Written by the Tempdrop Team
Did you know your hormones and core body functions are affected by your sleep? That’s right! Below we’ve listed some sleep facts you may not have known already.
1. While you sleep, your body doesn’t make much cortisol, helping your stress levels remain low. However, if you have too much cortisol in your system - meaning, you’re too stressed - you’ll have trouble falling asleep.
2. When you’re asleep, you also release cytokines which are key to a healthy immune system. They help your body fight inflamation, infection, and trauma. It’s not a myth that your body recovers and heals better while you’re sleeping!
3. Studies have found that 4 hours is the minimum amount of sleep needed for decent brain function. However, most people need to have 6-9 hours of sleep for peak brain function (and women may need even more). You may have to experiment with how much you need if you aren’t sure.
4. When you sleep for less time, your appetite will go up. This is likely because of the hormones that help regulate appetite (ghrelin and leptin). Shooting for your ideal sleep quantity will help you optimize your food intake, and it will decrease some cravings.
The good news is Tempdrop has some amazing sleep features to help you optimize your sleep! If you already have access to them but don’t know what they do - or would like to learn about them a little bit before jumping in - we thought we would give you the inside scoop on Tempdrop’s sleep features.
Tempdrop’s Sleep Features
We want you to understand the benefits you can get from our device - especially our sleep features! So we’ll walk through the sleep tab in our app to help you understand it a little better.
- Sleep Score. First up is the sleep score! You’ll find this in the top left box of your sleep screen. Your sleep score is a number between 1 and 100 (100 being the best sleep you could get!). This is actually a cumulative scoring of all of the other data points on the screen. When you’re making changes to have better sleep hygiene (don’t worry, there’s more on this below!), you should see this number increase over time.
- Time asleep. The top box to the right of the sleep score is the amount of time you spent asleep.
- Time in bed. Next up, just below the time asleep section, is the amount of time you spent in bed. Ideally this number is as close to the time asleep measurement as possible, since that means you fell asleep quickly and didn’t wake up for any significant amount of time during the night!
- Sleep Chart. The sleep chart takes up the largest section of your sleep screen. It tells you when you were upright, awake, in a light sleep, and in a deep sleep throughout the night. You can touch any place along the horizontal (time) axis to see exactly what time something happened - like if you want to know when in the middle of the night you woke up.
You can also toggle on the temperature symbol at the top right of this chart to see an overlay of your temperature on the sleep chart. This shouldn’t be used for evaluation purposes, but it is fun to see!
- Quick View. Finally, we have 3 pieces of data for you to view at a glance. They include when you fell asleep, how many interruptions you experienced during the night, and when you woke up.
Understanding Sleep Hygiene
Sleep hygiene is the term used to describe the sleeping habits you have - the environment and behaviors you’ve established around your sleep. As you clean up your sleep hygiene, your sleep quality generally goes up. You can see this in Tempdrop’s sleep score!
Sometimes it can be hard to put actual habits affecting your sleep into a list, though, so we’ve put together a few basics for you. Not only are we including what sleep hygiene encompasses, but we’re also giving you some tips on how to optimize yours.
- Sleeping and waking times - be consistent about both!
- Noises, lights, and smells in your environment - decrease everything mentioned, except maybe white noise and a gentle, calming scent (like lavender). Removing blue lights 30-60 minutes before bed is especially important.
- Your mind and body associating your bed with sleep only - try not to spend too much time in your bed while awake.
- Temperature in your room - the colder, the better! Well, within reason of course.
- Time to wind down - give yourself time to decompress for 15-60 minutes before going to bed. This could mean yoga or meditation, journaling, or anything else that soothes you.
Sleep hygiene is especially important because your quality and quantity of sleep - both affected by these habits - will affect a lot of things in your day-to-day life: stress, mood, appetite, thought process, and immune system, to name a few.
How Tempdrop Helps
Tempdrop’s sleep features are meant to help you get better sleep - in quality as well as quantity. The sleep score you’re given is a measure based on the information the device gathers, and it tells you how well you’re sleeping each night. If you’re trying to figure out how you can use this data in order to help increase your sleep quality, though, we have a few specific suggestions!
- Set a time you hope to fall asleep by, and then determine how long you need to sleep in order to know your waking time.
- Put your Tempdrop on (and turn it on!) as you finish winding down and are settling in to sleep.
- Take your Tempdrop off once you’re awake for the day, and get out of bed. Sync it at your convenience, but if you’re actively working on your sleep hygiene we suggest syncing sooner rather than later so you have access to your sleep data.
On top of Tempdrop's sleep features, you get better quality sleep with Tempdrop while charting since you no longer have to wake up earlier than intended just to take your temperature and fall back asleep - one less sleep interruption for you!
The biggest key to good sleep is going to bed and waking up at the same time every day in a good environment. This alone should help you to increase your sleep quality by making your sleep more restful and having less interruptions.
Learn more about the links between sleep, stress, and metabolism here.