Utilizing your Apple Watch for sleep monitoring? Here are 3 essential features to leverage
In the world of health and fitness, a new mom and editor is finding solace in an unexpected corner - the sleep feature on her Apple Watch Series 10. Despite not being a regular meditator, she finds the Sleep Meditations on Apple Fitness Plus helpful for deep breathing and relaxation, incorporating them into her bedtime routine.
The Apple Watch Series 10 offers more than just fitness tracking. Its sleep features are designed to optimize nightly rest and improve sleep quality. The three key features to focus on are:
- Sleep Stages Tracking: The Apple Watch tracks your sleep in stages - REM, Core, Deep sleep, and time awake. Understanding how long you spend in each stage helps assess sleep quality and make behavioral changes to improve restorative sleep, especially Deep sleep, which is crucial for body recovery.
- Sleep Schedule Setup: Setting a consistent sleep schedule through the Sleep app helps regulate your body clock and improves sleep consistency, which is foundational to better sleep hygiene. The watch can remind you when to wind down and when to wake, supporting better sleep habits.
- Vitals and Health Metrics Integration: The Apple Watch integrates with the Vitals app to monitor health metrics during sleep, such as heart rate variability and potentially body temperature. This integration helps provide insights into your overall sleep quality and restoration.
In addition to these features, Apple is reportedly developing a new Sleep Score feature, which would synthesize multiple sleep metrics into a single score predicting how rested and focused you’ll be during the day. This would be an advanced tool to optimize sleep based on quantitative scoring.
To further enhance relaxation, Ambient Music is available in four categories - Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing. Setting up a sleep schedule on the Apple Watch will provide wind down reminders as bedtime approaches and switch off notifications across all Apple devices.
The Vitals app, in particular, has been a game-changer for the health editor. It provides a breakdown of health metrics each morning, including sleep stages, sleep duration, nightly heart rate, respiratory rate, and wrist temperature. Moreover, it can alert users of potential health issues before they occur, as it did for the speaker with mastitis.
In conclusion, the Apple Watch Series 10 offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help users achieve better sleep. By focusing on sleep stages tracking, setting a consistent sleep schedule, and leveraging the insights from the Vitals app, you can optimize your nightly rest and wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day.
The Apple Watch Series 10's sleep features, beyond fitness tracking, are designed to optimize rest and improve sleep quality. These features include understanding sleep stages, setting a consistent sleep schedule, and integrating vitals and health metrics, helping to assess sleep quality and implement changes for better sleep hygiene.
Incorporating sleep features from Apple Watch Series 10, like Sleep Meditations on Apple Fitness Plus, into a nighttime routine might contribute to improved health and wellness, and possibly even promote fitness and exercise the following day.
