I have, for years, had activity trackers. Many years ago I started with the Jawbone Up I think. I’d met someone in Washington DC who had one and I really liked the look, design and functionality. Over time I’ve moved to Garmin devices because they are better designed. I currently have a Garmin Instinct and I really like it. I’ve probably mentioned it here before but I’m not sure I can be bothered to make the links.
The Instinct can “track” sleep. I think what it does is effectively monitor movement and pulse to decide what stage of sleep you are in. The first main stage of sleep is Deep Sleep. This is when you are absolutely whacked out and probably won’t respond to much stimulation. During this time, which ideally is around an hour your body does some magical stuff. It flushes bad stuff out of the brain that has built up during the day and it also repairs your stomach one third of which gets destroyed through the process of digesting food. After deep sleep the body will cycle through REM and sleep, maybe about an hour of each.
The above readout from my watch is practically perfect. It’s not often I have a night like this. The deep sleep is about right and then the cycles of the other forms of sleep makes a lovely pattern. Below as a contrast is an example of not-so-good sleep. You can see the poor pattern and movement around. The good sleep is reasonably rare as you can tell from the fact I wanted to write a communication about it.
