If you’re using your Apple Watch to track sleep, here’s 3 features you should be using

As a health and fitness editor, I’m constantly telling readers how important sleep is when it comes to our overall well-being. As a new mom, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen about how little sleep I’m getting. But despite the constant sleep disturbances a toddler brings, I still track my sleep religiously. It fascinates me, and to me, it’s as important as tracking my calorie burn or movement each day.

However, it’s only recently that I realized that through the fog of maternity leave, I’d missed some key updates to the sleep features on my Apple Watch 10, and that I wasn’t quite using my watch to its full potential. If you’re using one of the best Apple Watches to track your shut-eye each night, make sure you’re using these three features before letting your head hit the pillow:

Set up a sleep schedule

Whether you’re someone who reads before bed, listens to podcast or a music, or just sits doom-scrolling till it’s time to brush your teeth, setting up a sleep schedule in the Health app can make a difference. Think of it as the adult equivalent of being tucked into your little sleep sack and read a bedtime story. While your Apple Watch can’t read you the Gruffalo (yet), it can give you wind down reminders as your bedtime approaches. Plus, you can set a different bedtime schedule for the weekend if, unlike me, you have a life.

The Apple Watch will also switch automatically into Sleep mode when your bedtime approaches, turning off any notifications across all your Apple devices. It’s also great if you’re someone who forgets to turn on this mode before bed, as your Apple Watch needs to be in Sleep focus to track your sleep.

If you’ve set a sleep schedule, you’ll also get a little morning report from Apple, which is one of my favorite features on the best Garmin watches. Your watch will say Good Morning as you wake up, turn off any alarms you’ve set if you’ve woken (or been woken) before it went off, and show you the weather forecast for the day.

Use the Vitals app to check your sleep each morning

The Vitals app allows you to spot changes in your health before they occur. The Vitals app knew I was coming down with a nasty bout of mastitis before I felt any different physically — it spotted my heart rate and temperature were raised, and it alerted me that I had two health outliers. Of course, it didn’t stop me getting sick, but it encouraged me to take it easy, and not head out for a morning run thinking I’d just not slept well.

When using the Vitals app, you’ll immediately see a breakdown of your health metrics in your Apple Watch stack each morning, including a summary of your sleep stages from the previous night. As well as your sleep duration, you can see your nightly heart rate, respiratory rate and wrist temperature, and get notified if these metrics are outside your typical range.

When you’ve worn your Apple Watch to sleep, you’ll see a graph of your sleep, showing how much time you’ve spent in REM, Core, and Deep sleep stages, as well as how much time you’ve spent awake overnight. Each sleep stage is important — REM is where you experience dreaming, during the Core phase, muscle activity decreases and your body temperature drops, and Deep sleep has a restorative effect on the body. How long you spend in each stage will be personal to you, but learning more about your sleep patterns can help you make small tweaks to ensure you’re getting the best sleep possible. Deep sleep, for example, can be affected by screen time, stress, caffeine and alcohol.

Add ambient music to your Control Center

Ok, so this isn’t really on the Apple Watch, but it’s an update I’d missed but have since become hooked on. If, like me, you need some sort of white noise to drift off, you can now add Ambient Music to the Control Center of your iPhone. To do this, open Control Center, and tap the add button in the top left corner. Click Add a Control at the bottom of the screen and scroll down to the Ambient Music section. From here, you can choose four different categories of music — Sleep, Chill, Productivity, and Wellbeing. There are different playlists to choose from, but it’s a nice way to unwind as you get into bed.

I’d also be remiss to not mention Apple Fitness Plus here, and the Sleep Meditations on the platform. Similar to that bedtime story I mentioned earlier, if I have been working late into the evening, these inject 10 minutes of deep breathing and calm into my bedtime routine. I’m not one for meditation, but I’m really working on it, and this helps.

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