Tracking Your Sleep with Tech

Okay, we know, using technology to help your sleep doesn’t make much sense. It’s almost a widely accepted known fact that using technology as much as we do can actually damage our sleep habits and patterns, especially when using it in bed and during nighttime. If you haven’t been sleeping that well though, you may need some extra support getting the recommended 8-ish hours of sleep a night.

If you feel that your sleep health has been affected recently, you’re not alone either. With the stress and anxieties that have been, well, everywhere for the past few months, you might have been doomscrolling and finding it hard to get off your phone before bed. You might have been taking more naps during the day because you’re confined inside your home so much of the time and have nothing else to do, which then in turn makes it harder to sleep at night. Sleep disorders are also very common among those who have anxiety and/or depression, and with symptoms of these two mental illnesses increasing, and staying this way, due to COVID, these sleep disorders are likely to affect people more frequently now.

Making it a habit to monitor your sleep in the hopes of improving it might not only affect how well you sleep, but may improve your mental health as a whole. It’s a way to organize and feel productive and actively making changes to an important part of your overall health. You can keep a sleep journal by your bed, for example, or you can refer to some of the apps we’ve collected below. 

Just as a reminder though, just like any other habit tracking method, you shouldn’t rely on these organizational tools and use them as a measuring tool about how productive you are. If you end up taking a long nap for a few days in a row or don’t see improvements right away, or even if you are doing well but then only get a few hours of sleep one night, that’s okay! Overall, we hope that finding some method of tracking your sleep can help you take a step back and see what your sleep habits are like and how you can improve your sleep, mood, and mental health to feel like the best you.

If you have a Fitbit or smartwatch, you likely have a tool on there that tracks your sleep already – check the corresponding app for it on your phone to see if they do! Other than that, check out some of the free apps below:

Sleep Cycle
Sleep Watch
Sleep Score

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What are your sleeping habits like? How much sleep would you say you get per night? Has your sleeping patterns changed recently?