How Pokémon Sleep could help support your healthy sleep habits
Notes:
- Pokémon Sleep is intended for entertainment purposes only and is not intended for use in detection, diagnosis, or treatment of any medical condition or disease.
- The information provided in this article—and the sleep score registered through Pokémon Sleep—does not represent or substitute for a diagnosis from a physician or health care professional, and it cannot be used as a diagnostic or therapeutic treatment for a sleep disorder. Users should seek medical attention in case they present signs or symptoms that could be associated with sleep disorders.
- Please note that the information in this article is intended for adults regarding sleep unless otherwise stated.
1. Pokémon Sleep lets you visualize your sleep
Even if we understand how important our daily sleep is, the fact that it happens every day makes it difficult to get a good grasp on how well we’re sleeping.
We’ve been hearing the words “sleep tech” a lot lately. Sleep tech refers to services and devices that use the latest technology to scientifically analyze sleep. There are many apps and services that manage questions like “how much sleep did I get” and “how is my sleep consistency,” but Pokémon Sleep uses such sleep tech to illustrate your sleep graphically, to help you get a good idea of your own sleep consistency. After all, it would be difficult to record videos of yourself all night and then watch them to see how you slept.
It’s believed that the three most important factors for good well-being are an appropriate amount of exercise, a balanced diet, and enough sleep to regulate our minds and bodies. With exercise and diet, it’s easy enough to see for ourselves how much we’ve walked or what and how much we’ve eaten. But because we’re not conscious while we sleep, we’re not aware of the details of our own sleep. Being able to visualize our sleep is important for both our bodies and minds.
Quite a few people who think they’re sleep deprived are actually getting plenty of sleep. There are even cases where people overthink their own sleep, believing that they’re not getting enough, and this leads to worrying—which itself can lead to actually not getting enough sleep.
Representing sleep visually helps make people aware of their own sleep patterns. Using this observer’s perspective, we can work effectively towards understanding our sleep patterns.
Visual representations of sleep in Pokémon Sleep
Pokémon Sleep tracks, records, and categorizes your sleep into three sleep types: Dozing, Snoozing, and Slumbering. Each of these sleep types plays an important role in your sleep, and you need all three of them.
Using information supervised by Professor Yanagisawa, this application has many different features you can use to support your healthy sleep choices and patterns. By tracking, recording (see notes below), and visually representing your sleep, you can look back on your sleep consistency and use that knowledge to help you make better choices to improve your sleep habits.
Notes
• This data will be anonymized and will not be shared with any third parties.
• Audio data will not be saved on the server and will be deleted in 24 hours after you track your sleep by the app.
The Pokémon Company has a Privacy Notice for Pokémon Sleep, which is prepared under applicable laws to inform players that players’ personal information will be processed by The Pokémon Company or its affiliate.
2. Pokémon Sleep gives you a sleep score
Pokémon Sleep tracks your sleep habits and helps you to make better choices designed to improve healthy sleep.
Some mornings, if you wake up and your mood and body are feeling fine, you may feel like you got a good night’s sleep. But on the other hand, this is often hard to notice while you’re still in the process of understanding your sleep habits. When you get answers to questions like “how was my sleep” and “did I get enough of it,” you can work bit by bit towards better sleep choices.
Sleep tracking in Pokémon Sleep
Daily Score
If you are over 15, you will get a sleep score of 100 points for sleeping 8 hours and 30 minutes or more (11 hours or more for people 15 and under).
These numbers are based on the sleep durations recommended by American pediatrics.
According to their data, the recommended sleep duration for 16-year-olds is 8.5 hours of sleep. As they get older and become adults, the average sleep duration grows shorter, but the full sleep score in Pokémon Sleep for users 16 and older are based on the data for the youngest users.
As for evaluation of people under 16, the default is set to 11 hours, the recommended sleep duration for five-year-olds. In this way, Pokémon Sleep bases its full score sleep durations on what this data, which could be considered the international default, recommends for the youngest expected users.
Reference material: Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics (Nelson Pediatrics 2) (English Edition) 21st Edition, p.134f
Weekly Score
・Sleep Consistency
Pokémon Sleep tracks how consistent your sleeping habits are throughout the whole week. The time that falls right in the middle of when you fell asleep and when you woke up is called your sleep midpoint. If this sleep midpoint shifts between weekdays and weekends, it may cause social jet lag.
Consistent sleep is important, not only to help our minds and bodies recover when they’re tired, but also to maintain our well-being.
3. Pokémon Sleep makes your sleep more fun!
In order to improve our sleep habits, it’s important both to understand our own sleep through visual representations and to get enough sleep by maintaining a consistent daily sleep schedule. But the difficult part is keeping up with this over time. As with studying or exercise, forcing oneself to continue is not necessarily an easy task.
That’s where Pokémon Sleep comes in, helping to make your sleep more fun. Pokémon Sleep is set on a cluster of islands where large Snorlax live. On these islands, you’ll work with Professor Neroli to research how Pokémon sleep. Each night, Pokémon Sleep will track, record, and categorize your sleep, and Pokémon who have sleep types similar to yours will gather on your island.
The game is packed with fun things to make you look forward to sleeping at night, such as researching the sleep styles of Pokémon you don’t usually see and completing your Sleep Style Dex.
Repeating these experiences each day promotes more consistent sleep habits.
