On World Sleep Day today, doctors from across the board highlight the importance of a good night’s rest and recommend apps and devices that can help improve its quality and schedule
Experts recommend waking up and going to bed at the same time daily, including on weekends, to improve and maintain the quality of your sleep cycle. Representation pic
Schedule matters
Dr Wilona Annunciation, MD consultant psychiatrist and founder, Catalysts Clinic
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Owing to our hectic schedules and limited attention spans, maintaining and following a sleep routine feels like a Herculean task. Thankfully, with the progress in technology, we have quite a few good apps that actually aid in our attempts to achieve sound sleep. However, it is important to remember that while these apps may help us try to get better sleep, we still need to put in active efforts to truly enhance our sleep quality. Maintaining a sleep schedule, having a bedtime routine, keeping your devices away around bedtime, etc, can be the little steps that we take along with these apps to ensure sound sleep.
My recco: I use my Apple watch with Health App and that helps me track my sleep routine. I usually monitor it weekly and ensure I get at least six to eight hours of restful sleep. When I notice discrepancies patterns, I link that to diet and exercise habits, and factor in any major changes in my routine. Understanding and modifying these in the longer run helps me stay consistent with my sleep routine.
The hunger-sleep link
Dr Juhi Agarwal, clinical nutritionist
Less sleep makes you less productive, hungrier and more lethargic the next day. But why is this? One of the main reasons is the imbalance of your hunger hormone, ghrelin, and stress hormone, cortisol. Lack of sleep increases both and this causes you to reach out for high carb, processed and high sugar foods, and increases your heart rate.
My recco: I use the Oura Ring to track my sleep. It helps me prioritise my rest so that I can increase productivity and immunity. It tracks the quality of your sleep through heart rate variability. If the variability is high, it means the recovery and rest was of good quality. This helps me correlate the types of food that reduce the variability and therefore, the quality of sleep. Additionally, it gives me insights into how my body is on low reserves and I reduce the intensity of my workout or take a rest day accordingly, especially a week before my period.
Plan your routine
Dr Joy Desai, director of neurology at Jaslok Hospital & Research Centre
For sleep benefits to be accrued, it is vital to ensure sleep duration, timing, depth/quality throughout life. Sleeping late and waking up late in a rhythm out of sync with the circadian clocks is also deleterious for health. Maintaining a regular sleep routine, exercising in the morning, meditation, avoiding coffee after 3 pm, curtailing alcohol consumption, and restricting screen time within one hour of bedtime are simple sleep hygiene promoting lifestyle measures. Sleep apps are essentially wired to track sleep timings and to some extent measured sleep depth.
My Recco: Sleep Cycle is a popular choice and most other sleep apps, including the ones built into smart watches, are similar. However, they do not provide cues to maintain sleep timing and circadian rhythms. An app called My Circadian Clock [above] tries to bridge this gap but requires individual activity timings from your daily routine to be fed into the app algorithm for it to gauge optimacy.
Also check out
Sleep Watch: The app tracks sleep, sounds of snoring, tossing and turning. When connected with the Apple watch, it also provides details of heart rate throughout the night. The next day, it creates a report on the basis of a few questions like how well rested one feels, and how many times one gets up in the middle of the night, etc. It provides information regarding BMI and what somebody’s sleep quality should be like by comparing it with that of the others of the same age. Note that only some of these features can be availed for free.
Log on to: AppStore
Sleep Cycle: This app has a collection of meditating music, bedtime stories, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) and sleep coaching segments. Its smart alarm clock wakes you up in your lightest sleep phase with soft and gentle alarm tones. The app provides reminders before bedtime. However, several features are exclusively for paid users; it also does not give sleep statistics daily. For more detailed statistics, it needs at least five successive days of sleep tracking.
Log on to: AppStore; PlayStore
Prime Nap: This free app uses the phone’s microphone to detect any movement or disturbances in sleep. It includes a dream journal to track dream patterns. The smart alarm comes with a customisable sound library. Cons for the app is that the interface is a tad difficult to navigate, with not very sleek and up-to-date graphics.
Log on to: AppStore
Inputs by Dr Wilona Annunciation
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