OyasooSleep tracking for night shift workers
Most sleep trackers quietly assume you sleep at night. Work a run of nights and the app shows nothing, or records your daytime sleep as a “nap”, or tells you your sleep is wildly irregular when really you’re just on a different shift. If you work nights or rotating shifts, it helps to know what to track and what to ignore.
Where ordinary trackers go wrong
Day sleep doesn’t count. Many apps only look for sleep in the evening and night. Sleep from 08:30 to 15:00 after a night shift either goes missing or gets filed as a long nap, so your weekly total looks far too low.
The wrong day. Sleep that starts after midnight gets assigned to a calendar day in odd ways. Is the sleep you get after Tuesday’s night shift part of Tuesday or Wednesday? An app that splits it at midnight gives you two half-nights that mean nothing.
Everything looks irregular. If you do three nights, then three days, then four off, your bedtime jumps by eight hours or more. Measured against one average bedtime, that’s “terrible regularity”. Measured within each type of shift, you may be very consistent.
What’s worth tracking
Total sleep per 24 hours. Count every sleep, the main one and any short sleep before a shift. On night shifts the main sleep is often shorter, and a nap before work makes up part of it. The total is what your body notices.
Sleep after the first and last night. The switch is where sleep usually suffers most: the first day sleep after a run of days, and the first night back after a run of nights. Look at those specifically instead of at the weekly average.
Consistency within a shift type. Compare day-shift sleep with day-shift sleep and night-shift sleep with night-shift sleep. Going to bed around the same time after every night shift is a good sign, even if that time is 08:00.
Phone use before day sleep. After a night shift it’s tempting to scroll in bed. Seeing how much time that actually takes, night after night, is often more useful than any score.
A tracker that fits shift work
Look for three things:
- It finds sleep at any hour, not just at night, and doesn’t need you to say when you’re going to sleep.
- It counts sleep for the day you wake up from it. Sleep after a night shift then belongs to the day you get up, which is how most people think about it.
- It measures regularity within comparable nights, so a planned change of shift doesn’t count against you.
Oyasoo was built with these in mind. It counts each sleep for the day you wake up and judges regularity per group of similar nights instead of against one average. With My sleep times vary switched on in Settings, it also treats sleep at any hour as normal, instead of trusting mainly sleep at night. Because it works from when you use your phone and when it moves, there’s nothing to start before a day sleep, which is exactly when you’d forget.
Reading your numbers
Give it two or three weeks before drawing conclusions. One rotation is rarely typical. Then look for patterns rather than single bad days: is the first day sleep after nights always short? Does a nap before the first night shift help your total? Does phone use in bed stretch out after night shifts?
Phone-based tracking is an estimate. It’s good at when and how long, not at how deeply you slept. If you’re regularly struggling to sleep after shifts or feel unwell, that’s something to bring to a doctor or occupational health service, with your numbers as a useful starting point.