Are you interested in using sleep tracking on your Apple Watch? It’s a neat feature to analyze the overall quality of your sleep, sleep duration, and other sleeping habits.
And while that doesn’t sound like much, do not forget that sleeping is one of the essential functions of the human body.
Bad sleeping habits are enough to ruin an otherwise very healthy person. So, without further ado, let us get right into the guide!
Enable Built-In Sleep Tracking
To access the Sleep app, your Apple Watch must be running watchOS 7 on a Series 3 or newer, SE, or Ultra. You’ll also need an iPhone 6s or later running iOS 14 or higher. To update your watch’s software, start the Watch app on your iPhone and navigate to General > Software Update.
Before it can track your sleep, your Apple Watch must be set up properly. In the Watch app on your iPhone, navigate to My Watch and tap on Sleep. Select Use this Watch for Sleep to enable the feature. Make sure the switches next to Track Sleep with Apple Watch and Charging Reminders are enabled.
Set Up Your Sleep Schedule
Now, go ahead and tap Manage Sleep Focus in Settings to set up a sleep schedule, Focus mode, and wind down time. For Sleep Focus, select the people and apps allowed to contact you or send notifications while you’re asleep. Under Customize Screens section, you can set the screen that appears during the night to get rid of any distractions just in case you wake up and look at your watch.
You can review and further tweak your sleep schedule from the Health app. Tap the Browse icon at the bottom, and select Sleep. In the Your Schedule section, tap Edit to set the schedule for tonight, then tap Done.
To set up additional options, tap the entry for Full Schedule & Options. You can now set the permanent schedule based on different days of the week, change the wind down time, and indicate the number of hours you’d like to sleep as your goal.
You can also modify your sleep schedule directly from the Sleep app (the icon displays a white bed in a blue circle) on your Apple Watch. Tap the schedule, then you can change the Wake Up time, turn on an alarm, and change the Bedtime.
Go back to the main screen and tap Full Schedule if you wish to turn off your Sleep Schedule for any specific nights or all nights. Here, you can also add a schedule and change your sleep goal or Wind Down time. Once everything is set up, just go to sleep with the Apple Watch on your wrist.
View Sleep Data
When you wake up, you can go to the Sleep app on your Apple watch to check how much sleep you got. The screen shows the total number of hours, a graph of the different sleep stages, a breakdown of the sleep stages by minutes or hours, and a record of your sleep for the past 14 days.
For more details, check the Health app on your iPhone. Go to Browse > Sleep to see a bar graph that shows your start and end times for sleep. As you record multiple nights of sleep, you will see your history on a weekly or monthly basis. Tap the bar for a specific day to see the total amount of time you were asleep. Below the graph is your sleeping heart rate.
Tap Show More Sleep Data to see how many nights of sleep were measured, your sleep goal, your average time in bed, and your average time asleep.
Download a Sleep Tracker App to Your Apple Watch
If you don’t think the built-in Sleep feature is sufficient, you can simply use a third-party app to track your sleep. As long as you’re running watchOS 6 or newer, your Apple Watch offers a dedicated App Store. That means you don’t have to download an app onto your iPhone and your watch.
To add an app, start the Watch app on your iPhone. Tap Discover > Explore Watch Apps and select the search icon. Type a phrase such as ”sleep trackers” or enter the name of a specific app. Once you find one, tap Get on any free app to install it or select the price button to buy something.
If you already have a sleep tracker app on your iPhone and want to add it to your watch, turn to the Watch app on your phone. Swipe down the My Watch screen until you see the Available Apps section. Tap the Install button for the app you want to transfer it to your watch. The app will then appear under the Installed on Apple Watch section.
Sleep Tracking With AutoSleep
We’ve tried a ton of third party sleep trackers for Apple Watch and iPhone that promise to go further than Apple’s Health app sleep tracking, and while there are a lot of good apps out there, we’d recommend an app called AutoSleep as our favorite. It’s one of the few sleep trackers that includes a companion app for your Apple Watch, so you can see your sleep quality right on your wrist without having to look at your iPhone.
The amount of stats AutoSleep can produce from your night’s sleep is simply staggering, and tapping on any of them seems to reveal even more layers of information.
It also uses a simple ring-based scoring system that is very like Apple’s own Move, Exercise and Stand rings, combined with a green, amber and red color scheme that everybody will be familiar with. Red is bad, amber better and green is good. We also thought it did a better job of accurately deducing how long we’d been asleep than the other apps, too, but we’ll be honest, we still felt Apple’s own Health app did the most accurate job of estimating how long we’d been asleep.
AutoSleep isn’t free, but it’s only $4.99 on the App Store, which is a one-time purchase that isn’t going to break the bank. And after that purchase you don’t need to worry about a monthly subscription or more in-app purchases, as you do with a lot of other sleep tracking apps.
The amount of stats AutoSleep can produce from your night’s sleep is simply staggering, and tapping on any of them seems to reveal even more layers of information. If you want to find out if you have any medical conditions, like say, sleep apnea, then the data here will give you solid proof of what’s going on, which you could present to a medical doctor for a diagnosis. But there are also simple graphs that show you at a glance how well you’re sleeping — we particularly liked the Sleep Fuel Rating, which is the equivalent of a car’s gas tank meter, but showing if the sleep you’re getting is of sufficient quality to ‘fuel’ your tank.
Best of all is the companion app that is loaded onto your Apple Watch. This means you just have to glance at your wrist to see the important information about how well you just slept when you get up in the morning. Your rings show you your REM sleep and Deep Sleep times and your average heart rate, as well as AutoSleep’s best feature — the Sleep Bank. Here you can see if you are behind on your sleep requirement. Over a week the amount of sleep you’re missing out on can add up to truly staggering amounts, which might make you rethink your sleep patterns and enact a positive change in your lifestyle.
There are more ways your Apple Watch and iPhone can help you improve your sleep though. Let’s have a look at another that do more than just track your sleep.
SnoreLab
Do you snore? Wait, don’t answer that one yourself, find out from your partner instead, because you might be shocked by the answer.
With the app you can record your snoring overnight and it presents you with a Snore Score in the morning, together with tips on how to reduce or eliminate your snoring for good. You can download SnoreLab for free and try it out but the premium version is $3.99 a month or $23.99 a year and offers you access to features like a full night’s recording, trends and cloud backup.