By the way . . . The appy way to a good night’s sleep

LAST week I was discussing sleep with a group of company employees. They weren’t your average corporate employees; they worked for a bed company and, day in day out, were challenged with giving customers a good night’s sleep.

There was immense irony in the fact that many of them openly reported poor sleep. We had insomniacs, sleep walkers, restless legs sufferers and sleep apnoea patients all under the one roof. They had the perfect beds but the worst sleeping habits.

I asked if anyone used a sleep tracker. A show of hands revealed a few did, but by default, not design. Hell-bent on step counting and calorie calculating, they almost discovered the sleep function on their smart watches by accident.

For most people the solution to insomnia is either suffer in sleepless silence or seek your doctor’s help and try to get something to kick you out of it. Neither work and both are ill advised. So what about sleep tracking? There’s a rationale behind it that’s tactical. Track anything and you become more aware — and also more invested in changing behaviour.

A sleep tracker helps to give us an accurate picture of sleep quantity and quality. It can also tell us about our sleep cycles, which occur in 90-minute blocks. Instead of talking about how many hours we sleep we should think about how many cycles we sleep. Each cycle has five stages, the last two being the deepest. Ideally, you want to wake up at the end of a cycle. Wake up in the middle of a deep sleep stage and you will be slapping the snooze button or getting up groggy.

So if you’re struggling to sleep, try working back from your wake-up time in 90minute blocks to get your ideal bedtime. It might mean going to bed a bit earlier or a bit later, but getting it right could ensure you start sleeping like a baby again.

Adjusting bedtime, a caffeine ban and electronic shutdown 90 minutes before bed could be far more sleep-inducing than sedatives. Tracking your sleep will show progress — and not a pill in sight! Just a simple app and some common sense.