Five Science-Backed Products To Help Improve Your Sleep

Withings Sleep, £99.95

If you want to get really serious about your sleep, smart trackers are a great shout.

Withings have taken this one step further, creating a tracker specifically for sleep, with the added bonus that you don’t need to wear anything on your wrist.

When the tracker arrived at the office, it certainly turned heads. It’s a premium-looking piece of kit that connects to your phone via Bluetooth and a nifty app. It sends all your sleep data over Wi-Fi.

It comes in the form of a discreet grey piece of fabric with a tracker inside. You place it under your mattress and plug it into the mains via a long cable – so it isn’t a problem if you don’t have a socket directly by your bed. And because it goes under your mattress, you literally won’t notice it’s there.

The tech behind the device is fascinating. It starts tracking the moment you get into bed but it knows exactly when you fall asleep, so you don’t need to start or stop the device, unlike some other sleep trackers. Just go about your normal bedtime routine, drift off and when you wake an in-depth analysis of your night will be waiting for you in the app.

The accompanying Health Mate app is easy to find your way around. Sleep data includes the amount of time you slept for, the depth of your sleep and its stages, as well as other things like interruptions and time to get to sleep and wake up. Based on all of this you’re given an overall sleep score out of 100 which is also summed up by a simple red, amber and green colour guide. It tracks your heart rate throughout the night too and can even pick up snoring through a built-in mic.

The Withings sleep tracker has given me invaluable insight to my sleep and I couldn’t recommend it more. With a clear picture of my nights and goals to improve them, I now feel miles more confident and know more about sleep in general. For example, the app’s taught me about the importance of sleep stages (light, deep and REM) and the target amount of each to aim for.

Best of all, it has actually helped me to relax as it’s widely reported that we tend to underestimate the amount we sleep. On one night, I’d slept an extra 2.5 hours than I thought.

For me, the Withings Sleep has been a real game-changer.

For more information: www.withings.com