I've been using sleep trackers for a while now, and I'm not sure yet what I think of the new native sleep tracking of watchOS 7. The native sleep tracker seem to pretty much be in line with the data from Autosleep in terms of Awake vs Asleep times for the past two nights. But I still don't know what I think of the native sleep tracker. Here's why...
There are lots of numbers to be watched and analysed about sleep. You can choose to try to display all of these numbers in one overview, but these numbers don't really mean anything if you don't know what they mean, how to interpret them or know how to act on them. And they for sure don't mean a thing if you do know all of this, but just decide not to act on it.
Take sleep regularity for example. Sleep regularity is very important to improve your sleep. You can choose to just display it as a number somewhere, which is what all sleep tracking apps have done, or you can choose not to display it but actively motivate you to go to sleep at the same time every night. Wind down is like your mother sending you to bed. Yes, it's annoying at first, but for sure she knows best!
An example about wrongly interpreted numbers. Morning heart rate and heart rate variability. Autosleep combines these into one variable called readiness. "Readiness" is used in training for a long time and it means how well your body is ready for training. But readiness won't capture itself in just a single number. The truth is that there are many different training forms and many different states of readiness. But for each train form, your readiness is always pretty binary. You are either ready for it, or you don't. For example, if you have a low resting pulse and a high heart rate variability, your body is ready for any type of training, while if you have a high resting pulse and a low heart rate variability or just a low heart rate variability, it's best to give your body rest. But, if you have a high resting pulse and also a high heart rate variability, you can perfectly do a recovery training or some D1 endurance. You can never be 80% ready for a HIIT or a Maximum Overload strength training. So combining resting pulse and heart rate variability in to one digit and simply call it "Readiness" does not make sense at all.
And now an example of really useless numbers. Many sleep tracking apps display a nice graph of your sleep cycles. No matter how good or bad your sleep cycles look, this graph doesn't mean anything about how good or bad you will be feeling the next day. There is also nothing you do to directly improve them. You cannot go to sleep and say to yourself you are going to work on your sleep cycles that night. Your sleep rhythm is just the result of the stress that your body needs to clean up during your sleep. The only way you can improve your sleep cycles, is just to live healthier. Eat healthier food, be more active and also relax from time to time. Sure, it's nice to see that after a late night at the bar, your sleep is all messed up. But it actually means that your body is doing it's work just fine, as it's number one priority is to get rid of the alcohol. You won't be feeling groggy the next that because of the sleep cycles themselves, but because of the reason these sleep cycles are the way they are. Again, you can choose to just display a nice graph, or you can try to actively motivate people to live healthier.
So, in short: You can actively change your intent to go to sleep, you can actively change your lifestyle to be more active and start eating healthier, and you can actively choose to relax from time to time, and that will have an effect on your sleep, but you can never actively improve your sleep! If just showing you all the numbers, is what you need to get motivated then that's nice! The reality is however that most people are not. In the same way that weighing yourself every day has never really motivated anyone to change their lifestyle.
