At this point you’ve probably noticed we talk a lot about data, and today we’ll spend a few minutes demystifying this aspect of the RISE experience. What data does RISE track? What data doesn't RISE track? And, importantly, why? We’ll try to answer these questions here.

We’ve spent the last three days going over this, but it’s important enough to reiterate once more: How you feel every day (your energy, focus, productivity, and quality of life) comes down to TWO things--sleep debt and your circadian rhythm. With RISE, the entire experience focuses on using these Two Laws of Sleep to help you make progress. The good news is that accurate estimations and predictions are possible for sleep debt and circadian rhythm using basic sleep data and fancy algorithms.

RISE is capable of automatically tracking essential sleep data with just your phone (or most third-party trackers by extension). This data is combined with algorithms to predict your DLMO (remember this is the onset of your Melatonin Window), your circadian rhythm (or energy schedule), and your sleep debt. Here are the exact data points: 

• Time of night you fall asleep
• Time of morning you wake up
• Total time awake during the night
• The total duration of your sleep

Automatic sleep detection.

We use your phone's motion activity combined with our algorithms to detect and track your sleep automatically. We've found it to be accurate for about 80% of people. What’s great about this is that you’re using tools you already have on hand--you don’t need to buy an expensive tracker or wear something that might disturb your sleep.  

That said, if you already have (or decide to get) a tracker that puts data into Apple Health or Fitbit, we can use that too! But don’t worry, if you forget to wear your device, it doesn't mean your sleep will go untracked--your phone is still there as a backup.

This is a question some people have based on some of the promises that other sleep apps and trackers are making, but studies have shown very convincingly that REM, light sleep, deep sleep don't have an impact on how you're going to feel or perform the next day. There's some fantastic research conducted by sleep and machine learning scientists at Stanford. In essence, they took all of the best "sleep quality" data from polysomnography to figure out if they can predict how you feel in the morning. It turns out; they can't.

You can't track brain activity with a watch.

Unless you’re wearing polysomnography on your head when you sleep, you’re not able to track your sleep stages. If a tracker or app you’ve been using is giving you a sleep quality score based on your movement, estimated depth of sleep, or something else, they’re basing their predictions on something other than the last 100 years of sleep science.

What would you do with sleep stage data?

Your brain naturally regulates and calibrates sleep stages each night, and is very good at knowing how much of each phase your body needs. Science has yet to find a way to optimize this process. What you can do is ensure you're getting enough sleep so that your brain has ample time to move through the necessary phases. You can also avoid substances that affect your sleep like alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine too close to bedtime.

To date, there is no objective measurement of sleep quality widely agreed upon by sleep scientists. The gold standard questionnaire for sleep quality, called the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, has 7 different self-rated questions: subjective sleep quality, the time it takes you to fall asleep (sleep latency), how long you sleep, how much time you spend awake at night, sleep disturbances, sleep medication use, and, finally, how you feel during the day.

How are you feeling today?

At RISE, we decided to ask you about how you feel because we believe it's what matters most. We care more about how you feel than what you think about your sleep. For the vast majority of us, our brains are optimizing our sleep each night--moving between the different sleep stages expertly and efficiently--and our job is simply not to interfere with the natural sleep process.

After waking from sleep in the morning, it takes about 90 minutes for you to become fully alert--a phenomenon known scientifically as “sleep inertia.” We've been conditioned to think that we should feel amazing and refreshed right on wake up, but it's not true. This is why we wait until 90 minutes after you wake up to ask you how you’re feeling today--by this point, along with an awareness of your sleep debt number, you should have a useful measure of your sleep quality.

We realize a lot of what we’ve talked about so far is predicated on the notion that we can all simply “fall asleep earlier”...but of course this is often easier said than done! Tomorrow we’ll deep dive into sleep hygiene, to give you some ideas for how to best prime your body, brain, and environment for natural, quality sleep. 

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, message us in the RISE app or reply to this email. We're here to help!

Oddie from Rise 💤