morning. Do the math and see if you were even between the sheets long enough. Be sure to include weekends here. That can be a time when our sleep patterns can be quite different. A bonus item with this type of tracking is that you can also see how consistent you are with going to bed and waking up at the same time every day as this is a key factor in developing a consistent circadian rhythm (you can read more on that here).
2) Morning alertness
How well rested do you feel in the morning? You can simply rate this on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 means you feel like you didn’t sleep a wink and 10 means you feel fully rested and ready to tackle the day.
Why? If you’re changing up your sleep routine to improve your sleep quality, you need some way to know if what you’re doing is working. The higher the number, the more alert you feel and the better you probably slept. You might find you feel more rested when you wake up on weekends vs weekdays or vice versa. Why might that be? You might find that on the days you eat a little later, you don’t wake up feeling as rested as on the days you eat a little earlier. It’s not all about hours in bed. If you’re not getting quality sleep while you’re there, you may still not be at your best.
3) Factors that might influence sleep
These might include things like:
- How many hours before bed did you eat?
- When did you drink your last caffeinated beverage?
- Were you exposed to blue light in the form of a tv, computer or phone screen?
- How much alcohol did you drink?
- When did you exercise and how intense was it?
- How much water did you drink in the 2 hours before bed?
- Did you meditate today?
Why? If you’re taking the time to track your sleep that usually means you’re probably not very happy with it and might be looking to make a change to improve it. If this is the case, then you also need to track the things that might be influencing your sleep. Cracking the code on what might be helping or hindering your sleep means you have to collect the data.
4) Waking in the night
It might be worth taking note of whether you had a period in the night when you were awake.
Why: For some people, the challenge is with falling asleep, but for others, it’s all about staying asleep. Now it’s not abnormal to wake up in the night. Lots of people wake up, they might get up to go to the bathroom and then they fall back to sleep quickly. This is no big deal. In fact, waking up in the middle of the night is not an issue unless it’s really interfering with your ability to wake up the next day. For some, they wake up in the night, struggle to fall back to sleep and then have a terrible time getting up for work the next morning. Those nights are the ones that might be worth tracking.
5) Sleep phases
Everything that has been suggested so far you can track with a pen and paper, no fancy electronics required however, it is becoming easier and easier every day to track more sophisticated features of our sleep. Whereas we used to wear a Fitbit to track our steps, now these same devices can tell us how many hours we spent in various phases of sleep i.e., deep sleep vs REM sleep vs. light sleep vs awake.
Why? If you have the tech to do it, you can get a sense of whether you’re hitting the ‘ideal targets’ for each of these. You may start finding patterns like if I eat right before bed or have an extra glass of wine, I don’t get as much deep sleep. So, you might be hitting your target number of hours of sleep, but the quality of that sleep may not be leaving you feeling rested in the morning. Just a note about the accuracy of these devices. It varies wildly. If you go this route, focus more on the differences between one day and another as opposed to the absolute values.
Why not track?
So now you know how to track your sleep but while tracking might sound like a good thing, there is a dark side.
A large part of successfully falling and staying asleep relies on our brain’s ability to wind down and do its necessary clean-up processes while we sleep. The problem with tracking our sleep is that we can get ‘all up in our heads’ about our sleep data and start freaking out if we do or don’t get the amount or quality of sleep we targeted. I find this particularly with digital tracking when we start looking at how much deep sleep vs REM sleep, we get. For some people, the more they track, the worse their sleep gets because they stress about not getting enough.
To track or not to track?
It’s not always easy to figure out whether you should or shouldn’t track your sleep. To avoid the tracking becoming detrimental to your sleep, I would start with just tracking basic things that you have control over such as the number of hours you’re in bed. Once you’ve got that dialled in, you might want to look at factors that might influence your sleep and how rested you feel in the morning. Again, these are the things that are in your control. For most people, this is all you need. If you feel like you could improve on your sleep, but you’re not really stressed about it, this is as far as I would go with tracking.
If you’re already all up in your head about your sleep, you suspect that you are stressing about your sleep is part of the problem and you haven’t done any tracking yet, digital tracking can be helpful for some.
Digital tracking is also good for those that are just curious and can look at their data objectively and not get all stressed out by it.
My experience - a tracking success story
I can struggle sometimes with waking up in the middle of the night. I was getting really stressed by this. I would ‘finally’ get back to sleep only to have my alarm then go off and leave my groggy and grumpy in the morning thinking about that period in the night when I was staring at the ceiling. I started using an OURA ring (just an activity and sleep tracker. No, I don’t get any affiliate commission so feel free to click on this link if you want to check it out) to see if my activity level or other things in my day were impacting my sleep. The ring helped immensely but not in the way I was expecting.
The less stressed I was about waking up in the night, the less I woke up and the easier it was to fall back to sleep when I did.
Turn out when that I did wake up in the night, I wasn’t awake for as long as I thought I was. I was waking up in the morning thinking I’d only had 4 hours of sleep, convinced that I had been awake for hours, yet my ring indicated that it wasn’t that long at all. Knowing this, when I did wake up in the night, I felt less anxious about being able to fall back to sleep which meant the number of nights I woke up and was unable to fall back to sleep decreased. The less stressed I was about waking up in the night, the less I woke up and the easier it was to fall back to sleep when I did.
I discovered lots of other things too, but all of these could have been found out by tracking things manually. The ring was not required. One glass of wine and my sleep is great, two glasses and not so much… Long bike rides or runs that push my limits leave me struggling to get and stay asleep. Eating within two hours of bed definitely – especially if it’s a big meal - has a negative impact on my sleep quality and often results in me waking in the night and unable to fall back to sleep.
The bottom line
So, now you have lots of information on how to track your sleep and why you may (or may not) want to track it. How do you know what is right for you? if you think tracking your sleep is going to create stress about your sleep, consider not tracking at all or just do some basics – number of hours, how rested you feel and factors that may influence it.
If you’re already all up in your head and stressed about your sleep and feel more information would make you feel better or you are simply just curious, try digital tracking. However, ‘Know thyself’. If you tend to get a little stressed about your diet, your sleep, your exercise, do not go down this digital tracking path. It may not end well for you.
If you would like help with your sleep and other lifestyle habits, that’s what health coaching is for. Feel free to book a free 30-minute consultation to find out how health coaching can help you.
