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Comment by phildenhoff | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, I’ve been wearing my Apple Watch nearly 24 hours a day for a few years and find the sleep info extremely useful.

Really, the primary benefit I get is twofold:

1. I know approximately how long I slept for and remind myself of that all day via a widget. A short sleep is common for me, but I end up feeling foggy. Being reminded that it’s OK, I had a poor sleep, helps ease my mind.

2. I see approximately when I fell asleep and when I woke up. I end up having to add extra time if I sleep past my alarm, but seeing that I didn’t really fall asleep until late into the night helps me manage the pattern of late nights.

Both of those are easily covered by even semi-diligently tracking your sleep on paper, but having my watch do it for me is what I like!

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> I end up having to add extra time if I sleep past my alarm

I find this one a painful design decision on the Apple team's part. The end time of the normal desired sleep schedule does not mean the literal end of sleep every day. I wish they wouldn't clip the data at the end of the sleep schedule. Maybe it's because they're using heuristics and so all the data is guesstimates?

I find the Autosleep app to be much more accurate than the Watch's native sleep tracking.

I have been using Autosleep now with an apple watch 6 - for 3 years daily.

The learnings and the gamification are huge for me. I got my deep sleep up from 1.5h to consistently over 2h.

Learnings:

- early to bed makes more deep sleep. Huge difference from 10pm or 12am

- magnesium doesn’t help at all

- sauna before does help, but hard to do daily

- deep sleep less than 1.5h makes for an awful day with angry mood

- cold room: biggest lever. Haven’t pulled the trigger on an 8sleep yet. But that wouldn’t be my next thing if sleep wouldn’t be so great.

- also, as weird as it sounds: having something exciting to work on improves sleep by a lot.

YMMV

From Apple Watch, I learned I get 11 minutes of deep sleep last night, and generally average well under half an hour (for a full 8 hour typical). I can fall asleep easily, but apparently not very well. Yours sounds great.

I've been considering buying an apple watch just for the stats. I really don't like how my co-workers watches light up when the move, or when they receive a message, so I wonder if I can turn off everything except health stat collection, at which point the whole thing seems a bit absurd.

If that's your only showstopper you can change that in settings. Look up Raise to Wake[1] and Notifications[2] in Settings.

I'm usually using Theatre Mode which keeps the screen off until an alarm or I wake it up and have pretty much all notifications off. I still get heavy use of the watch itself for timers, reminders, calendar, tracking workouts and health stats and whatnot so I'm very happy with it. [1] - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/watch/apd748b87e2a/wat...

[2] - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/watch/apd9b833c9f3/wat...

Mine was absolute crap at sleep detection. Typically it would report that I fell asleep before I went to bed, or I was asleep longer than I was in bed.

Heart rate detection and so on was generally fine through the night, as was Hrv. I sort of wonder if the actual sleep detection is done on the phone, and if the phone is not nearby, it just fails. (My phone doesn’t go to the bedroom. Makes it far easier to actually sleep)

(Also, Watch is dead now, and didn’t replace it, so I might be misremembering the exact bits, but the results were generally paradoxical)

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