How Apple Watch revealed my toxic stress level, and helped me fix it

When I started that SleepWatch App on the Apple Watch a year ago, I mainly wanted to compare it with other sleep tracking products that I had tried. But it led to a series of events that not only helped me quantify my sleep better than other sleep technologies, but also identified a bigger problem: my unhealthy stress. Combined with some other apps on the Apple Watch, I was able to improve my stress levels and track my progress by tracking heart rate variability.

It all started last May when I started testing the SleepWatch app and some other sleep tracking apps on the Apple Watch. Part of my motivation was that reports had started to circulate this Apple was working to add built-in sleep tracking to the Apple Watch. So I wanted to find out if the Apple Watch actually has a long enough battery life to enable sleep tracking, if I don’t mind wearing my watch while I sleep, how accurate the tracking can be, and what types of data it contains can deliver.

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After testing free versions of multiple sleep tracking apps. I put it on SleepWatch because it felt like the most polished, detailed, and most like a feature that Apple would design.

I have been testing various sleep technologies since CES 2018 because sleep was one of the hottest new categories at the show this year. I also knew that of the three pillars of health – diet, exercise and sleep – sleep was the one where I needed the most help. I already had discipline and a good routine for exercise and nutrition, and technology played an important role in this.

I was an early Fitbit user in 2010 and switched to the Apple Watch to track the activity when it started in 2015. I also used apps like Lose it to keep track of my meals and my daily diet for almost as long.

By early 2018, the tech industry had woken up to the fact that sleep was one of the next boundaries at which technology could help improve life. The CES Sleep Tech Pavilion contained all kinds of technical products designed to help people sleep, from special glasses to high-tech sleep masks to smart air filters, smart pillows and speakers to create a sound cover.

The first product that I tried to track sleep was EarlySense LiveWhen I was working on a story about how the sensor under the mattress was used to monitor hospital patients and children with asthma. It worked pretty well. It seemed to track my sleep correctly about 80% of the time and the app was fairly simple.

I got one a few months after CES Sleep number 360 Smart Bed. It had some features that made it a great bed, such as the ability to adjust the firmness and tilt of the mattress so that my wife and I could each adapt to our side of the bed. But the sleep tracking features weren’t great. I found it to be accurate only about 50% of the time and the data visualizations were nowhere near as detailed as with EarlySense. Several times a week, SleepNumber missed chase times when I slept, or mistakenly took extra hours to sleep when my wife rolled over to my side or the bed or cat jumped on the bed after getting up.

All in all, the best thing about SleepNumbers Tracking was that you didn’t have to wear anything, add anything or do anything extra. The best thing about EarlySense was the detailed data visualizations that showed the sleep quality, such as: B. deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep.

When I started using SleepWatch, I quickly found that it was far more accurate than SleepNumber or EarlySense. In my personal use, it was correctly recorded in about 95% of the cases. Since the Apple Watch was on the body and was set directly to the heart rate, this seemed to increase the accuracy.

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I didn’t mind wearing the watch as I expected it to sleep, mostly because the Apple Watch’s sports straps were fairly comfortable and therefore not distracting or uncomfortable. The battery life of the Apple Watch also exceeded my expectations. I found that charging it two to three hours a day – when I was in the shower, reading at bedtime at night, or meeting during the day – was enough to charge a full day.

All of this gave me the confidence to track my sleep every night and to trust the data I got back. That’s why I set myself the goal of having an average of at least seven hours of sleep a night. That made it like a game – like 10,000 steps a day or closing the activity rings on the Apple Watch. And within a few months I was able to change my habits and routines to go from an average of five to six hours of sleep a night to at least seven hours.

After improving the total amount of sleep I got, I started to look at the other metrics that SleepWatch was tracking to understand the quality of my sleep. While SleepWatch didn’t track REM sleep like EarlySense did, it added a number of other indicators that went into the daily SleepWatch score. These included total rest time, sleep heart rate drop, 7-day sleep rhythm, percentage of sleep disorders, and average sleep HRV.

If you look at them, you can click on them and see how your 30-day average behaves compared to other SleepWatch users. Once I got my sleep to an average of seven hours a night, all of my numbers were in the top 70th to 90th percentiles – with the exception of Average Average Sleeping HRV. And that was really bad, in the bottom 25th percentile (which means 75% of SleepWatch users did better than me).

To be honest, I didn’t even know what HRV was. Some information was integrated in the app in the SleepWatch app itself. So I read: “Heart rate variability (HRV) is not synonymous with heart rate. HRV is a relatively new and growing area of ​​health research. HRV can provide information about your well-being that heart rate cannot provide.” It also says: “Health research suggests that higher levels of heart rate variability during sleep are associated with more youthful physiology, better sleep quality, and less psychological stress.”

The app included some tips for improving HRV: consuming less alcohol (I don’t drink), doing long-term exercises regularly (I already did), and practicing mindfulness activities before bed.

While praying and meditating regularly, I tended to do most of the early morning. So I started researching more about HRV and how mindfulness, meditation, and deep breathing can improve HRV. I learned that the Apple Watch didn’t start tracking HRV with WatchOS 4 until 2018.

I also learned that HRV essentially takes the pulse of your nervous system. Another way to think about it is to measure the impact of stress on your overall health and wellbeing – something that is usually difficult to quantify as many adults internalize things rather than act.

The average HRV for sleep in my SleepWatch data indicated that I had a potentially toxic amount of stress in my life and that I had to handle it better.

I listened to the audio book Breathing: The main key to self-healing from Dr. Andrew Weil and started trying a number of meditation apps. I finally started Dr. Because to use 4-7-8 deep breathing technique before bed and I chose Simple habit as my favorite meditation app. I liked this because it focused most on relieving stress and improving sleep. It also had the most free content, so I could use it for a few months before I gave my credit card to opt for the subscription.

Basically, I took meditation, breathing and mindfulness just as seriously as my training program. Gradually, my HRV numbers improved overnight in the SleepWatch app. However, since I was concentrating on improving my HRV, I wanted to follow it a bit more closely and not just while I was sleeping, so I downloaded it too HRV tracker App. Sure enough, I noticed that my HRV levels often hit rock bottom in a stressful conflict, confrontation, or setback.

But the Apple Watch doesn’t keep track of HRV and I wanted a better way to manually measure my HRV pulse. I have learned that the Breathe app integrated into the Apple Watch automatically triggers an HRV measurement. So I started measuring my HRV at different times during which I meditated or breathed during the day.

It wasn’t long before I realized that the Breathe app itself is a great tool for meditation, deep breathing, and mindfulness – especially if you slow the “breathing rate” down to four breaths per minute in Apple Watch settings. Now with HRV Tracker I have my daily numbers in mind – and not just my sleeping HRV. I use the Breathe app regularly throughout the day for two-minute sessions and mixed it with my other breathing exercises and the short meditations I do with the Simple Habit app.

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This allowed me to increase my daily HRV averages from mid-20s to mid-50s. This is still not outstanding, but it is much more normal and it continues to improve. The whole process also trained me to understand my body better. I now notice when certain signals in my body – which I had previously ignored – set red flags to tell me that I have to take a moment to breathe a little and realign my thoughts. It was a solid upgrade to the quality of life.