How I Am Using Technology To Reclaim My Sleep
What worked, didn’t work and what I have learned So Far
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I had a problem. I simply couldn’t sleep more than 4–5 hours at a stretch on any given night.
I had another problem — Sleep when it did come, used to be mostly broken, very light, hardly refreshing and would leave me tired in the morning!
It reached a point where I started telling people that sleep and I don’t get along and prided myself on getting by with less sleep.
Until I started working out regularly.
Sleep has a tremendous impact on how well your body recovers. Not only that, lack of sleep inhibits the growth of good cells in the body and promotes the growth of tumors among other things as detailed by scientist and researcher Matt Walker in this TED talk.
So, instead of accepting that I just cannot sleep, I decided to do something about it.
I started tracking my sleep in the beginning of 2019 with the goal to average 6 hours of sleep over the course of the year. While I narrowly missed the target, I did learn a lot about my sleep in the process.
Tools I use to track my sleep
Fitbit Versa
I got this as a gift in 2018 on my birthday. A Versa tracks your heart rate, your workouts, the steps you take, and of course sleep. I wasn’t tracking my sleep in 2018 but at the start of 2019, when I decided to track it, this was very handy.
Below are some screenshots of how this looks in the Fitbit App.
If you don’t have a Fitbit and cannot afford to buy one, there are tons of sleep tracking apps that you can download on your existing smartphone. You can also…
