Sleep quality, heart rate variability, and blood sugar are important factors in mood and mental health. Tracking these metrics and optimizing them can help you stay on top of your mood.
Wearable fitness trackers, such as the Oura Ring, WHOOP band, Apple Watch, Fitbit, and even glucose monitors, have become increasingly common for daily use. There are a few metrics that may be useful to keep track of to see what impact they have on your mental health.
Sleep stages
The first metric that can be helpful to track with a wearable, or even a smart mattress such as the Eight Sleep, is your quality of sleep. The important metric is not your total time spent asleep, but the amount of time you spend in each stage of sleep — including REM, deep sleep, light sleep, and awakenings.
Sleep is an extremely important factor in mood and mental health. Tracking and consciously prioritizing sleep to optimize the amount of time you spend in REM or deep sleep, in particular, can help you maintain a healthy sleep schedule. Being cognizant of when you are sleeping poorly can also give you context for why you may be feeling bad, and serve as a reminder to take it easy that day.
Heart rate variability
Heart rate variability is a measure of the intervals between heart beats. For example, if you have a heart rate of 60 bpm, this does not necessarily mean that your heart beats once every second. It may beat once after a second, and then after a second and a half, and then after a half-second, with an overall average of 60 bpm.
High variability is a good thing — this is an indicator of how rested, recuperated, and ready for stressors a person is.
Low heart rate variability can be an indicator that a person is under stress, about to get ill, didn’t sleep well, or has taken other substances or medications that decrease responsiveness to environmental stressors.
Blood sugar
A continuous glucose monitor is a wearable device that sits on the upper arm and uses a very small needle to track blood glucose, or blood sugar, in real time. Most people don’t feel it once it’s in place, and the data is available instantaneously through an app that can be installed on your phone.
These devices are primarily used as a tool to help manage diabetes. However, over-the-counter versions of these devices have recently been FDA approved and made available to everyday consumers for use, which has spurred conversation over whether they can be helpful for those without diabetes.
We know already that very dangerously low blood sugar, such as under 60 or 50, as well as dangerously high blood sugar, above 200 or 250, can have serious mood effects.
However, we’re also finding that blood sugars outside a much narrower range can also have impacts on mood. Blood glucose levels below 80 may result in some anxiety, restlessness, and irritability. Levels above 120 or 130 may also result in restlessness and irritability as well as difficulty sleeping.
Every person’s body is different, and the same diet may result in different degrees of blood sugar change over different periods of time for different people. Tracking the impact that diet has on your individual body can be helpful for developing an awareness of how diet influences your mood.
Maintaining balance
Each of these metrics can have an impact on your mood in your day-to-day. Using a wearable for three to six months can teach you how your actions and behaviors influence your sleep, heart rate variability, or blood sugar, and your mood as a result. They can also give you agency over your mental health by showing you how you can take control of and optimize these metrics to improve your mood.
You can gamify these metrics by keeping track of how factors like exercise or diet influence your sleep, or turn it into a competition to compare with friends over who can make the greatest improvement in heart rate variability.
It is important, however, that the desire to optimize your metrics does not become an obsession that interferes with other aspects of your life.
Overall, it is great to prioritize sleep and ensure that you are getting good sleep — but if there is a social event where you’ll be seeing lots of friends and can really enjoy yourself, it’s much more important to go to that social event for one night than it is to prioritize sleep. It is great to focus on keeping a healthy diet — but if you’re at a birthday celebration for your elderly mother, you can have a slice of cake.
As much as it is important to keep track of your daily habits and optimize them to improve your mood and health overall, it is also important to keep balance with other factors that can also have an impact on your mood and the pleasure you take out of life.
About Us
Wells Medicine is a Houston-based practice designed to provide meaningful care for mental health. Providing targeted interventional treatments for Depression, Anxiety, OCD, PTSD and other conditions, with Ketamine Treatments, Stellate Ganglion Blocks, TMS, and Nitrous-Oxide Treatments. Focused on comprehensive care and integration with Psychiatry, Psychology, and Support Services. We are evidence-based, patient-focused and mission-driven.
The content here is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon for medical decisions. For the details of your specific medical conditions and treatments consult your doctors or other qualified healthcare professionals.
