Serious question - what is sleep tracking useful for? While I can see the benefit of tracing activity, I have no idea why would I want to track my sleep. I fall asleep, I wake up, what is there to track? Or rather, even if it tells me that I had a period of less/more movement during the night, what kind of actionable information can you possibly get out of it?
Wether you have trouble sleeping or not, it allows you to measure what "good" and "bad" is for you.
If I have alcohol before I sleep and don't use a sleep tracker, I generally assume I have a bad nights sleep. But my interpretation is all anecdotal. A sleep tracker can tell me though that I get up X more times when I have alcohol, I sleep Y less hours in each stage, I have a higher heart rate by Z much, have a lower heart rate variability, etc.
And you may think "so what?" We'll, that's the whole point. Now you know...not just "kind of know" that alcohol is bad for you.
It allows you to confirm what you think may be true, but can't prove.
Do you really need it to prove that drinking alcohol, especially before bed is bad for you? This is a well known medical fact. I don't see the point...
I'm building some unobtrusive alerting with mine (they have a public API). I'm bipolar, and less sleep is often correlated with a hypomanic episode. My oura helps me track my overall sleep and see patterns over time.
It also shows when I woke up in the middle of the night, which isn't always obvious to me when I fall back asleep soon after, but definitely impacts my sleep quality.
If you wake up happy, energised in a consistent manner then there isn't much to get out of sleep data. But a lot of people don't sleep consistent times with consistent results and not knowing why that happens leaves you with little control on how to improve your sleeping.
Without proper sleep, life loses a lot of its value.
This may sound obvious but I find the main benefit is that when I have data on my sleep I find myself being more intentional about my sleep patterns. Because I can see the results of an intervention to, say, go to sleep earlier, I feel like I have more control over my sleep patterns.
For myself the sleep duration tracking is the most useful data generated from sleep tracking.
I am struggling with a similar problem (food, and gas in particular, affecting my sleep) and was wondering if you'd be willing to share more about your experience.
Sorry for such a late reply. For me the two biggest culprits are sulfites (increased sleep disturbances) and fructose (reduced deep sleep and more chaotic cycles).
What's weird about the fructose is I don't have the symptoms associated with such an intolerance; namely gas. Good news is that there is an enzyme (Fructaid) that helps mitigate it for me, so I don't have to completely cut it from my diet.
In the US, sulfites can be sneaky. Labels are required to list them if directly added to a product, but not for sulfite-containing ingredients sourced from a third-party. So the raisins in that trail mix very likely contain sulfites.
