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One of the nice things about summer in high latitudes is the long, light evenings. The downside, of course, is that the sun comes up early. Tonight near London, for instance, there will be less than eight hours between sunset and sunrise. That can make it tricky to get a full night’s sleep.
If I wanted to know just how disturbed my sleep really is by the early-morning light, I could invest in a sleep tracker—the
subject of this week’s column.
Some of these are apps on a phone; some are integrated into smartwatches. The poshest are rings like the Oura, which cost hundreds of pounds each.
Are they a good investment? As always, you’ll have to read the column to find out. But most of the devices do seem to be at least reasonably good at telling when you’re actually asleep. When compared with polysomnography—the gold-standard test for measuring sleep that requires lots of fiddly lab equipment—they perform well. But sleep is more than just an on-off state, and measuring quality turns out to be trickier than you might suppose.
There is also another question: is more information always helpful? Travelling for work means a lot of sleeping in unfamiliar hotels. I often find myself worrying that I’ll struggle to sleep, be tired the next day and be too zonked to ask useful questions of whoever I’m interviewing. Inevitably, that worry is enough to keep me awake much longer than usual. If a disapproving device tells you that you aren’t sleeping well, is that going to help you fix the problem—or will it just make you worry, and make things worse?
Do you use a sleep-tracking device? If so, do you find it helps or harms your inner peace? Email us at
wellinformed@economist.com.
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