I have an app on my phone that tracks my sleep. After the initial novelty wore off years ago I deleted it, but lately I've been wondering if my sleep patterns have become truly as awful as I've suspected from the way I've been feeling upon getting up in the morning, so I reloaded the latest version.
The old version required that the phone be placed under the pillow on the mattress itself to track motion. I can only surmise there were some overheating incidents, so now it's designed to sit on the nightstand and instead of tracking motion it listens to your breathing.
While I can understand how the previous version of this software would track your sleep stages via mattress movement, how this works now simply by listening escapes me (especially with more than just me in bed, the ceiling fan, the gurgling aquarium, and the humidifier whirring in the background.)
Even not understanding how this works, seeing this data has been—pardon the expression—eye opening. It verifies that I do often wake up—and remain awake for some amount of time before falling back to sleep—anywhere from 3 to 5 am almost every night. The fact that I almost immediately fall into deep sleep after going to bed explains why I'm almost never aware of Ben coming in later. It also shows the times I get up to use the bathroom.
What's less clear is how "Sleep quality" is computed, because it seems the higher the score on that, the less rested I feel upon waking. Of the data I've posted here, the 67% night was subjectively the best night's sleep I've had in weeks, while the 91% night was among the worst.
I loved to sleep with the window open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open the window and put my head on the pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak." ~ Neil Gaiman
