You didn’t really think about sleep: It was just an activity that your body required, for about six to eight hours a night, in order to not feel like garbage the next day.
Although there’s a lot we don’t understand about sleep, we know that it’s incredibly important: Getting too little on a regular basis is associated with a range of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, and depression.
Sleep researchers generally agree that most adults need about seven to nine hours of sleep per night to stay in good health. Studies also show that we need high-quality sleep, which means falling asleep relatively quickly, sleeping soundly through the night, and spending most of the time that we’re in bed asleep.
“If you’re moving a lot, you’re highly unlikely to be asleep.”
That’s why CardoO Smartwatch harnesses more data, including heart rate, to provide insight into the entire sleep cycle.
The sleep cycle:
Sleep is far more than a nightly lapse in consciousness. While we’re getting those z’s, the brains and bodies are doing a lot, cycling through four different sleep stages like a person moving up and down between four floors of a house.
In these sleep stages, your heart rate, breathing, and brainwaves get progressively slower as you fall into a deeper and deeper slumber.
While the science of sleep continues to develop, what’s an average smartwatch-wearer to make of all this information? If you’re a healthy adult and you don’t suffer from a sleep disorder, you can probably trust your CardoO Smartwatch to do a pretty good job tracking your total sleep most of the time.
Ideally, in a world obsessed with productivity, trackers can help us all pay better attention to our sleep and think about how to improve it.
But if you feel like monitoring your metrics is stressing you out more than it’s helping, try taking the smartwatch off for a few nights. Maybe you’ll sleep better knowing you won’t be graded on it in the morning.