Your morning routine includes waking up, picking up your phone and looking at your sleep score before you even walk out the door. Your sleep timer shows you that you slept for 7h and 42m, slept for a “below average” amount of deep sleep, and your recovery score is not on par. All of a sudden, with no idea of pain, you think to yourself, “do I think I slept well?Then unexpectedly, you consider, “do I think that I slept well?
It’s the weird world of health tracking these days. Our watches, rings and fitness bands can tell us more about our daily habits than ever before. They track your movement, heart rate, sleep schedule, recovery and stress. As health can now be quantified, though, an increasingly pertinent question is, are wearables truly making us healthier, or are we just making it easier for ourselves to monitor our health?
When Sleep Became a Score
Previously, sleep was something we used to do, not measure. You sleep, wake up and you know if you were rested or not. Nowadays, sleep is another measure of performance. We look at our score from last night, the numbers from yesterday and compare our deep sleep percentage and strive to get better week after week.
It’s not a bad idea to pay attention to sleep. In fact, it can be helpful to understand your sleeping patterns. Seeing the pattern can help you get motivated to make a change if you always go to bed late, sleep for too few hours, or have an irregular sleep schedule. The issue is when the number is more important than how you feel.
Sleep score: is an approximation that is being produced from the signals your device can measure. It doesn’t represent the whole of what’s going on in your body during sleep. While your wearable may give you helpful information, it can’t simplify something as intricate as sleep and of course your health as a whole.
The Pressure to Get “Perfect” Sleep
Optimisation is a term that has become ubiquitous in the wellness world. Ideal bedtimes, ideal wake ups, recommended sleep times, recovery targets, and supposedly perfect routines. Throw in a wearable, and sleeping may begin to feel like an exam you need to pass each night!
You may have been sleeping for 8 hours but worry that your deep-sleep percentage wasn’t as high as normal. Perhaps you get up in the morning feeling like you’re full of energy and feel disappointed in your results. The desire for improvement can sometimes lead to stress over a restorative activity.
That’s where the word orthosomnia has come into the picture too much worry about getting what is considered “perfect” sleep according to wearable data. It’s ironic that a device to help you get a better sleep is also a reason to think about sleep.
In a lot of ways, more data isn’t necessarily better data.
It’s certainly made people more conscious about their health with the use of wearables. A step count goal may help get people more active. If a pattern of sleeping for too long or too short is detected, this can be an indicator of unhealthy sleep habits. The resting heart rate or activity can help individuals catch the changes in their body, which they might not have noticed if they were not looking for them.
Awareness is not understanding. The more numbers doesn’t necessarily mean better health. Walking a certain number of steps doesn’t mean that you are eating a balanced diet. Awareness of your sleep score doesn’t give you all the information you need about the quality of your sleep. Knowing how much you exercise does not mean that your lifestyle is sustainable.
When data changes behaviour for the better, it’s useful. It isn’t very helpful when it just provides you with yet another number to worry about.
Your wearable does not know what you are wearing
In wearable technology applications, one of the biggest constraints is that it only measures what its sensors can measure and then decodes the information using algorithms. For example, sleep stages are typically measured by movement and heart rate rather than directly measured from brain activity like a clinical sleep study.
Wearable data is not completely null and void. It’s just a matter of knowing what the information is. A trend of overnight scores may not be as significant as a trend over several weeks. If a persistent change and symptoms are present, it might warrant more attention than if it were just a low reading.
The key difference is when you are using technology to notice patterns, versus making assumption about your health.
The healthiest things are the ones that can’t always be measured.
One more challenge with datafying health is that certain facets of wellbeing just don’t fit on a dashboard.
How active are you during the day? Can you concentrate? Do the exercises make you feel good? Are you able to take time out to chill out? Do you have quality time with family and friends? Do you have the ability to turn off your work and technology? Are you excited about your day when you get up in the morning?
There are no guarantees that any of these experiences will result in a score.
However, all of them are associated with a healthy lifestyle. One person does not have to be a “bad” sleeper because they do not earn a sleep score. One person is not a “bad” sleeper because they do not get a sleep score. There are a myriad of factors that affect one’s health and well-being, and physical activity is just one of them; it is not something that can be measured by a single piece of equipment worn on the wrist.
So, do wearables make people healthier?
It will depend on the way we use them, of course. Wearables can be great when they remind us to do things in a healthier way, and help us identify trends. When a person begins walking more simply because he or she is being tracked on a daily basis, he or she may actually be benefiting from the feedback. If a person observes they are always feeling tired at night, they can use their sleep data to create a more productive sleep schedule.
However, there is a point when tracking is not beneficial. Repetitive monitoring of all metrics, struggling with minor fluctuations and letting the algorithm decide if you had a “good” or “bad” day can become another stress factor for health tracking.
Don’t fixate on making the dashboard perfect. The aim is to create a healthy lifestyle.
Maybe We Need to Track Less, Not More
The next generation of health technology doesn’t have to go about gathering more information. There’s already a tremendous amount of data at our fingertips. The real challenge is to determine what information is helpful and what numbers can be ignored.
Your wearable will tell you the amount of time you slept. You have the choice of feeling rested.
It can tell you the amount of movement performed. Whether your body feels strong and capable is up to you.
It can demonstrate patterns. But what do those patterns mean in your life?
Technology can help improve your health, but it shouldn’t be a decision maker.
The Sleep Score is not the health score. The Sleep Score is not the health score.
The best way to use wearable technology is actually quite straightforward: use the data, but don’t do it as if it were the law.
Focus on patterns rather than individual scores. Listen to your feelings as well as what your device says. Expand awareness, not anxiety, by using technology. And keep in mind that nothing can get to the whole truth about your health through an algorithm.
Sometimes the most important health indicator isn’t on your wrist.
It’s how you feel when you get up in the morning, and start your day and live your life.
