Yawning your way through morning meetings and reaching for a double shot every few hours might feel like a normal part of adulting. But not getting a good night’s sleep is something that most people don’t take seriously enough.
Study after study has found that quality sleep is essential for your physical and mental health, impacting everything from hormones to memory, productivity to exercise performance. So how do you ensure you’re actually getting a good night’s rest? Start by understanding what that means. With the stylish and super intelligent Samsung Galaxy Watch Active, you can monitor your sleep, track your stats and adopt strategies to improve it*. Here’s how.
What should you be aiming for?
While you’re getting some shut eye, your brain goes through various patterns of activity. These are broken down into two main stages: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. During non-REM sleep you’ll progress from awake through to a restorative and repairing deep sleep before heading into REM sleep. REM sleep is when the brain is most active and most vivid dreaming happens. This period is thought to be important for learning and creating new memories. Everybody is different but a person usually completes a sleep cycle every 90 to 120 minutes, resulting in four to five cycles each night. For healthy adults, 13 to 23 percent of sleep is deep and 20 to 25 is REM.
So while you might be hitting the recommended hours of shut eye each night, the quality of that sleep might surprise you when you see how it’s broken down. Overnight the Galaxy Watch Active tracks four stages of your sleep (awake, light, deep and REM) and when you wake up you’ll have a rundown of how much time you spent in each stage, how many times you woke up, and total sleep time**. The Samsung Health app can show you trends in your sleep habits and benchmark your stats against other people.
What can you do to improve your sleep stats?
There are a range of science-backed tips for bettering your sleep quality.
1. Stick to a regular sleep and wake cycle
Keeping your sleeping habits consistent can help regulate your body clock, which naturally manages when it needs to sleep and wake. Set your optimum sleep and wake up time through your Samsung Galaxy Watch Active and it would remind you to maintain these habits. If a bit of healthy competition is what it takes to get you sticking to a regular bedtime, you can earn rewards for healthy sleep habits through the Samsung Health app and square up against your mates in challenges.
2. Reduce caffeine intake late in the day
Keep track of your caffeine consumption (which you can with a touch of a button through the watch) and try to limit your coffee, green and black tea intake in the afternoon. Caffeine’s stimulatory effect on your nervous system can stop you from relaxing at night and found that consuming it up to six hours before bed significantly worsened sleep quality.
3. Optimise your bedroom
Your surroundings can significantly influence how well you sleep, especially factors like noise, lighting and temperature. Try to minimise external noise (or use ear plugs if necessary), reduce artificial lighting (or invest in a quality sleep mask) and try to regulate your body temperature through air conditioning or clothing as hot conditions can decrease sleep quality.
4. Relax and clear your mind in the evening
Try not to hit the hay with all the stress of the day still weighing on your shoulders – research has found that relaxation techniques can improve sleep quality. Through the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active you can do breathing exercises to help you lower your stress levels before you get some shut eye. Samsung has also partnered with Calm – the number one app for meditation, sleep and relaxation – so you can access their range of meditation programs through the Samsung Health app on your smartphone. Then, using the Galaxy Watch Active, you can play and pause meditation sessions.
If you’ve made changes to your habits and sleep hygiene and seen little change in your sleep quality, speak to your doctor as an underlying condition could be to blame.
Click here for more information about the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.
*Galaxy watch Active is not a medical/therapeutic device. Fitness and health functions are for informational purposes only. Using Samsung Health app with Galaxy Active requires signup and pairing with your compatible smartphone.
**Galaxy Watch Active is not a medical/therapeutic device. Fitness and health functions (including sleep tracking) are for informational purposes only.
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