SHORTS | Debunking Sleep Tracking Tech with Dr. Bijoy John

That's the number one cause of recent people call my office to see me in person. Hey, my sleep is not good. I don't have stage two sleep or stage three sleep or REM sleep. Remember, Ben, you know when you are in the weight loss program, what do the coaches tell you? Don't weigh yourself every day, only weigh yourself, you know, in 30 days or 60 days when you're.

Yeah, yeah.

Even last night I had the mistake of jumping on my scale and I was like, lower. So what did I do? I went and ate a big dessert, which I would not have done. Right. So it doesn't work. So again with sleep. Oh, I need to get more REM sleep tonight and then the next day, morning. But there's fundamentally something wrong with these variables because you, you, you quantify sleep with your brain waves.

Yeah.

So this one gets the movement. So it's not accurate. So it's a rough. So where is the compromise is we have to find a compliment. I tell people to, to get a baseline and then do something about it. And then same watch from same company, you know, everything is in a different, you know, and then after you implement that, try to see it. Right. So every day looking at it, it's not going to change, you know, change the data mining is not going to change it. And so get a baseline, implement the strategy and then see if it works. Daily looking at it and worrying will invariably make you sleep less on the data. That's not accurate.

Yeah, that really resonates with my experience. So over the years I've tried using various sleep tracking devices like my Garmin watch. At one point it was a Fitbit type device and a few things happened. One is I'd find it would interrupt my sleep because I'd roll over and the feeling of the watch or the band pressing against my skin would wake me up. So I'm like, this isn't good. It's not even comfy getting to sleep. And then there'd be days where I would wake up and immediately I'd feel quite rested and I'd look at the data and it would tell me to your point, like I didn't get that much REM sleep or deep sleep. And then I'd talk myself out of feeling rested because I go, well, the data says I didn't sleep well, so I couldn't have. And then again, to your point, you go to sleep that night kind of worrying about it. So in the end, I did do exactly what you've recommended, actually. I put in place some strategies. Then ditched all the devices and stopped measuring it because I think we can generally just tell intuitively, right. By how we feel, how well we've slept, which is good enough for most of us, I think.

So it depends on how. If you spend majority of their sleep in REM sleep, there's this big misconception. Conception is REM sleep is not the restorative. You know, it's actually good for, you know, conflict resolution, but it's not a restful sleep. So if you sleep seven hours and you're spending five hours in REM sleep, you're not going to be rested the next day. Right. So how you feel depends on stage three, you know, deep sleep, most of it. So that's the deep, sweet sleep, I call it. To, to answer your question, you made the perfect statement. How you feel the next day is how well you did the night before. Remember, there's no eeg. They're not monitoring the brainwaves. You have inaccurate data and you're steering in the wrong way. So I am not a fan for that.