You want to improve your sleep and energy levels, but your Apple Watch just isn’t cutting it. There are third-party Apple Watch apps out there to help, but many of them aren’t much more useful than your watch alone.
The RISE app is different.
RISE tracks key metrics proven to make a difference to your energy levels and gives you daily advice, based on your own biology, to help you get better sleep and more energy.
Below, we’ll dive into what to look for in a sleep-tracking app for the Apple Watch and how RISE can help.
Here’s what to keep in mind when choosing a sleep app for the Apple Watch:
Learn more about the best non-wearable sleep trackers here, including why you can trust sleep apps for sleep analysis.
Here’s what the RISE app tracks — and doesn’t track — and how this works with your Apple Watch.
Sleep debt is the amount of sleep you owe your body. Alongside circadian alignment (more on that soon), it’s one of the biggest factors affecting how you feel and perform.
The lower your sleep debt, the better your energy, productivity, mood, health, and performance.
RISE works out your sleep debt by calculating how much sleep you need — known as your sleep need — and comparing this to the hours of sleep you get each night.
Sleep debt is then measured over 14 nights for an accurate representation of how past sleep affects today’s energy levels.
Sleep debt tracking is something many sleep trackers — including Apple Watch — don’t do. Those that do (like AutoSleep), don’t do it accurately as they use generic guidelines or self-set sleep goals to work out your sleep need. Apple, for example, lets you choose your own sleep goal with the default being eight hours.
But we don’t all need eight hours. For example, among 1.95 million RISE users aged 24 and up, we found sleep needs ranged from five hours to 11 hours 30 minutes.
RISE works out your sleep need based on a year’s worth of your phone use behavior and sleep science algorithms. You’ll get a number unique to you.
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RISE then tracks your sleep duration via one of three methods:
If your Apple Watch runs out of battery or you leave it at home when traveling, RISE will automatically use tappigraphy to track your sleep.
Instead of complicated graphs, overly detailed sleep reports, or not-that-useful sleep trends, you’ll get one clear sleep debt number to focus on.
You can view your sleep debt number in the RISE app, on a widget on your iPhone home screen, on your iPad, or on your Apple Watch. This helps you plan your day, knowing whether you should schedule a nap or an early night to catch up on sleep.
Learn what makes RISE the best sleep debt tracker here.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can view their sleep need here and view their sleep debt here.
Circadian alignment, where your body's internal clock is in sync with environmental cues like light and dark, supports consistent sleep timing, better sleep, and low sleep debt. You can get out of sync by having an irregular sleep schedule — among other things — and syncing up can improve your sleep, energy, performance, and health.
Syncing up with your circadian rhythm also involves syncing up your tasks to match your natural fluctuations in energy throughout the day. This can boost your productivity.
Just like with sleep debt, Apple Watch and many apps that work with it — like SleepCycle — don’t tell you anything about your circadian rhythm.
Apple Watch’s native Sleep app shows you information about your sleep consistency and gives you a recommended bedtime, but this is based on your self-set sleep goal and sleep schedule, and may not be what your body really needs.
RISE predicts the timing of your circadian rhythm each day so you can get and stay in sync with it.
To do this, RISE uses your recent sleep times, inferred light exposure, and algorithms built on the SAFTE model, which was developed by the US Department of Transportation and the Department of Defense.
You’ll find out when your body wants to wake up and go to sleep and when you’ll have peaks and dips in energy across the day.
View these on the RISE app on your phone or, with the RISE complication, at a glance on your Apple Watch face. You’ll know whether to do focused deep work, take a nap, or wind down for bed, depending on your circadian rhythm. You can tap for more energy insights to plan further ahead in your day.
We cover more about how RISE predicts your circadian rhythm here.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can see their circadian rhythm on the Energy screen here.
Apple Watch and apps like SleepCycle track the amount of time you spend in the different stages of sleep: deep sleep, REM sleep, and light sleep. Although, Apple calls light sleep “core sleep” — a nod to how this sleep stage is just as important as the others.
This sounds like a useful feature, but, unfortunately, it’s not all it's cracked up to be.
Research suggests the amount of time you spend in different sleep stages doesn’t really impact how you feel during the day. There are no set guidelines for how long to spend in each sleep stage, and the ideal amount will be different for everyone and changes nightly.
So, tracking won’t help you get enough of each sleep stage, but getting enough sleep overall on a regular schedule (aka low sleep debt and circadian alignment) will.
Even if tracking was useful, research shows sleep trackers aren’t that accurate at figuring out which sleep stage you’re in. Even in polysomnography (sleep studies), experts agree on results only about 80% of the time.
If you’re interested purely from a curiosity point of view, RISE pulls Apple Watch’s built-in sleep stage tracking into the app, so you can view sleep stage data alongside RISE’s sleep tracking.
Apple Watch’s native app tracks your sleep quality, as do many apps that integrate with it, like Sleep++, Pillow, and SleepWatch.
Again, this sounds useful to track, but there are a few problems.
Firstly, there isn’t an agreed-upon definition for sleep quality. Sleep trackers use their own scoring systems to give you an opaque sleep score based on multiple metrics. This makes it hard to know how to improve the score, and improving the metrics the score is based on may not even make a difference to your sleep and energy levels in the first place.
How you feel about your sleep has been shown to make a difference, though. This is why you can self-rate your sleep quality in the RISE app. You’ll get a reminder on your Apple Watch 90 minutes after you wake up. This should give you enough time to shake off sleep inertia (grogginess) for a more accurate rating.
Heads-up: Time spent in sleep stages and sleep quality can’t help diagnose sleep disorders like insomnia or sleep apnea. Sleep debt can show sleep loss and Apple Watch’s blood oxygen levels can signal sleep apnea, so you can bring these metrics to a doctor or sleep specialist.
We dive into sleep tracking metrics in more detail here, including why it’s not worth tracking sleep stages or sleep quality.
RISE — both on your phone and Apple Watch — can improve your sleep and energy, and, let’s face it, this is probably why you’re looking for a sleep app to begin with.
Here’s how RISE can help:
Here are more ways RISE can help you improve your sleep and energy:
These complement what the Apple Watch can do. Useful features include Sleep Focus (a wind-down period before bed when notifications are silenced), workout and respiratory rate tracking, smart notifications, and — of course — it’s a watch.
Plus, the upcoming Apple Watch Series 10 may be able to detect signs of sleep apnea by tracking snoring, breathing rate, heart rate, movement, and sleep patterns.
If you want to have a sleep tracker that works just as well with Apple Watch as it does without it, we’ve covered the best trackers without a watch here.
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RISE costs $69.99 a year, which works out at $5.83 a month.
You’ll get access to all of RISE’s features with no hidden costs. As you don’t need an Apple Watch — or any other wearable — to use RISE, you can access all of RISE’s insights and tracking even if you decide to stop using your Apple Watch in the future.
RISE has a seven-day free trial so you can take the app for a test drive.
During this free trial, you’ll find out:
You can see for yourself how RISE’s suggested bedtime, smart alarm, and sleep hygiene reminders sent straight to your Apple Watch can improve your sleep and energy.
The biggest difference comes from consistently keeping sleep debt low and staying in sync with your circadian rhythm, but 80% of RISE users feel more energy within five days!
We dive into whether RISE is worth it here (spoiler: we think so!).
Thousands of users love RISE and the RISE Apple Watch app:
Beyond the thousands of 5-star reviews, RISE has awards and industry recognition, including from Apple, who nominated RISE for a design award and named it an Editor’s Choice app.
Plus, both Sleep Foundation and Sleep Doctor named RISE one of the best sleep apps of 2024.
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You don’t necessarily need a sleep app for the Apple Watch. Apple Watch’s in-built app is great for tracking time asleep, but it’s not so great when it comes to making changes to get more sleep and energy.
That’s where RISE comes in.
RISE works out how much sleep you personally need and gives you daily guidance to help you lower your sleep debt and get in sync with your circadian rhythm.
It pulls data from your Apple Watch for its sleep tracking and sends you personalized sleep hygiene reminders straight to your wrist. You can view your sleep debt and upcoming energy predictions from your watch, and get woken up with gentle watch vibrations.
All this will help you get more sleep and energy to enjoy each day.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
