Tracking my sleep score changed how I live. Here's how

The first time I used the sleep score feature on an Apple Watch was after setting-up the new Series 11 about a month ago. With the rigour of a heavy news cycle, my sleep cycle was completely awry—for a person who typically had no problems sleeping, I started facing issues such as snoring, waking up multiple times through the night, and on certain occasions struggling to sleep even when I was exhausted.

On the first night, the ‘sleep’ app on Apple Watch Series 11, which ran watchOS 26 out of the box, showed a redesigned interface with a score readout. A quick glance at it showed a score of about 55—which explained itself by saying that this was a preliminary score based on general parameters. The previous night, I’d gone to sleep too late and woke up too early—thus giving a low score.

Over the past four weeks, I’ve been regularly wearing the Apple Watch Series 11 to sleep and keeping track of how I slept the first thing on waking up. It has become something I look forward to, and something that my physician has been asking me to keep track of.

Recovering lost sleep

Six months ago, my physician flagged potential signs of sleep apnoea—a disorder where breathing stops for over 10 seconds repeatedly during sleep, thereby disrupting sleep quality. Early signs of concern over sleep quality started emerging about a year ago after I went through a phase of waking up in the morning without feeling rested.

While I have admittedly delayed going through potential treatment for it, including the need for potential surgery, the Apple Watch’s sleep score and sleep apnoea notifications are two things that helped me make significant changes to my daily schedule.

The first thing that the score helps with is time of sleep, which is a factor that it takes into consideration while rating your past night’s sleep. This happens on a comparative basis, ensuring that for a person working a late night schedule, their timings are taken into account. I had for long sustained a habit of reading late into the night—a habit that has morphed into watching short videos on social media instead. This, as many psychologists have flagged globally, has an adverse effect on sleep tendencies, brain activity, and more. But, with the score taking relative timing into account, the gamified interface’s little nudge started pushing my average time of sleep for the better—up from 3AM at night to around midnight over the past four weeks. This incremental shift has made a significant impact. Previously, my average sleep duration was under five hours—clearly inadequate for someone in their mid-30s. The more intriguing part of this process was to determine if I’m getting ample REM (rapid eye movement), core and deep sleep periods.

Four weeks ago, the Apple Watch sleep tracker showed a breakdown of 25 minutes of deep sleep, about three hours of core sleep, and about 40 minutes of REM sleep times. While each were individually inadequate, what was more alarming to me is that more than 10% of my five-hour sleeping schedule was spent awake—which my physician later explained as the reason why I felt tired even after waking up in the morning.

I began by addressing each of these inadequacies after a conversation with the doctor, who recommended dining at least two hours before sleep, no loud video content at least 30 minutes within sleeping time, a balanced diet, three litres of water daily and no consumption of water within an hour before sleep. I was also asked to be mindful of my sleeping posture for optimum results.

This made a sea change: the day before writing this, I registered a sleep score of 92, with a total sleep time of eight hours. Core sleep was up proportionately to 4.5 hours, 90 minutes of deep sleep, and two hours of REM sleep—as close to perfect as it can be as per the average recommendations accepted worldwide. Based on the graphic sleep pattern display in the app, I was now only left with a handful of minutes-long disruptions that accounted for the ‘awake’ minutes through my sleep.

Apnoea notifications

A quick check earlier this week in the Health app revealed that the Apple Watch had tracked what it called ‘breathing disturbances’. Over the past four weeks, as I got my sleep schedule in order, the breathing disturbances tracker showed a steep drop in such disruptions—which also explained why I started waking up feeling fresher and more active than before. Yet, the tracker continues to chart if my disturbances are recurrent, and at the moment, they show they are.

While Apple’s display suggests that my disturbances are not at a level of receiving apnoea alerts, they are recurrent and fluctuate daily. This, the alert reads, is reason enough for fixing the next phase of my sleep disorders—something I intend to take up through the next week.

For now, it is undeniable that Apple Watch’s sleep score helped me drastically change my schedule for three hours leading up to sleep, change unhealthy practices, and pay attention to the need for adequate rest.

Note: Sleep score is not exclusive to Apple Watch Series 11, and through software updates, is now available starting with Watch Series 9.