How to track sleep  on an Apple Watch?

Sleep is especially important for health and can therefore affect health. However, about 10% of modern people have sleep problems. Maybe it is not serious enough to be a sleep disorder, but the poor quality of sleep will get worse, which will evolve into a sleep disorder and then affect health. Therefore, in the recent health data recording of wearable devices, the recording of sleep time is also emphasized. If you are an Apple Watch wearer, you may as well start with the upcoming World Sleep Day, turn on the sleep tracking function, and observe your sleep quality well.

How to track sleep on an Apple Watch

Open the Sleep app on your Apple Watch
Set your nightly goals, sleep and wake-up schedule
Turn on Sleep Focus and set a Wind Down time
Enable Sleep Tracking; turn on sleep and charging reminders
View your recent sleep data

World Sleep Day is a global event founded by the World Sleep Society. It is scheduled for the third Friday of every March. This year is March 15. The purpose of World Sleep Day is to remind people to pay more attention to sleep and educate people on the importance of sleep. Recently, in the health data recording of wearable devices, the recording of sleep time is also emphasized. Taking Apple Watch as an example, after upgrading to watchOS 9, most of them can use the sleep tracking function. The operation mode is to detect whether the user is in the rapid eye movement period, the core sleep period, or the deep sleep stage through the signals emitted by the accelerometer and heart rate sensor.

Before enabling the sleep tracking function, you can go to the “Health” app on your iPhone or iPad to first set your sleep goals, including the target time, bedtime, and wake-up time.

Then, in the “Watch” app on your iPhone or iPad, find the “Sleep” feature and turn on “Track sleep with Apple Watch”. Then, just wear the Apple Watch to sleep every night and let it automatically track your sleep.

More importantly, you need to turn on the “Sleep Focus” mode during sleep to reduce distractions that appear on your iPhone and Apple Watch, so that you can have a good sleep.

The information recorded by Apple Watch can also be viewed in the “Sleep” feature of the Health app to understand your sleep quality. The recorded sleep data can be divided into rapid eye movement sleep (rapid eye movement period), non-rapid eye movement sleep (relatively stable core sleep), and deep sleep. In good sleep quality, deep sleep accounts for 15%, core sleep accounts for 50-60%, and rapid eye movement period accounts for 20%. If you feel that you have slept for a long time but are still very tired, perhaps you will find that you have not entered deep sleep.

Of course, exercise can also help with sleep. For cases with sleep disorders, it is usually recommended to increase the amount of exercise, but it must also be regular. According to the habits of diurnal animals, the exercise should be scheduled during the day, and it should be moderate and timely. It is not that if you exercise to the limit during the day, you will be tired and fall asleep at night. Sometimes it will have the opposite effect. If you want to know if your activity level is enough, you can view data such as activities, walking, and exercise through iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, which also helps to improve the activity level. In addition, if you want to exercise, it is also reminded not to do it three hours before going to bed, because the effect of the sympathetic nerve will make you more energetic, and it will take enough time to ease before you can enter the sleep state.