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Sleep Trackers

Monitor and improve your sleep

I thought I was pretty good at sleeping until I started waking up exhausted every morning despite getting eight hours in bed. My Apple Watch said I was sleeping fine, but something felt off. That's when I fell down the rabbit hole of dedicated sleep trackers, convinced a $200 Oura Ring would solve everything. Spoiler alert: it didn't. After three months and way too much money spent testing different devices, I learned that most people (including me) are asking the wrong questions about sleep tracking entirely.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about sleep trackers – they're all basically making educated guesses about your sleep stages, and some are terrible at it. The biggest mistake I made was assuming more expensive meant more accurate. I tested eight different devices, from a $25 fitness band to that fancy Oura Ring, and the results were all over the place. The same night, one tracker said I got two hours of deep sleep while another claimed I got thirty minutes. The Fitbit Sense I bought for $180 consistently overestimated my sleep quality compared to how I actually felt. Even worse, three of the wearable trackers I tested started irritating my skin after a few weeks of nightly wear.

What actually matters isn't the fancy sleep stage breakdowns – it's consistency and trends over time. After months of comparing data, I realized the most useful trackers focus on simple metrics: total sleep time, how often you're waking up, and when you're going to bed. The Withings Sleep Mat surprised me here. It's not sexy looking, just a thin pad under your mattress, but it gave me the most consistent data without any wearability issues. Battery life became huge too – nothing kills the habit like a dead tracker. I found the sweet spot around $100-150 for devices that actually last and provide reliable data. The cheap fitness bands under $50 were inconsistent, but anything over $200 wasn't noticeably better for basic sleep insights.

I tested these devices across different sleeping conditions – hotel beds, my couch during sick days, even camping trips. I tracked everything for twelve weeks, comparing how the data matched my actual sleep quality and energy levels the next day. Some trackers completely freaked out when I wasn't in my regular bed, while others adapted just fine.

The real value isn't in the fancy charts – it's in building awareness of your patterns. I've spent three months testing these so you don't have to guess which ones actually work in real life.

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