Illustration: Olivier Heiligers
When my alarm is triggered every morning, it looks like the end of the world, which, to some extent, is. At least the next episode of the end. I hold my phone in my left hand, where I wear a Oura sleep tracking ring on my index; Launch the Oura application; And wait until the ring tells my phone how he thinks that my night went. I look at my “sleep score”, which sometimes has a small logo of the crown on it, like the version of Oura with a boost. There is also a “preparation” score. This is particularly unpredictable – sometimes high, sometimes low, apparently unrelated to the sleep that I really passed and my global sleep score. My results are slightly alarming and slightly encouraging. Above all, they are a puzzle to solve.
I had tried to give meaning to this data for six months when I decided to bring it to some experts in the sleep medice to obtain advice-a choice which, it seems, many users of Oura Ring are finally doing. “Last month” Emerson WickwireThe head of the Sleep Medicine section at the University of Maryland Medical Center, said to me: “A patient began our discussion by offering to show me volumes of sleep monitoring data she had crossed over several months. And in situations like this, not only are sleep tracking data not useful, sometimes they can actually be harmful. ” He believes that “becoming over -occupied on sleep can be a problem in itself”.
Drawing on sensors that include LEDs that shine through the skin, Oura application follows heart rate, respiratory frequency and blood oxygen saturation, the more the variation in heart rate – a number that the oura system seems to be deepening. In my application, there is always a red or pink warning bar for “deep sleep”. According to The Ring, most nights, I spend less than 10% of the night in “the most restful and rejuvenating sleep phase”, when the brain “eliminates amyloid proteins which are a characteristic of Alzheimer”, ” According to the New York Times.
My chronology also has white spikes representing the moments of the night when I woke up. When I look at them, the interruptions that I was barely registered at the time were put in place: my neighbor on the other side of the wall of our room having a noisy and torn cough adjustment; My cat scratches on our leather bedside bench; My firstborn goes by viagne in the apartment, procrastinating on the tests of university applications; An almost inaudibically low -haunting mechanical roar on somewhere nearby, strong enough to make a heavy paint add its own chatter of chatter while shaking against the wall. What should have been ephemeral, the forgotten mysteries have become things I feel responsible for. If the ring knew these things, I wanted to know what it could glean elsewhere.
Self-recruit technology, digital sociology scholar Martin Berg From the University of Malmö wrote in 2017, when the Ring of Oura was new, reflects a “very modern ontological insecurity”. I asked the ring to make myself more effective in the very important task of rest – a task that humans have never been able to watch out.
But the sleep stages are defined by what is happening in the brain, not on the finger, the sleep experts I asked about my deep sleep readings told me. Instead of setting an electroencephalographer, how a real polysomnography test in a sleep laboratory would do so, a home tracker is getting closer to the state of the brain with a motion sensor. “If someone moves a little, he is probably in light sleep”, ” Dr Daniel BaroneThe associate medical director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me on the phone. “If they move a lot, they are probably awake. If they don’t move at all, they are probably in deep dormant.”
Barone said that he was more interested in the subjective experience of a patient upon waking than what happens when he was sleeping. “So, if they say, you know:” I wake up, I feel good, but damn, my ring yes, I don’t sleep deep “, I would say:” Take the ring of our Oura and throw it away. “”
“We are thinking of the duration of sleep, the quality of sleep and the timing of sleep,” added Barone. “And trackers can be good enough in sleep. They can be good enough for the moment sleep. The quality of sleep? Relon as good as the first two.” If the patients consult a tracker to see how much they sleep, he said: “I encourage patients to take these measures of sleep quality with a grain of salt.” But these tips collide with the persuasive force of scores and graphics on a screen, and even with scientific research on sleep.
Objectively, the fundamental difficulty with my sleep was obvious by a glance at the sight of the Oura calendar: my little blue crowns – for a solid rest – were grouped during weekends and school holidays. The number that continued to drop me was the simple arithmetic. The Glib, the front of the excuse of my brain likes to believe that, fundamentally, 11:30 p.m. – 11:50 am, even – is the same as 11. When the alarm is triggered during the six hours of the next morning, however, the back of my brain and the application hear both that seven hours have not passed.
The underlying facts aggravate the effects of my approximate mathematics. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends seven to eight hours of sleep per night, but Wickwire told me that it means at least Seven hours of sleep, not at seven o’clock from the moment you crawl under the covers until your last rehearsal alarm is exhausted. “Even if my sleep efficiency is high,” said Wickwire, “I’m still awake 10% of the time. So if you spend seven hours in bed, you are still awake for 42 minutes. It therefore means that you are at six hours and 18 minutes, which is a chronic loss of sleep.”
And although experts recommend results of the cross -sleep tracker with your subjective feeling, subjective feelings can also be wrong. Wickwire told me about an experience in which the subjects went through a week of artificial shortcut sleep and tested to measure their drowsiness as it increased day by day. “However,” he said, “in addition to the objective measures of drowsiness, the participants were also questioned subjective The drowsiness and these scores have not changed. Even if people fell asleep faster and faster and faster every day, they did not judge their drowsiness increased. »»
“Humans are very bad estimators of their loss of sleep,” he said. “Even losing a single hour of sleep can degrade cognitive performance the next day.”
I got seven or eight hours maybe once or twice a weekend. The rest of the time, the newspaper of the week could be read 5:17m, 6:31m, 5:40m, 5:29m, 5:38m. My joyful preparation scores were joyful only because the ring had concluded that the duration between the moment when I usually slept and when I usually got up, it was naturally to what extent I had to sleep: my “sleep regularity” and “the balance of sleep” recorded as good because there was nothing better to compare them. The Oura did not know that my daily schedule – and my sleep environment, with a cat and adolescents and a noisy building – were hostile to a solid night of rest.
The rest of the world too. An end of January morning Commune of murder of rationalistsAnd then I remembered The army helicopter striking the jet of passengers. However, my preparation score was an 86.
“Do you want to treat yourself with something fun today?” My Oura asked.
A few days later, I did it, but not because the application suggested it. I went out and I met my oldest friend in the city and I had two beautiful beer pints. I cheated on the calendar so that I could not dine before I go home thereafter, then I had to help fill out a college financial disclosure form: alcohol, late meals and anxiety – three labels from the list that Oura offers to people who wish to classify what could have reduced their scores. It was perhaps the beer, but for the first time in a long time, I did not worry about whether the “errors” would sabot the sleep that awaited us. I threw and shot a little … Then I slept deeply, calm and not disturbed until a few minutes before my alarm was triggered. The ring gave me a 91 to sleep with an abundant deep sleep. My preparation was a derisory 79.
Subjectively, I could feel my real mood in the air from breakfast.