5 Things That Make Your Sleep Score Plummet + How To Get It Back On Track

What's one thing professional athletes, data nerds, and health researchers have in common? They all use sleep trackers.

Sleep tracking is an increasingly popular, increasingly high-tech way to optimize your sleep (and, in turn, your health).

Trackers—typically a watch or ring—collect data on your heart rate, temperature, and movement scores during the night to assign you a sleep score. While not 100% accurate, these scores can give you an idea of how your sleep varies from evening to evening.

"It's more important to track trends over time rather than single nights," board-certified sleep medicine specialist Nishi Bhopal, M.D., tells mindbodygreen. Once you see your score go from 90 one week to 70 the next, it's a sign to investigate what could have caused the dip.

We all have slightly different windows of time when our bodies want to be asleep (you've probably seen this described as your "chronotype"). If you push your bedtime to be later than your ideal window, your sleep score will suffer—even if you sleep in later in the morning to try to make up for it.

This is something I noticed when I wore an Oura ring for months: Getting eight hours of sleep starting at 10:30 p.m. yielded much better scores than getting eight hours starting at 11:30 p.m. or later. I consistently got less REM sleep and deep sleep on the nights when I went to bed later, even if the rest of my routine stayed exactly the same.

If you're busy running around all day, you might find that stressful thoughts and worries only have a chance to catch up with you once your head hits the pillow: precisely when you don't want them. These stressors can rev up your fight-or-flight response and trigger the release of cortisol, increasing your sleep latency1 (the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep). And the longer it takes to fall asleep, the more likely you are to start worrying about not sleeping enough, kick-starting a cycle that will show up in your metrics the next morning.

While a streetlight peeking through a bedroom window seems like it shouldn't be a big deal, research shows that even a little bit of light exposure is enough to shorten sleep, cause more frequent wakeups2, reduce REM and deep sleep, and heighten heart rate.3 This is one reason that people who work overnight shifts can have such a hard time getting into a healthy sleep rhythm.

While sometimes you don't have a choice, eating a late dinner does get in the way of sleep quality. Consuming food (especially heavy foods) too close to bedtime means that you'll go to sleep still digesting—which will keep you up for longer and/or cause you to wake up more in the middle of the night. And that's not even accounting for any alcohol you drank during dinner...

Even on nights when you feel like you got good sleep, your tracker might tell you that you were actually tossing and turning more than you realized. A lack of physical activity during the day can spur restlessness at night since exercise tires the body out and helps the mind relax and de-stress.