Track Your Sleep With Apple Watch
I share a bedroom with at least one person, sometimes two or three, depending on whether any children migrate at night. So I feel like I have superpowers when I wake up and turn off the alarm five minutes before it actually goes off. I’m certainly not super: it’s just a silent alarm clock on my Apple Watch.
The silent alarm helps me get up for my morning workout, and the fact that it can track my sleep means I can keep track of whether I go to bed early enough every night. You don’t need to track your sleep every night, but a tracker like Watch or Fitbit can help you automatically determine if you’re consistently enough or not.
There is another small benefit to sleeping with a tracker that can measure your heart rate: you get your true resting heart rate. Your heart rate is lowest when you are truly resting — not sitting, walking, finishing a workout, and when you’re lying in bed and not moving for a few minutes. (It’s also difficult to measure this first thing in the morning if the first thing that happens is the alarm goes off, scaring you before bodybuilding.)
Knowing your resting heart rate is, again, optional, but useful to have: as you exercise and get better, your resting heart rate will decrease. If you are stressed by an illness or too much exercise, your resting heart rate may rise again.
To take advantage of sleep tracking and silent alarms, there are a few things you need to set up first.
Charge your watch while you shower
Finding the time to charge your Apple Watch is your first problem to solve. Unlike Fitbit models that can last seven days on a single charge, Apple expects the watch to last 18 hours of battery life if you check the time 90 times, get 90 notifications (that’s too much ) and practice for an hour with music playing. clock. It takes two hours to fully charge the battery, but you get the first 80 percent charge in 90 minutes.
The best time to charge the battery is twice a day, morning and evening. I keep the charger in the bathroom and set my watch to charge while I shower, right after my morning workout. I leave it there while I dress, pack my kids’ meals, and do all my other morning chores. I dress when I leave the house. Then in the evening I do one more exercise. Forty to 60 minutes twice a day and you’re done.
Put your watch into cinema mode while you sleep
Apple Watch thinks they’re so smart. It turns on when you look at your wrist, which is sometimes handy, but illuminates the room if you are anything but still in the dark. Luckily, there is a quick tweak to stop this.
Swipe up from the bottom of the clock and small happy and sad masks will appear on one of the control center buttons. This turns on the theater mode. In Theater mode, the screen will remain dark unless you tap on your face or press one of the buttons. Notifications are also disabled, but the alarm will still ring you on schedule.
Mute cover to mute sound
There is another pitfall. The handy Mute feature lets you turn off notifications by placing your hand on the watch face. When your watch vibrates to wake you up, you can turn it off too. So you can turn off the alarm without even realizing it.
There is no convenient control center button for this. Go to the Apple Watch app and find Cover to Mute in the Sounds & Haptics settings menu.
Choose an app for good sleep
I love the sleep hours that automatically track your sleep and give you useful stats every morning. When you look at your stats, you are asked how rested you felt when you woke up, which is honestly a better indicator of sleep quality than any of the data points it can electronically track.
For the alarm, I just use the watch’s built-in alarm function.
Sleep ++ and Pillow provide simpler statistics, which means you only track sleep time (good) and “sleep quality”, which is unreliable in any application . Pillow also has a Smart Wake up alarm, which aims to find the lightest sleep 30 minutes (or 15 to 60 minutes of your choice) before the alarm time. Other alarms wo n’t go off while Pillow is tracking your sleep, so choose well.
If you’re already using a sleep cycle on your phone, you can also use it with your watch, but it still expects your phone to be on the bedside table listening through the microphone. (The Watch feature adds the ability to track your heart rate, but you have to pay for a premium subscription to use it.)