Sleep health: Wearables, napping and dreams
Fact checked by Mindy Valcarcel, MS
Shift workers like emergency physicians need to nap before a night shift; however, many of us think napping is otherwise for children, not for adults.
Sleep experts feel that as long as naps do not impede a person’s ability to fall asleep and stay asleep at night, a 10- to 20-minute nap is a great way to overcome daytime sleepiness and the effects of a short night of sleep.
I spoke with sleep medicine and circadian rhythm expert Katie Sharkey, MD, PhD, for her insights into wearables, napping and dreams. Sharkey is the inaugural director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Rhythms at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem North Carolina. She is also a professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
Lewiss: Give us just one thing about wearables that is great, one thing that is backfiring and one thing we are learning thanks to wearables.
Sharkey: Wearables that track sleep are a great way for people to become cognizant of their sleep behaviors. We know that one of the best ways to get people to maintain a healthy weight is for them to log their food intake with a food diary — there’s something about engaging with the data that helps keep people on track. And wearables can do the same thing to help with sleep, because they can serve as an electronic sleep diary. For example, you might estimate that you go to bed at 10:30 p.m. and wake up at 6:00 a.m. — that’s 7.5 hours per night, so why are you exhausted?! However, if you record your sleep patterns and the wearable data show that 4 nights per week you actually aren’t falling asleep until midnight and your alarm is still going off at 6 a.m., that solves the mystery!
Where I have seen these devices backfire is when people become overinvested in tracking their sleep and rely on what the wearable data show instead of how they feel. There’s even a term for this coined by Kelly Baron, PhD — orthosomnia — where self-monitoring becomes maladaptive as people strive for perfect sleep data. They wake up and decide whether they are going to have a good day based on what their app tells them, and then we have a new problem.
Something we are learning from wearables — and I hope they will help us learn even more — is how to optimize light-dark exposure and balance indoor/artificial light with natural/outdoor light and darkness (at night) to optimize our circadian rhythms. We are a culture that wants to maximize all 24 hours of the day, and we discount the effects of light exposure patterns on our biology and behavior. I anticipate that the massive amounts of light exposure data collected from wearables will further our understanding of the impact of light.
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