I’ve been tracking my sleep with a wearable for about six months now, and the data shows my deep sleep is consistently lower than the average for my age. I’m just not sure how much stock to put in that number, or if I should even be worried. Has anyone else compared their own tracker’s sleep stage data with a proper lab study?
I hear you the numbers can feel personal when deep sleep looks low yet you still feel rested some mornings. Sleep data can be slippery on a consumer wearable.
From a data nerd angle wearables infer sleep stages from motion and heart signals not from EEG so deep sleep percent is noisy and shifts with the night and your posture.
I used to think deep sleep is where you dream but that happens in REM so a low deep sleep reading might not mean you are getting fewer dreams.
I am not ready to panic about one metric a wearable shows because it is a noisy proxy and the lab version is not practical for day to day living.
Maybe focus on overall sleep quality rather than the share of deep sleep track and look at how long you are in bed and how consistent your schedule is.
Why assume a lab is the gold standard for a person living their life sleep wise?