Wrist Jolt

Behind my bed sits a vintage clock radio.  Modern in its day.  Red numerals.  Wake to an audio blare or to whatever AM or FM station had been preset.  I never liked it, but those red numbers behind me remain my official command to arise each morning.  Though that now happens silently.  The NFL offers a two-minute warning.  My current smartwatch signals a ten-minute warning in the form of a fifteen firm buzzes across my left wrist.  

Being smart, and a good buy at $40, it multitasks.  That includes a passive but ongoing assessment of the sleep it is programmed to terminate.  Home Sleep Trackers have been a great disappointment, at least the two Apps I've downloaded to my smartphone.  Highly inaccurate.  Prone to failure. Annoying to have the device next to me.  This watch may not be any more accurate, but it doesn't intrude.  It records a sleep time, has a mechanism for deciding when I am in REM without access to my eyeballs, and thinks it can decide when my nightly nap is light or deep.  Then it gives a time summary at the end.  Unlike the phone Apps, it does not offer a running timeline so I can match which stage at which hour.  Mostly, the morning wrist buzz occurs during light sleep, confirmed by the electronic bar graph of sleep stages.  However, apparently nearly every morning I have a deep sleep interval preceding that.  One electronic jolt occurred during that interval.  I could tell the difference.  The intensity of that buzz could terminate deep sleep.  The bar graph that morning had the blue deep sleep color as my final interval on awakening, a rarity.  

With considerable focus on professional sleep hygiene recommendations the past year or two, I might not need the dawn reminder, as my intrinsic sleep cycle ends my nightly session on its own at about the same time each morning.  Still, I like to see what happened before that.  My smartwatch records a doze-off time, probably accurate.  I try to keep that constant, though less effectively than I manage the arise time.  It will record nocturia X 1 as wake time.  It does not really capture middle of the night insomnia, which that clock radio's red numerals usually capture at about 3AM.

Yet it is reassuring that a simple electronic device can keep me reasonably on track for what has been a chronic vexing challenge.