The pros and cons of using a sleep tracker

Disordered sleep can have a significant impact on your wider health.  As well as tiredness, prolonged periods of insufficient sleep can result in an inability to focus, higher blood pressure, and a range of mental health problems, including anxiety and depression. Learning the cause of your disordered sleep is therefore the first step to better overall health.

Many people are turning to sleep trackers to gain a better understanding of their sleep habits. The production and distribution of sleep tracker technology is a multi-billion-dollar industry, but what exactly can we learn from tracking our sleep, and what benefits do they have for our sleep health?

What is a sleep tracker?

As the name suggests, a sleep tracker is any device which is used to monitor your sleep cycle.

There are many such devices available, some of which are made by well-known tech companies. Some are designed to be left on your bedside table while you sleep, whereas others must be strapped to your wrist or placed on the pillow.

The potential benefits

Here are a few of the ways in which a sleep tracker might help you:

Having access to your sleep information will tell you how long it takes you to fall asleep, and how long you end to sleep each night. Without this information, it’s impossible to know for certain how many hours sleep is typical for you, thereby making it more difficult to make informed changes to your sleep habits and schedule.

A sleep tracker can help you discover any triggers which disrupt your sleep. For example, if a tracker tells you that you sleep much worse on nights when you’ve consumed alcohol, you will know to cut down on your alcohol consumption to improve the quality of your sleep.

If you can learn how interrupted your sleep is, you can measure when you tend to wake, and if these times align to any changes in your environment, such as sunrise, or the central heating coming on.

Many sleep trackers help you to gently wake up in the morning, thus promoting a healthier morning routine.

The potential drawbacks

While sleep trackers can be useful, they can also be unhelpful or even harmful, depending on who is using them and why.

The use of a sleep tracker causes certain people to overthink their sleep habits, developing an obsession which can impede sleep rather than aid it. Checking the tracker in the middle of the night or trying to have a ‘perfect’ night’s sleep instead of merely a healthy one are potentially dangerous behaviours.

Sleep trackers don’t provide perfect data and may be easily fooled depending on the type of sleeper you are. For example, if you move a lot while you sleep or talk in your sleep, a tracker might tell you that you’re getting a worse night’s rest than you actually are.

One of the biggest obstacles to healthy sleep these days is an overexposure to technology. While technology can be a wonderful thing, it can also cause a lot of health problems, such as anxiety and addiction. Sleep experts often tell their patients to avoid looking at a screen in the hours immediately before going to bed, and by adding another data-collecting screen to your life, you may be doing more harm than good.

Lastly, using a sleep tracker may give you a false sense of productivity; the feeling that you’re doing something to tackle the problem of poor sleep, when you actually aren’t.

Having data is one thing, acting on it another. The way to achieve regular restful sleep is to make behavioural changes, such as cutting down on screen time and alcohol consumption, creating the optimum sleep environment, and sticking to a consistent sleep pattern. A sleep tracker may help you to make these changes, but you have to be willing to take the next step yourself.

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