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Hit Snooze on Restless Nights: How to Track Your Sleep on an Apple Watch

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If you’re having trouble sleeping, you may want to monitor your sleep cycle. The built-in Apple Watch sleep tracker and numerous third-party tracking apps make it easy.
Yawwwwn. Waking up feeling tired? Think you’re not getting enough sleep, or even the best kind of sleep? You could turn to your iPhone to create a sleep schedule, but it may be better to track your sleep patterns with a sleep tracker app on your Apple Watch.
In years past, you had to use a third-party app to monitor and record your sleep, but Apple introduced an integrated sleep tracker in 2020 with watchOS 7. The built-in tracker gets the job done, but it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you might need to fully track and record every aspect of your sleep. For that reason, you may still want to try a separate sleep-tracking app to get a more complete picture of your sleep patterns.
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By wearing your watch to bed and using an app to monitor your sleep, you can learn how long and how deeply you sleep during a typical night. These apps can transfer results to your iPhone, where you can check on your sleeping pattern the next morning and see how your sleep fares over time.
Worried about battery power? Don’t be. Your Apple Watch won’t run out of battery in the middle of the night if you give it a power boost before bed. Connect it to the charger for an hour or two before sleep, and it should last the entire night.
Keep in mind that these apps aren’t always 100% accurate. A more comprehensive test would involve your doctor and a full sleep study where you would be hooked up to monitors. However, these sleep trackers at least offer a good place to start.Enable Built-In Sleep Tracking
To access the Sleep app, your Apple Watch must be running watchOS 7 on a Series 3 or newer, SE, or Ultra. You’ll also need an iPhone 6s or later running iOS 14 or higher. To update your watch’s software, open the Watch app on your phone and head to General > Software Update.
Before it can track your sleep, your Apple Watch must be set up accordingly. In the Watch app on your phone, open My Watch and select Sleep. Tap Use this Watch for Sleep to enable the feature. Make sure the switches next to Track Sleep with Apple Watch and Charging Reminders have been turned on.Set Up Your Sleep Schedule
You can then tap Manage Sleep Focus in Settings to set up a sleep schedule, Focus mode, and wind down time. For Sleep Focus, select the people and apps allowed to contact you or send notifications while you’re asleep. Under Customize Screens, you can set the screen that appears during the night to minimize any distractions should you wake up and look at your watch.
Under Schedule, select a wind down time to help you prepare for bed and a wake up time (with or without an alarm) for the next morning. You’re also able to set up Focus filters to determine how your device behaves when you’re asleep.
You can review and further tweak your sleep schedule from the Health app. Tap the Browse icon at the bottom, and select Sleep. In the Your Schedule section, tap Edit to set the schedule for tonight, then tap Done.
To set up additional options, tap the entry for Full Schedule & Options.

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