Smartwatches, rings, mattresses, and apps — there are so many ways of tracking your sleep and so many sleep scores you could get. But it’s not always clear what a good sleep score looks like or how to improve it.
Below, we dive into what makes a good sleep score, why you don’t need to worry about most scores, and how you can improve the scores that make the biggest difference to your days with the RISE app.
There’s no single good sleep score as there are many ways of scoring sleep.
Apps and devices, as well as surveys and sleep tests used in sleep medicine and research, use various methods to evaluate your sleep.
To optimize your daily energy levels, mood, and productivity, focus on sleep debt and circadian alignment. These scores are backed by decades of research as the best markers of your sleep health and the strongest predictors of your performance and well-being both day-to-day and long-term.
Sleep debt measures how much sleep you owe your body, calculated by subtracting the sleep you get from the sleep you need. In the RISE app, we measure sleep debt over 14 nights.
The lower your sleep debt, the less sleep deprived you are, leading to better energy, mood, health, and productivity. While a score of zero is ideal, it is often unachievable; we recommend aiming for five hours or less sleep debt to feel your best.
Circadian alignment is how in sync your sleep-wake cycle is with your circadian rhythm or body clock (your body’s natural schedule for sleep and wakefulness).
You can be more in sync by having a regular sleep schedule at the right time for your circadian rhythm — such as by sleeping at the right time for your chronotype.
For example, if you’re a “night owl,” you might naturally prefer a later bedtime and wake-up time, whereas an “early bird” might feel best going to bed and waking up early. Sticking to a schedule that fits your natural preferences helps you feel more rested and energized.
There isn’t a standardized score for circadian alignment.
Methods used in research and clinical settings include measuring social jetlag (the difference between your sleep schedule on work days and free days), and the time elapsed between Dim Light Melatonin Onset (DLMO) and the average time you fall asleep (DLMO is a measure of the time in the evening when your body starts producing melatonin, indicating the start of your biological night).
The less variation you have in your sleep patterns and the more aligned you sleep with your body clock, the better energy, health, and quality of your sleep.
RISE can work out how much sleep debt you have and give you a “score” in hours — for example, 4.5 hours of sleep debt.
The app can also predict the timing of your circadian rhythm, so you can see the best times to sleep and wake up for you.
RISE also helps you improve your scores.
To do this, RISE guides you through daily advice, tailored to you, to help you improve your sleep debt and circadian alignment, so you notice the difference each day (more on this soon).
We’ve covered more on how much sleep debt you have here, including how RISE works it out.
There are many different sleep scores out there. Many scores look at different dimensions, or aspects, of your sleep and combine them into an overall score in different ways. They have varying degrees of scientific validation and clinical acceptance. What makes a score good or bad — and by how much — varies, too.
Here’s a rundown of some common sleep scores you might get, how they’re calculated, and what a “good” score looks like for each.
Sleep quality doesn’t have a set definition, but it generally refers to how well you slept.
You might get a sleep quality percentage from a sleep tracker, which might combine metrics like:
Sleep efficiency is a measure of how long you spend in bed asleep, taking into account how long it takes you to fall asleep and how long you’re awake during the night.
You divide the time you spent asleep by the time you spent in bed and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if you slept for six hours and spent eight hours in bed, the math would be 6 / 8 = 0.75 x 100 = 75%. The higher the percentage, the better your sleep efficiency and the more time you spend asleep in bed. Sleep efficiency above 85% is considered good.
You can also get a sleep quality score from a survey like the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), which asks you to self-assess metrics like your sleep onset latency (the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep), sleep duration, and sleep disturbances over a month.
Good or poor sleep quality is tricky to score and it varies depending on how quality is defined and measured.
We’ve covered more problems with sleep quality as a score here.
PSG is a sleep study that may be done in a lab. Researchers measure metrics like your brain activity, heart rate, and movement during sleep.
With this sleep data, they score your sleep, but instead of calculating a grade or percentage, this scoring refers to working out how long you spent in different stages of sleep. Researchers can also look at any sleep disturbances and your sleep quality, sleep efficiency, and sleep onset latency, among other metrics.
A sleep medicine specialist uses PSG scoring and deviations from normal parameters to help diagnose sleep disorders and build a picture of your overall sleep health. There's no universal “good” sleep score for PSG, as many metrics rely on individual characteristics and baselines. For example, we all need a different amount of deep sleep, light sleep, and REM sleep and this can change from night to night.
There are many more sleep scores beyond this.
In sleep research or sleep medicine, you might find scores like:
Sleep was already hard to score before the invention of sleep trackers like Garmin or Fitbit, but trackers have made things more complicated.
Each tracker uses their own scoring system and combines different metrics in different ways to give you a sleep score.
You might get a:
It differs from tracker to tracker, but this score can be based on metrics like sleep duration, how often you wake up in the night, and heart rate variability (HRV).
Sleep trackers use different sleep scores for a few reasons:
For the most part, these scores don’t reflect the research we have so far about evaluating sleep, so getting a good sleep score from a sleep tracker may not be that useful.
Dr. Jamie Zeitzer — co-director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at Stanford University and one of our sleep advisors — agrees.
“I haven't seen anything correlating these scores to an independent assessment of sleep or the consequences of sleep,” he says. “There is currently no requirement for sleep trackers to prove any claim.”
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The good news is — other than sleep debt and circadian alignment — you don’t need to worry about sleep scores, including the one your sleep tracker gives you.
Sleep is multi-dimensional, so it’s tricky to boil it down into a single score. Each metric — like sleep duration or time awake at night — may need a method of measuring and scoring.
Low sleep debt and good circadian alignment reflect the optimization of critical aspects of sleep health, such as duration, efficiency, timing, and regularity. Having low sleep debt and good circadian alignment helps optimize all other sleep scores — like getting enough of each sleep stage and having good sleep quality.
What’s more, most sleep scores — including sleep efficiency, sleep quality scores from a tracker, and even PSG scoring — look at single nights of sleep, which may not accurately reflect an individual's typical sleep patterns or overall sleep health.
This can put a lot of pressure on each night of sleep, which may lead to sleeplessness.
In contrast, low sleep debt and good circadian alignment are based on a longer-term view of your sleep patterns, providing a more accurate and sustainable approach to improving your overall sleep health.
Our sleep is highly individual. For example, when we looked at the sleep needs — how much sleep you need — of 1.95 million RISE users, we found it ranged from five hours to 11 hours 30 minutes.
So, any score measuring a dimension of sleep that’s unique to us — like sleep timing or how much of a sleep stage we need tonight — needs to take into account sleep need for it to be accurate. Most scores don’t do this and instead use generic sleep guidelines, ask you to set a sleep goal, or suggest a bedtime that doesn't consider your personal sleep patterns or chronotype.
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Dr. Zeitzer worries that sleep tracker scores can even be harmful for some: “They can be problematic because you can take someone who believes that their sleep is good, but the device is saying that it's bad, and this may trigger insomnia or unnecessary worry about sleep.” One of those worries is orthosomnia, which is when you become obsessed with getting the perfect sleep score.
The complexity of composite scores and the lack of transparency in the underlying scoring systems make it difficult to interpret whether a trend or deviation is meaningful or just noise. This ambiguity makes it challenging to know what to change in your life to improve your sleep score — or even if improving your score will impact how you feel or function in any way.
Dr. Chester Wu, a double board-certified doctor in psychiatry and sleep medicine, doesn’t recommend sleep scoring devices in his clinical practice: “The main problem I run into is people who get fixated or overly focused on things like their sleep score or the amount of each sleep stage they get, which we know is not reliable with most fitness trackers.”
The sleep scores you get from sleep-tracking apps and devices may be tracking metrics inaccurately.
Research shows wearables aren’t always accurate at knowing what sleep stage you’re in.
Even PSG isn’t perfect — experts agree on scores only about 80% of the time.
Fortunately, you can accurately track sleep debt and circadian alignment outside of a sleep lab with just your phone.
Sleep scores aren’t all bad, though. They can be useful starting points in sleep research or for doctors to diagnose and treat sleep disorders. But these scores usually come from methods like the PSQI or more consensus methods of measurement like sleep efficiency, not sleep trackers.
You can improve your sleep score by following sleep hygiene — science-backed, daily sleep habits that help you fall and stay asleep.
Sleep hygiene includes:
RISE can tell you when to do 20+ sleep hygiene habits at the right time for you.
Sleep hygiene habits can help you lower your sleep debt and get and stay in circadian alignment. RISE can guide you through additional easy steps you can take to improve them both too.
To lower your sleep debt:
We’ve covered more advice on how to catch up on sleep here.
To get, and stay, in circadian alignment:
Sleep scores come in many different shapes and sizes, measuring different things in different ways, so there’s no one good sleep score. Luckily, you don’t need to worry about generic sleep scores you get from most sleep trackers.
Instead, focus on sleep debt and circadian alignment. These are the scores that make the biggest difference to how you feel — which is probably why you want to score your sleep to begin with.
RISE can work out how much sleep debt you have and predict the timing of your circadian rhythm. You’ll then get daily personalized guidance to help you lower your sleep debt and get in circadian alignment.
When it comes to which scores to aim for, try to keep your sleep debt below five hours and sleep as in sync with your circadian rhythm as possible. This can help improve everything from your energy levels to your ability to focus to your overall health and wellness.
And users say it helps improve other sleep scores too:
After taking sleep debt more seriously with RISE, I’ve found my sleep stages tracked by the Apple Watch have started to improve as a result of reducing the sleep debt.” Read the review.
It doesn’t take long to improve your score — 80% of RISE users get better sleep within five days.
Learn more about Rise for sales teams.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
