Comment by anxiousguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anxiousguy | Hacker News Reader

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I believe I'm one of the "short sleepers" they mention in the article. I've bought wirstband mostly to track my sleep patterns. Even though article says that devices like fitbit are not accurate enough in tracking different phases of sleep, my goal was largley to see how much time do I spend sleeping. In the last four months, I average out at 6,1hrs.

90% of the time I will wake up before the alarm and will sleep the same amount of time over the weekends, when I usually don't go to bed as early as I do during the working part of the week. The thing that I constantly think about is - could I benefit from those 2 extra hours to get to that magic number 8? I would really like to try it, but I keep waking up after 6 hrs. :)

I've started to think it's because of not so healthy lifestile - no exerxice, sub optimal diet, irregular bed time. Is it possible that my poor lifestyle results in me waking up after only 6 hrs of sleep and while feeling OK (it became normal to me), I could feel better if I slept longer? That was always something I pondered about. How to know if you really are a short sleeper, or you're just a person that gets by with sleeping less than recommended while not feeling as good as they could if they slept longer?

I’m the same way. Exercise and eating healthy just makes my body want even less sleep. When I’m firing on all cylinders, eating right and working out, I can get away with 5.5-6 and feel better than I ever do trying to push up past 7 by going back to sleep in the morning.

I my experience, the most important thing is, wake up when you wake up. Don’t go back to sleep because you feel like you should, or the alarm has 20 more minutes. If you’re awake, get moving.

I feel like going back down signals to my body that this is going to be a lazy day and it should settle in, instead of firing up all systems.

How much do you exercise? Because when I exercise to the point that I am really tired, sweating and have sore muscles next day, I sleep more then normally. The theories I read on internet seem to confirm the same - your body rebuilds when you sleep, exercise is sort of damaging it (it is damage good for you, but I dont know better term), so if you exercise you should sleep more.

You have asked the correct question. "Exercise" is a wide spectrum of intensity levels and energy expenditure depending on who is exercising and for what reason. If you are training like an athlete then 8 hours of sleep usually isn't enough.

You mention you bought a wristband. Tracking my sleep is one of those things I want to start doing. Do you have any recommendations?

I don't particularly want to remember to put it on every night. I know Nokia launched a mattress pad recently (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/sleep) but I'm concerned about how reliable this is if I don't sleep exactly on top of it. (Plus I don't know how this could actually tell anything like sleep cycles and what not, or even detect that I'm asleep vs. watching TV in bed)

Hi. I'm a software engineer at Fitbit. It is not my job to speak for Fitbit or to sell Fitbits, but I'm answering you because it gives me the chance to point out three reasons why this article's quote about Fitbits not being accurate about sleep stages is wrong.

1. The researcher is also an entrepreneur whose product's sales depend on people thinking Fitbit isn't good enough. https://sonicsleepcoach.com/about-dr-dan/ 2. The quote lumps Fitbit and Apple Watch together in terms of how frequently heart rate is measured, when there's a 60x difference. A sincere quote would be more along the lines of "Apple Watch's 1-5 minute sample rate certainly isn't enough, but even Fitbit's 1-5 second sample rate won't give the accuracy you need..." 3. He doesn't say what's wrong with any published study showing sleep stage accuracy of Fitbit, notably https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/40/suppl_1/A26/378095...

Not the parent, but I've been using the Oura ring (https://ouraring.com/) for almost a year and it works very well for sleep tracking. It's a sleep tracker above all, and has rather limited exercise tracking. It tracks resting heart rate, sleep phases, body temperature, and breathing. There's also an API to download data from their cloud service, although I haven't tried it.

I haven't yet received the newer model, but it seems to solve the issue of limited battery life in the previous model and the ring is also significantly smaller.

Woah, that's cool. I'll try it out, thanks for the pointer!

I was looking for something cheap with as much packed features as I can get and settled on Huawei Band Pro 2 (https://consumer.huawei.com/en/wearables/band2). You can get it for 70 bucks, and it tracks your sleep, heart rate and even has built in GPS if you want to jog or cycle.

The easiest win for your sleep might be removing the TV from your bedroom

I wonder if you considered that my concern is still valid when replacing "watching TV" with "reading a book".

I wonder if you considered that maybe I use my bed throughout the day for non-sleep-related activities.

I wonder if you considered that "watching TV" might have been an example, and I don't actually have a TV in my bedroom.

Try going without an alarm at all for awhile, and then measure your sleep.

I've noticed that I have much more energy throughout the day when I get up as soon as my body wakes up. If I decide to sleep in because it's too early, I will usually have less energy.

I have to assume getting up at the end of a REM cycle is far better than starting another you cannot finish.

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