Is Your Activity Tracker Interfering With Your Sleep?

FitBit’s, Apple Watches and even under-mattress sleeping devices all claim now to be able to give you a deeper look at your sleep patterns as well as your daily activity levels. Heart rate, percent of REM sleep, daily step count and active minutes in a day are what we use now to gage our health. Activity trackers make it easy to become focused on these numbers - perhaps even obsessed with them

But how do activity trackers impact us when we sleep? And what type of role do these numbers play in our overall sleep patterns and health? The answer may surprise you.

Activity Trackers and Sleep

While activity trackers can give you an insight into many things in your life, there are limitations on what they can do. This is especially true when it comes to the reliance on them for personal sleep analytics. There’s a reason that sleep labs use so much equipment when monitoring sleepers - a wrist device simply can’t provide the accuracy or information needed to truly understand what happens while you sleep. 

As a whole, there are many positives and negatives when it comes to activity trackers - and more particularly the roles that activity trackers play with our sleep cycles. 

The Bad: Trackers Can Take Make You Focus on What The Numbers Say, Not How You Feel

Activity trackers can negatively impact or interfere with your sleep habits by creating a focus on sleep cycles numbers and sleep grades. People can put how they feel after sleeping or being active second, using the numbers and their grades as the main level of judging how they should feel. 

Like everything related to health there are best practices and standards that you should use as a base. Health, activity and sleep are very individualistic. Activity trackers can take this connection on personal feeling, health and sleep quality away. 

The Good: Trackers Can Remind Us To Be Active

A benefit of activity trackers is that they are a constant reminder to us to move our bodies. 

One way that activity trackers actually can help you sleep is by reminding you to be active during the day. Many of these trackers will buzz to remind you to get your steps or to stand up if you remain inactive for a certain period of time. It’s easier than ever to see on your wrist if you’ve taken 1,000 steps or 10,000 in a day. 

Moving your body and exercise is beneficial for your mood, your appetite and your sleep. In fact, deep, restful and high-quality sleep is linked to daily activity. This reminder is one way that activity trackers actually can help with your sleep.

The Bad: Trackers Are Used As Fact

A second way that activity and sleep trackers can take away from your sleep quality is by encouraging people to take what their sleep tracker says as fact. Sleep trackers are not exact. The best way to use a sleep tracker is to use it as a general base to give you an overarching idea of what your sleep is like. 

Many scientific reviews of activity trackers found that they can actually over estimate how much sleep people are getting. By leaning on the numbers produced by these trackers as fact, it can make you feel that you are getting more sleep than you are. So, if you are leaning on your tracker as the source of truth to your sleep, you could be concerned about feeling sleepy when your tracker says you’re getting 8 hours every night.

The Good: Sleep Timers on Activity Trackers Can Help You Maintain a Steady Sleep Pattern

Consistent sleep times can regulate your melatonin production and help get your body into a solid circadian rhythm - or the internal sleep-wake cycle within your body. During stressful times, or when you’re very much engaged in a new tv show, game or book it can be easy to bypass your bedtime. 

Many activity trackers come with sleep reminders or alerts to help you maintain a regular bedtime and waketime. In the long run, this will help improve your sleep. 

You Determine How Much Control Your Activity Tracker Has on Your Sleep

Activity trackers can interfere with your sleep as much as you let it. On a basic level on their own, they won’t impact your sleep. The interference comes from a person leaning too much on those numbers and becoming obsessive with what the tracker says about your sleep more so than what your body does. 

Activity tracker and sleep trackers are great to keep your health front of mind but should not be taken as fact. Remember that trackers are just a tool - not the top-most tool for tracking your sleep. They should be treated as such.