This Oura Insider Exclusive contains material not available anywhere else – except right here.
Did you know that in the Daily movement graph you can see not only your daily movement, but also your nightly movement?
In this Oura Exclusive we'll take a closer look at restless sleep. To understand how restful your sleep is, first take a look at these metrics:
– Awake time
– Restfulness
– Sleep efficiency
Besides these metrics it might be worthwhile to take a look at the daily movement graph. The graph shows a 24-hour span starting at 4 am and ending at 4 am the following night. For the sake of this exploration, ignore the daily movement and focus on what happens after you fall asleep.
Do you see any short gray bars next to the dark gray ones? That's you tossing and turning, getting up to check on the kids, the dog or going to the bathroom. To get a closer look, log into Oura Cloud with your Oura account and navigate to Dashboard > Activity. You'll see something like this:
We're interested in what happens at night, so let's focus on the latter part of the graph. Each bar in the Oura Cloud graph represents 5 minutes.
We can see from the image that this person is fairly restful during the night with some interspersed periods of increased movement. As always, it's best to compare your nights to your own baseline instead comparing to other people.
If you feel rested in the morning, you don't need to worry about seeing movement during the night. It's completely normal. If your Oura app says you should pay attention to the Restfulness contributor or if you feel like your nights are restless, check out this Oura Help article for 13 ways to remedy restlessness.
And if you don't have an Oura ring yet, you can get one from the Oura shop.
"The consensus view, passed down over the decades via public-service announcement infographics, is that adults should get somewhere between seven and eight hours of shut-eye. But by snoozing a few extra hours, are the world’s tip-top athletes—whose jobs require them to stay in outrageously good shape—on to something the rest of us aren’t?" – From GQ
"If sleep actually does “rebalance” the brain, then two things should happen: The synapses should swell during the day as the brain is exposed to a plethora of new things and experiences, and they should shrink ever so slightly at night as the brain returns to a “synaptic homeostasis,” as the authors put it, and gets ready to complete that process all over again." – From Inverse