I just wanted to solve the mystery of why I wake up tired, and it’s led me to this moment: Electrodes glued to my scalp and face, to read every twitch, eye roll and brainwave as I sleep. Wires stretching down to a glowing control box strapped to my waist. A flow sensor in my nostrils to measure my breathing.
This isn’t how I normally go to bed.Â
I’m at Stanford’s Sleep Medicine Center for a polysomnography, the gold standard method for diagnosing sleep disorders. Jonathan Campbell, a friendly sleep technician, has just spent 45 minutes gluing and strapping equipment to my body. He’ll monitor me overnight from the control room, watching my brain activity, heart rate and body movement and listening for snoring in real time.
He’s been doing this for 20 years. “It boggles my mind. To this day I still get some adults asking me, ‘Can you see my dreams?'” he says, applying blobs of adhesive to my forehead with a Q-tip.
I’m not alone in having trouble sleeping. According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, between 50 million and 70 million Americans have sleep disorders, and one in three adults don’t get the recommended amount of uninterrupted sleep they need. People sleep badly for so many different reasons: stress, chronic pain, environmental factors like noise — the list goes on. Getting less than the recommended amount of sleep is a slippery slope to a variety of health issues, and we all know how it can make us feel like a walking dumpster fire the next day.  Â
You might already track your sleep using an Apple Watch, Fitbit, Galaxy Watch or similar wearable and have a general idea of how you sleep. These trackers can give more insight into the amount of time we spend in different sleep stages like rapid eye movement (REM) or deep sleep and may help identify areas we can improve through lifestyle tweaks. But they can’t diagnose sleep disorders — yet.Â
That’s where a lab-based sleep test comes in, though home sleep tests are also an option. Over 80…
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