With regard to sleep tracking apps, I have Idiopathic Hypersomnia, a rare sleep disorder that causes excessive daytime sleepiness, sleeping for long hours, sleep “drunkenness”, central sleep apnea, and resulting short term memory problems. I’ve used literally every sleep app I could get my hands on and they are all terrible. I’ve used the Fitbit and Apple Watch heart monitors, the cpap machine’s app (Philips), and medical grade, at home ones.
Most of the apps that supposedly track sleep cycles do so in very lackadaisical fashion. They measure small variations in heart rate to determine the sleep stage you’re on, but I’m the ultimate edge case and they all ways fall short. Even medical grade sleep monitors stuff ends up not working right because half the time it thinks I’ve gone into cardiac arrest because my heart rate falls so low (The random 3 hour block of time in the night being reported as “deceased” was a little jarring).
Sleep comes (perhaps too) easy to me, but my partner is not so lucky. She used to obsess over the sleep tracking stuff until the Apple Watch where it just measures time asleep, a way more measurable and meaningful metric. I mean, what are you going to do with the knowledge of being in deep sleep from 1:28am until 2:09am? Nothing. You cannot control it or will it to be better, practicing good sleep hygiene by going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time is way more important than knowing the stage of sleep you’re in at any given part of the night. The most rested I feel is when I have a consistent sleep routine, and contemporary medical advice supports this.
Ditch the sleep apps that track your sleep, it’s just another thing to worry a about.