When someone has had a good night's sleep, they say, “I slept like a baby. No one says, "I slept like a middle-aged man."
Sleep is a precious commodity that in the stock market of life is headed for a bear market once you hit middle age. I haven't slept through the night in a decade. No mattress or pillow cushions my body satisfactorily, and I have enough scooters in the middle of the night, half-bathroom-like, to qualify as a midnight marathon runner.
Enter the technology to solve, no, follow my problems.
Most wearable devices now offer sleep tracking as if all of humanity is crying out at once for a binary entity to watch over their dreams. I have used some. More recently, I spent the night with the Withings Scanwatch Horizon and an Apple Watch 7 (one on each wrist) to compare their sleep tracking capabilities. Back then, Scanwatch Horizon was a more expert tracker.
Apple's watchOS 9, which it unveiled this week at WWDC 2022, should change that equation. The updated portable operating system, which is currently in developer beta and will ship this fall, adds "suspension stages." This means the watch will know when I'm in REM (Rapid Eye Movement, associated with dreams), Core (also known as "slow wave sleep" and an essential part of sleep), or Deep Sleep (actually a part of sleep). central). ). It will do all of this using just the accelerometer and heart rate sensor of the watch.
Apple updates sleep app with sleep stage data #WWDC22 pic.twitter.com/ubKD72muJHJune 6, 2022
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Sleeping well must include all of these steps. My dream has REM and not enough Core, at least that's what I'm sure watchOS 9 would show me in its new detailed graphics.
I'm not arguing about the obvious benefit of a sleep tracker, which can shape your sleep patterns and issues.
On the other hand, I don't need a smart watch telling me I wake up every 25 minutes or so.
During this aforementioned test, my sleep was worse than usual because I was wearing two bulky watches on my wrists. At least the Apple Watch is thinner, lighter, and smoother. Sleeping with the Withings Scanwatch Horizon was crazy. I was rolling on my hand and the rotating bezel of the watch was cutting into my ribs.
Just because the Apple Watch is more comfortable doesn't mean it's a natural part of my sleep. Without painting the picture too much, I like to be relatively clear in bed. I'm wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. Lying in bed with a clock, I often feel like The Princess and the Pea. It is a small device that has a big impact on my comfort.
Comfort aside, I have a hard time understanding how having all these details about my sleep problems will improve the situation. I think I'll just put an exclamation point on it. "So you thought you were sleeping terribly? Let me show you how monstrous it really is! How do you survive?!"
Sleeping, like eating, is something fundamentally human, it is something alive. This is also the time when we are most vulnerable. Why do we need to introduce technology there?
I prefer the purity of sleep without technology (I say, taking the alarm from my iPhone, which I place right next to my bed).
When watchOS 9 hits public beta next month, I'll probably try sleep tracking, for work, but as soon as it does, I'll take the watch off before bed and enjoy another restless night. I already know everything I need to know about my lousy sleeping habits, with or without Apple Watch and watchOS 9.
Speaking of the Apple Watch, does anyone know why it took so long for Apple to add heart rate training?