How do you sleep?

If you’re like me, you might be starting to realize the critical importance of sleep. For years, the importance of sleep has been marginalized—even by the health and fitness community. With our frenetic, productivity-driven lives, a good night’s sleep has been replaced by more work, socialization, or worse—late nights staring at a screen.  It wasn’t until recently, when I listened to an interview with sleep scientist Matthew Walker, Ph.D. that I realized the profound and far-reaching impact of sleep on our overall health. 

We all know that a poor night of sleep can make you feel groggy, irritable and less focused.  But did you know that chronic sleep deprivation can impact your risk for Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease?  Or that sleep is one of the most powerful weapons against high blood pressure and can improve diabetic control without medications and their unwanted side effects?  This is all without pointing out the most important factor: unlike eating a healthy diet or exercising, sleeping is enjoyed by virtually everyone! Yet you will still here “I don’t need sleep” or “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”  These are the mentalities that society has ingrained in our heads—and it’s quite literally killing us.

If you read Walker’s Why We Sleep (or at least listen at least some of his 3 part, life-changing interview with Peter Attia), you will soon realize there is hardly any aspect of your health that sleep does not impact.  You can consider it the “third pillar” of health after diet and exercise, although it may even trump both of these in terms of its importance.  Think about it: you sleep for nearly 1/3 of your life…how much time do you spend eating or exercising?  Yet diet and exercise get far more attention from the media (and on this blog for that matter!).  Quite simply, sleep is the most important bio hack, and most of us are ignoring it despite its simplicity and enjoyment.   

But that is changing. With the advent of wearable technology more and more people are becoming interested in not just quantifying their sleep, but also getting more qualitative data. A number of products are already on the market. As we’ve written about before, we are long-term users of the Fitbit technology which provides pretty good sleep tracking, including data on sleep phases (REM, deep, etc) for the devices that incorporate a heart rate monitor. But if you find yourself really wanting to take your sleep analysis to the next level you might be looking at the OURA ring. This tiny, lightweight ring packs a lot of technological punch. It incorporates a very sensitive heart rate monitor that can even record heart rate variability, as well as sensors that can measure body temperature and respiratory rate. At the end of the night you get an impressive analysis incorporating all of this data packaged up as a “sleep score” and a “readiness score.”  In a forthcoming post, we’ll review what goes into these scores and how they impact my behavior and sleep.

But do you really need a sleep tracker? It depends. If you wake up and feel good, have steady energy and mental clarity throughout the day, and no health problems to improve upon…you are probably good. After all, do you need a $300 ring or watch to tell you what you already know? But if you wake several times at night, feel sleepy in the afternoon, or notice your physical or mental performance deteriorating, it might be time to take a closer look with a tool that can objectively and quantitatively analyze your sleep. Stay tuned to find out more about my experience with OURA, but for now its safe to say the information it provides has been quite insightful and more impactful than what I got from Fitbit.

~Brendan