Track Sleep Using Your Apple Watch and Pillow

by Jeff Byrnes

July 22, 2017

Believe it or not, your Apple Watch can help you figure out the quality of your sleep, and truly track how much of it you’re getting. Sleep is one of the most valuable commodities we have, but it seems we never get enough of it. Even when we do sleep for our target number of hours, we often feel like we haven’t slept a wink all night when we get up. With the Pillow app, you can unearth what’s the cause of all of that. In fact, your Apple Watch and Pillow can track sleep and show you almost exactly how well you’re slumbering throughout the night.

Track sleep with your Apple Watch using Pillow

You can track sleep on all your devices using Pillow, but the Apple Watch integration is what makes it truly magical

Pillow’s iPhone App is Great, but …

I’m not going to talk much about it. After all, this is an Apple Watch site. Briefly, the iPhone app for Pillow is capable of the following, and more:

Integrate with Apple’s Health app to track your sleep
Analyze your sleep patters, including the stages of sleep (Awake, REM, Light Sleep, Deep Sleep)
Record sounds during your sleep
Select the best possible time to wake you up, just a few minutes before the alarm you have set up

The Apple Watch App Helps Track Sleep

The true beauty of Pillow is how it utilizes your Apple Watch to help track sleep. The app monitors your movements and your heart rate throughout the night, using that to help determine precisely how well you’ve slept. You can even get detailed information about your heart rate during sleep.

Heart rate tracking on Apple Watch to track sleep

Using Pillow and your Apple Watch to track sleep, you can get detailed heart rate analysis of your night

The developers aren’t sitting on their laurels now, either. They’re busily working on even more Apple Watch functionality, like letting the Watch automatically track sleep (right now, you have to tell the app when you’re going to sleep), the use of haptic feedback for the alarm, and performing audio recording using the Apple Watch instead of the iPhone.

There’s a secret to using your Apple Watch together with Pillow, of course. You’re probably curious about the battery life. I’ve been using Pillow for two months now, and have gotten into a routine. I charge my Watch for an hour or so in the evening, just before bed. Then I put my Apple Watch back on and go to bed. The battery lasts me almost a full 24 hours, so I never run dangerously low on juice. Granted, I have a Series 2 Apple Watch, so your mileage may vary a bit.

What Pillow Can Already Do for You

Right now, Pillow’s iPhone and Apple Watch apps provide some of the best sleep tracking information of any app I’ve tested. They work in tandem to track just how well you’re sleeping, and then provide that information in a very easy-to-understand graph. There are also screens that will show how well you’ve slept over time, such as for the past week or month.

Sleep patterns on an Apple Watch when you let Pillow track sleep

Get detailed statistics of your slumber when you allow Pillow and your Apple Watch to track sleep

Tracking your heart rate using the Apple Watch is a terrific means of monitoring how well you’re sleeping. An elevated heart rate almost certainly means you aren’t in the deep stages of sleep that are so important to our well-being. This is just one way you can use the Apple Watch to track your health and fitness even when you don’t know it’s happening.

Pillow is a free download on the App Store, with an in-app purchase to unlock all of the premium features.