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 levels of key biomarkers change across a day, over days, months, and even years and work together to balance-out your overall health and wellness. Each time you repeat this assessment, the results add even more value to your understanding.
Within a basic sleep rhythm assessment, you will establish where you are now, revealing insights into how your body responds to daily rhythms in your eating, activity, and rest patterns. This is a key metric for tracking your body’s natural circadian cycles, allowing you to assess how well your habits synchronize with your environment and your body’s internal clock for optimal health and well-being.
Your job is to then think about aspects of your health behavior choices, lifestyle, or eating and exercise habits as they relate to your report. Is your metabolism in check with your eating and sleeping habits? Is your work or family life causing a sustained stress-response? Is your quality of sleep suffering from low melatonin levels, high cortisol levels, or high insulin levels?
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 metabolic health.
If you need more help, our telehealth professionals are standing-by to also answer any questions you might have.
Review the sample results and information below for more information.
(click to download)
Total Score:
Your Total Healthy Lifestyle Check score is a culmination of several different profiles that encompass the major wellness pillars of sleep, stress, metabolism, and inflammation indexes. This overall index represents a balanced view of your overall health in these areas.
Overall Sleep Rhythm Indexes:
Our algorithm does all the number crunching for you to deliver an easy to understand Total Sleep Rhythm Index. A high Total Sleep Rhythm Index for all of your profiles means that your body appears to be balancing health and wellness and that 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 stress levels in the green!
If you see a lower Total Sleep Rhythm Index, don’t fret! Lower scores include an approved list of science-backed healthy lifestyle recommendations to help support your body in managing that particular index. The major benefit of this assessment is that you can now pick a single area or recommendation that easily fits with your unique lifestyle. Then you can determine precisely how effective this behavior is in improving your Total Sleep Rhythm Index through routine testing.
Individual Profile Scores:
On the flip-side you’ll gain access into each individual metric that is used to calculate your Total Sleep Rhythm Index. This way you can determine if there are any important areas that might be dragging down your Total Sleep Rhythm Index scores. This enables you to focus even more precisely on specific timing or behaviors that target this particular area of improvement.
Contact: Salimetrics (USA)
