Your wearable is lying to you about sleep

What you should do about it

Bad sleep kills

Sleep is the most important element for your health, arguably more important than nutrition or exercise. There are over 260,000 scientific studies on sleep on PubMed. What they find is simple: disrupted sleep kills you, makes you unhappy and unproductive. Everything is worse from bad sleep.

The average person lives 10 years less due to bad sleep.*

Good sleep is not just sleep duration, although the volume itself is a huge problem. Good sleep is also about proper sleep architecture. This is a fancy way of saying you need to have good quality for each of the sleep stages: stage 1, 2, and especially deep sleep and REM sleep.

How much deep sleep did you get last night? What about REM sleep?

If you have a wearable, such as an Apple Watch, a fitness band, an Oura ring or a sport watch, you will be looking at it now. It will tell you that you got X minutes of deep sleep and Y minutes of REM sleep.

Your wearable is lying to you.

It cannot measure your sleep stages.

Although companies make big claims about sleep stages, they don’t offer any actual proof that their…