Sleep tracking is increasingly popular, offering insights into your sleep patterns and overall health. From professional athletes to data enthusiasts, many use these devices – typically a watch or ring – to monitor metrics like heart rate, temperature, and movement, ultimately assigning you a sleep score. While not perfectly accurate, these scores can reveal trends in your sleep habits, acting as a valuable indicator of your sleep quality. As board-certified sleep medicine specialist Nishi Bhopal, M.D., explains, “It’s more important to track trends over time rather than single nights.”
Here are five key factors that can significantly impact your sleep score, along with actionable steps to get it back on track:
1. Going to Bed Too Late
Everyone has a natural window of time when their bodies are primed for sleep – known as your “chronotype.” Pushing your bedtime beyond this ideal window can negatively affect your sleep score, even if you try to compensate by sleeping in. For example, wearing an Oura ring revealed that eight hours of sleep starting at 10:30 p.m. consistently resulted in better scores than eight hours beginning closer to 11:30 p.m., leading to less REM and deep sleep on the later nights.
What to do: While occasional late nights are unavoidable, consistently delaying bedtime can be detrimental. Naturopathic sleep doctor Catherine Darley, N.D., recommends setting a “bedtime alarm” an hour before your ideal bedtime as a reminder to wind down.
2. Racing Thoughts at Night
Stress and worries often intensify when you lie down to sleep, triggering your fight-or-flight response and releasing cortisol. This can increase sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep), creating a cycle of worry about sleep deprivation that’s reflected in your sleep data.
What to do: Consider incorporating calming ingredients or supplements into your nightly routine to quiet the mind.
3. Excessive Light Exposure
Even small amounts of light exposure can disrupt sleep, shortening overall sleep duration, increasing wakefulness, and reducing deep and REM sleep. This is why shift workers often struggle to establish healthy sleep cycles.
What to do: Invest in blackout curtains to minimize light pollution. Alternatively, wearing a sleep mask can protect deep sleep and improve alertness the following day.
4. Late-Night Dining
Eating dinner too close to bedtime can interfere with sleep quality. Digesting a heavy meal before sleep can keep you awake longer or cause nighttime awakenings. The effect is compounded by alcohol consumption.
What to do: Aim to finish dinner roughly three hours before bedtime to allow for digestion. Establish a consistent mealtime routine, and prioritize lighter, easily digestible foods, particularly those containing sleep-supporting nutrients like magnesium, on occasional late nights.
5. Insufficient Daily Activity
Even nights where you feel like you slept well, your tracker might reveal restlessness. A lack of physical activity during the day can lead to nighttime restlessness, as exercise helps tire the body and relax the mind.
What to do: Incorporate daily movement into your routine. Resistance exercise, in particular, has been shown to increase sleep duration and reduce sleep latency.
While sleep trackers aren’t perfect, they can highlight areas in your sleep routine that need adjustment. By addressing these key factors—bedtime consistency, mental clarity, minimizing light, timing meals, and increasing daily activity—you can work towards improving your sleep score and ultimately enhance your overall health and well-being. If you’re in the market for a new tracker, consider one that delivers accurate data for more actionable insights
