Many things you do during the day can affect your sleep, so it may be useful to track them. Activities include things like exercise and stuff you consume like caffeine, drugs, and food. A large number of sleep-related activities are built into My Sleep Tracker, and many of these may not be relevant to you. To hide the activities that are not relevant, or that you do not want to track, use the main menu to go to the Settings screen and tap on the Activities tab. Uncheck the activities you are not interested in recording. This reduces the number of choices you see when recording an activity.
When adding or editing a sleep-related activity you choose a date and the approximate time the activity occurred. Don't wait too long, because research shows people do forget these details. My Sleep Tracker will allow you to add information only for today or the previous two days.
Next, you pick the activity category. The eight categories are:
- Alcohol
- Caffeine
- Exercise
- Food
- Medication*
- Nicotine
- Recreational Drugs*
- Napping
Then you pick the specific type of activity. For example, after picking the “Caffeine” category the choices for the list of specific activity types will include items like coffee, energy drink, soda, tea, etc.
Some activities may ask for additional information – like “Amount”, “Units of measure” and “Details”. A few examples of additional information you might enter for different activity types follow.
- Exercise – Cardio: “3 hours cross-country skiing”
- Caffeine – Energy Drink: “8 fluid ounces Red Bull”
- Medication – Other: “50 mg tramadol”
- Napping – Asleep, but not in bed: “30 minutes”
If you change the date for an activity entry and save your changes, the activity entry is moved to a different daily log; you may need to browse through your Daily Logs to find the entry. Similarly, if you record a new activity from the Home Screen screen, and specify a date and time other than the yesterday or last night, the activity entry will not be displayed on the Home screen; you need to go to the Daily Logs to see the entry.
*Even if you opt in to sharing your sleep information with a therapist or doctor, My Sleep Tracker does NOT share any medication or recreational drug entries. Drug information is more confidential than other information you may track and is regulated by the HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy guidelines. All other sleep-related information logged in My Sleep Tracker and sleep metrics is not regulated by HIPAA, and when a client and therapist have agreed to share the client's sleep information can be remotely viewed by the therapist at their convenience.