Months Of Sleep Tracking Taught Me These 6 Essential Sleep Lessons

Sleep is something I think (and write) about a lot. And after years of interviewing doctors who specialize in the essential human function, it's become clear to me that quality is more important than quantity.

That is, spending eight hours in bed at night doesn't necessarily guarantee that you'll wake up refreshed the next morning. Sleep quality is more dependent on how much time you spend in the two last stages of sleep: REM and deep sleep, or slow-wave sleep. Those later stages are where the body recovers from the day and the brain flushes out waste and consolidates memories.

Unless you're sleeping hooked up to an ECG, it's impossible to know how long you actually spend in these later stages every night. But personalized sleep trackers, while not perfect, can give you a pretty good read on what's happening under the hood when you're snoozing.

Curious to learn more about my own sleep quality and what influences it, I connected with the team at Oura, who were kind enough to give me a tracker to try. What's unique about Oura is its ring design. Beyond being more comfortable to wear to bed than a watch, Oura CEO Harpreet Rai explained to me that the ring had a functional component too: Our fingers tend to have a stronger pulse signal than the front of our wrists, which Oura says allows them to take more accurate readings throughout the night. It uses this to approximate the amount of time you spend in the various sleep stages.

The ring also provides data on other factors that could be relevant to sleep quality, like average resting heart rate and body temperature (interestingly enough, some clinical studies have tested the ring for early COVID detection).

Clearly, "good sleep" doesn't rely on just one thing. "Sleep is a complicated metric to measure," board-certified sleep specialist Michael Breus, Ph.D., said of sleep trackers during a recent event with mattress company Hästens. For this reason, he recommends using trackers to measure any sleep trends that occur over time and not getting too hung up on the numbers that come in nightly. "It's not about the absolute data; it's about the relative data," he added.

I started this experiment a little nervous. I wondered, slipping on my silver ring, do I really want to know how well I'm sleeping? Will knowing that my sleep is being tracked make it harder to relax? These thoughts raced through my head for what was, ultimately, hours, and I slept terribly that first night.

A few days after that window had passed, I ran out of something I've been using to get a good night's sleep for a while: sleep support+. mbg's sleep supplement contains a blend of relaxing ingredients like magnesium glycinate, jujube, and pharmaGABA, and taking two every night has been helping me sleep more steadily since COVID-19 started.

When I spoke with Rai from Oura, he said that the ring's data is meant to encourage people to do some self-reflection and decide for themselves what habits are most important to stick to for better sleep. For him, it's stopping drinking coffee before 10. a.m. and eating dinner earlier when possible.

I spent the first month of this year abstaining from booze. And once I started reintroducing alcohol to my nightly routine, my sleep suffered—but not in the way I imagined.

I spent the first chunk of this year sleeping in my NYC apartment. When I packed up and went to spend time with family in rural Vermont, things really got interesting.

Remember how I mentioned before that my time in REM and deep sleep is always pretty low? When I swapped the city for the country, it nearly doubled. Every night for weeks, I was consistently clocking more than enough of both and could feel it in my mood and energy levels the next day.

Maybe it was the newfound sense of quiet, or maybe it was the crisp, cool air. Either way, it's not necessarily a lesson I can act on now that I'm back in the city—but it is a reminder that keeping a chilly, dark, quiet bedroom environment is key.