Description
Why Measure Healthy Sleep?
Most of us believe that we can simply ‘catch up’ on sleep later. However, the science suggests otherwise. Just one night of poor sleep can significantly impact your cognitive performance, mood, metabolism, and immune system. While temporary sleep disruptions are inevitable, chronic sleep deprivation over weeks, months, or even years can incur a host of negative health effects. We all know that our ability to achieve healthy sleep changes with major life events such as having children or as we age. Most of us will experience significant sleep deficits in our lifetime and don’t appreciate the risks or long-term impact.
Think you can assess the impact of sleep deprivation just by judging how tired you are in the morning or how much energy you have throughout the day? Nope. While you can just “feel” some of the effects of poor sleep, there is a deeper level that is not part of our awareness.
We all need different amounts of sleep, which is why comparing your sleep patterns to others is not very helpful. What you can do, rather than just reflect on how you feel, is use a science-based, multi-day assessment. This assessment enables you to develop an understanding of your biological rhythm connected to your sleep needs. This will answer questions, such as is the amount of sleep you experience tracking with the natural day-night light cycle? What is your optimal bedtime and how often do you start your sleep routine at this time?
The healthy sleep check is an objective assessment specifically designed to help you develop a personalized strategy for managing healthy sleep habits and improving your overall health and well-being.
Why Measure Melatonin Levels?
The amount and timing of your body’s production of melatonin is very important in your sleep-wake cycle. Melatonin levels drop shortly after waking and are barely detectable throughout the day. In the evening melatonin levels begin to rise 1-3 hours prior to your typical bedtime, and then gradually decline until the morning hours.
Signatures of a chronic sleep deficit can reveal melatonin levels rising to early or to late relative to your typical bedtime. Understanding the timing of your melatonin production will enable you to know more about the underlying factors that may be contributing to poor sleep-quality issues, and provide objective information you can use on your journey to improve sleep quality in your life.
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Comparing You-To-You: What Do My Results Mean?
Comparing you-to-you is much more meaningful than comparing you to others. You are not the average of a group, you are unique. That’s the power of this assessment. Its simplicity enables you to observe how your melatonin levels change across a day, and over days, months, and years. Each time you repeat this assessment, the results add even more value to your understanding.
Within a basic assessment, you will establish where you are now, revealing how your melatonin levels change across the day given your current sleep habits and behaviors. You will also learn about your optimal bedtime.
Your job is to then think about aspects of your health behavior choices, lifestyle, or sleep habits as they relate to your report. Are you going to bed at your optimal bedtime? Do circumstances of your schedule need to change to enable you to do so? How much light exposure do you experience after dark? What is your estimated screen time in the evening? Is there too much ambient noise during the period when you are working on sleep?
As you experiment with changing these behaviors and or circumstances repeating the assessment will provide an objective metric as to whether what you changed worked. The information provided can help you determine next steps on your journey to better sleep.
If you need more help, our telehealth professionals are standing-by to also answer any questions you might have.
Review the sample results below for more information.
Overall HLC Index:
Our algorithm does all the number crunching for you to deliver an easy to understand Healthy Lifestyle Check Index or HLC Index. A good HLC Index in Healthy Sleep means your body appears to be managing your circadian rhythm well and your test values were within a healthy level throughout the assessment sampling profile. Over time, you can track and compare results to determine when you might consider additional lifestyle choices to keep your healthy sleep levels in the green!
If you see a lower HLC Index, don’t fret! Lower scores include an approved list of science-based healthy lifestyle recommendations to help support your body in managing healthy sleep. The major benefit of this assessment is that you can now pick a single recommendation that easily fits with your unique lifestyle. Then you can determine precisely how effective this behavior is in improving your overall Sleep Index through routine testing.
Individual Melatonin Scores:
On the flip-side you’ll gain access into each individual metric that is used to calculate your overall HLC Index. For healthy sleep, this involves calculating your morning, mid-day, and bedtime melatonin levels and determining the consistency of a healthy circadian rhythm. With these individual metrics, you can determine if there are any important areas that might be dragging down your overall healthy sleep index. This enables you to focus on specific timing or behaviors that target this particular area of improvement.
Contact: Salimetrics (USA)
