How smartwatches can help you sleep better

Tags: Technology and concepts | Smart

28.1.2026 | 9 MIN

Sleep plays a major role in our quality of life, energy, and mood. Today, almost every smart device can measure it. So how can smartwatches help us improve our sleep?

In this article, we’ll focus on how smartwatches can help with your sleep. My colleague Dominik has already written an excellent piece on how smartwatches monitor sleep.

You can sleep for hours, but are you sleeping well?

Sleep quality isn’t defined only by duration, but also by the specific stages and their balance.

Modern watches can distinguish sleep stages — REM and NREM. Thanks to that, you can see why you sometimes wake up tired even after 8 hours in bed. Each brand uses slightly different algorithms, but all of them give you a solid overview of what happened during the night.

Whether you do or don’t use a smartwatch to monitor your sleep, there’s one thing you can estimate fairly easily — how long you slept. Sure, not down to the minute, but we roughly know when we went to bed and when we got up.

What you definitely won’t know without help is the ratio of sleep stages, the time spent in each, and the overall evaluation. I usually check my sleep score a few dozen minutes after waking — once I’m properly awake — and use it as a starting point. Then I look at the stage ratios and, from a recovery standpoint, how much time I spent in deep and REM sleep, where the body recovers the most.

I never look at the evaluation immediately after waking up. I know I won’t remember it in a groggy state, and first I go by how I feel. I know my body, and within minutes I can tell how well I slept. Also, if you wake up and let yourself be influenced only by what the watch says, you might start the day on the wrong foot.

I won’t lie — for some people this kind of scoring can feel a bit restrictive. You get up, the first thing you do is glance at your watch and see a low sleep score. You automatically convince yourself you slept badly, and it affects the rest of your day. Remember, the watch is your servant, not your master — don’t fixate on the number right away. Your inner feeling should always take priority over what the watch says.

A sleep assessment typically shows duration, individual stages, a sleep score, and usually overnight heart rate variability (HRV).

Based on this data, you can evaluate whether your sleep-stage balance is within a normal range or whether something needs improvement.

Heart rate and HRV tell you more than you think

Heart rate can reveal a lot, especially when you track overnight heart rate. Your lowest overnight heart rate is one of the most reliable indicators of recovery.

Lower HR indicates better recovery and lower physiological stress. Conversely, higher HR can point to fatigue, overreaching, illness, or elevated stress.

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Daytime heart rate can be influenced by dozens of factors — movement, stress, food, coffee… During sleep, the body faces fewer variables, so results are much more precise.

Persistently elevated overnight HR can signal several issues: an impending illness, poor sleep hygiene, dysregulated stress, or alcohol consumption.

As a rule of thumb, the lower your overnight heart rate, the better for your body. It indicates better fitness or generally healthy habits. In well-trained individuals, overnight HR can drop below 40 beats per minute.

With HRV, we aim for the opposite: the higher the number, the better.

HRV, or heart rate variability, is one of the best indicators of how rested your body is. When HRV is low, it often means your body is overloaded, fatigued, or stressed. It doesn’t have to be caused purely by training — illness can play a role, too. Many processes happen in the body without us noticing, and HRV can highlight that it’s time to ease off.

Balanced HRV, low overnight HR, and solid recovery = your body is ready for intensity. If HR goes up, it’s smart to dial back and get more rest.

A sleep coach can help

Most smartwatch makers now offer a sleep coach feature. It provides personalized recommendations tailored to your needs. A sleep coach doesn’t consider only the previous night’s sleep, but also training load, daily activity, and stress — and based on that, it suggests how much sleep you should get the next night.

It doesn’t just advise on sleep duration. It also suggests when to go to bed. (This feature differs by brand; Garmin offers this type of recommendation in its evening report.) The aim is to help you build a regular bedtime. On top of that, you get actionable sleep tips: limiting phone time before bed, setting an ideal bedroom temperature (which has a big impact on sleep quality), or reducing noise in the room where you sleep.

Many brands now implement habit logs. You record key things that happened during the day and could strongly affect your sleep. You can note coffee intake, whether you trained, rested, ate heavy food, and so on. Later, you can determine which of these factors affect your body positively or negatively.

Sure, we all subconsciously know it’s not great to down chips and beer before bed. But the point is to highlight healthy vs. unhealthy habits — apply and stick to the positive ones, and eliminate the negative ones.

It can flag breathing issues

Blood oxygen measurements and respiration variability tracking can alert you to nighttime breathing pauses, snoring, or other problems that may disrupt sleep. In this way, a watch can help detect conditions like sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea is a disorder in which there are repeated breathing pauses during the night. People often don’t notice it — they just wake up tired, have headaches, or their partner says they snore loudly.

Smartwatches won’t replace a doctor, but they can be a signal that it’s worth getting checked.

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Not sure when to wake up? Use a smart alarm

Watches track your sleep stages throughout the night. A smart alarm uses those stages to pick the best moment to wake you up and avoid dragging you out of deep sleep.

If you set an alarm for, say, 8:00 a.m., the watch typically picks a 30-minute window to wake you when your sleep is light. That leads to a much more pleasant wake-up than if you were in deep sleep.

The result? You likely won’t hit “zombie mode,” but wake more naturally. A smoother wake-up can also help you fall asleep more easily the next evening. If there’s no suitable moment within the window, the alarm will ring at the time you set.

Personally, I haven’t been waking up any other way for months than with a smart alarm — and my mornings are much nicer. I get up and within minutes I’m alert and energized. Of course, that’s not just the smart alarm, but also proper sleep hygiene.

Stress, the silent killer. Is it worth tracking?

Many people don’t realize how much daytime stress affects sleep. Watches measure stress responses and show the links between a demanding day and a worse night.

That lets you respond to these variables and make changes that have a real impact — for example, add short breaks or breathing exercises during the day.

Aim for consistency

Sleep scores, stats, badges, and trend comparisons over time — all of these can motivate you to work on your sleep habits.

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Honestly, of all the reasons listed in this article, this is the most valuable one for me personally. Yes, it’s great that watches can evaluate your sleep, offer tips to improve it, or even help flag health problems.

In my case, if any of these features made a lasting difference, it was building consistency.

Going back 5 years, when I was still a student and just getting into smartwatches, my routine wasn’t balanced. One day I’d sleep 5 hours, the next 10. I even skipped classes sometimes because I woke up so wrecked that I chose rest over school. At that age (I was around 20 then), my body could take it.

Over the years, with age and a better grasp of sleep habits, I felt how negatively irregular sleep impacts the body. Poor sleep is a much more serious issue than it may seem at first. It affects our energy, mood, feelings, decision-making — everything we deal with daily. That’s why I’d prioritize sleep consistency above all. You don’t need a smartwatch to realize this, but it can be a very helpful tool — and it helped me a lot.

My personal tips

For years I thought I slept perfectly. If I slept 5 hours one day, I believed I could make up for it with 10 hours the next. Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — I learned over time that it doesn’t work that way.

As I mentioned, the biggest lever is sleep consistency. You don’t realize it until you sleep consistently and then break the pattern a few times — that’s when you really feel the impact on sleep quality. So my most valuable tip is consistency. Try to go to bed and wake up at similar times. It will improve your sleep and help build discipline you’ll appreciate later in life.

With slight fluctuations, you can see I managed to keep sleep consistency for almost the entire year.

It’s not always possible to go to bed and wake up at the same time. In that case, at least try to keep your sleep duration consistent. If you know your body thrives on 7 hours, don’t take them away — try to give it those hours every time.

Don’t eat right before bed — it’s advice most of us have heard at least once. I’m not saying this to prevent weight gain, but to improve sleep quality. Even if we don’t realize it, eating and digestion are a form of stress for the body. Several processes kick in to process food. If you eat shortly before bed, your body will be busy for the next few hours and pay less attention to the processes that occur during sleep.

Not only will your overnight heart rate likely rise, your HRV may drop, and your recovery and sleep stages may be disrupted. All of this leads to worse sleep. And all you had to do was eat two hours earlier.

Avoid alcohol — you’ve probably heard that from your mom, too. We all know alcohol, aside from lifting your mood and helping you unwind, has no positive effect on health. Like many people, I enjoy having a beer with friends while watching sports. These days, I usually choose to skip it. Alcohol again has a negative impact on the body. It significantly raises heart rate and lowers HRV (because the body is stressed and busy metabolizing), which leads to worse recovery and worse sleep. Sure, you shouldn’t deprive yourself of everything — enjoy it occasionally.

But if, like me, you train several hours a week, a few drinks can undermine your hard work. I’d recommend skipping alcohol more often than not. Your body will thank you.

Room temperature — it can make the difference between a restless night and sleeping like a baby. Temperature has a major effect on sleep quality because it strongly influences thermoregulation — how the body lowers its temperature to fall asleep and maintain deep sleep.

The ideal bedroom temperature had a big impact on my average sleep score of 85/100.

The ideal temperature should be somewhere between 16–19 degrees. Not that I use a thermometer — I just try to keep a slight chill in the bedroom. Higher temperatures can cause more awakenings, shorter REM and deep sleep, higher heart rate, more sweating, and worse recovery. Excessive cold isn’t great for sleep either.

It’s scientifically proven that lower temperature supports melatonin, the sleep hormone. It helps “switch off” the sympathetic nervous system faster and supports the parasympathetic — the recovery state.

In this respect, I’d apply a simple rule: warm duvet, cool air.

Reduce ambient light — it can significantly help you fall asleep faster. Light controls our circadian rhythm (our internal biological clock). Even a small amount of light before bed can block melatonin production. A lit lamp or looking at your phone can disrupt sleep.

But you probably don’t want to walk around in the dark for half an hour before bed. There are several solutions: use warm, yellow light; wear red glasses that block blue light; or switch on RedShift mode on your device, which most smartwatches now have.

My tips may sound restrictive — don’t drink alcohol, don’t eat, don’t watch TV or look at your phone. But once I learned to do them, they became habits I follow almost automatically. It was a hassle at first, but it paid off. There are very few days in a year when I sleep badly. And since I spend a third of my life sleeping, these micro-habits are worth it to improve it.

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Photo credits:

• Hodinky 365 photographers
• screenshots from the Garmin Connect app