Pokémon Sleep arrived last week, combining the joys of collecting small furry animals with the necessity of sleep. But how does it compare to a dedicated sleep tracker?
I tested Pokémon Sleep against the Fitbit tracking provided through my Pixel Watch. This might seem like an unfair comparison (it is, but more on this later), but it nevertheless helped highlight the weaknesses and strengths of the new Pokémon Sleep app.
Should Pokémon Sleep replace your dedicated sleep tracker?
Firstly, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. The Pixel Watch and the Fitbit companion app is a better sleep tracker than Pokémon Sleep. Without the watch’s hardware that tracks elements like oxygen saturation and heart rate, Pokémon Sleep can’t hope to compare as a fitness tool. However, do you need all these features to track your sleep reliably?
For this strictly non-scientific study, I wanted to see if Pokémon Sleep could reliably track your sleep and help you build better sleeping habits. I’ve frequently used the Pixel Watch for sleep tracking since its release; it’s one of the best smartwatches for tracking sleep. For this study, it acted as a baseline, a reliable set of data I could compare to Pokémon Sleep.
What should you expect from Pokémon Sleep?
The most crucial element of sleep tracking is reliability. If you regularly sleep poorly, you’ll want to figure out why. Are you going to bed too late? Are you waking up too often in the night? Are you not spending enough time in each sleep cycle? Are you waking up too early? All these questions can be answered with an accurate sleep tracker.
But to form answers, you need reliable data over time. Answering these questions consistently is essential to a quality sleep tracker:
- What time do I fall asleep?
- What time do I wake up?
- How long do I spend in each part of the sleep cycle?
A lot more data can be gathered from a sleep tracker, but reliably answering these three questions is the bare minimum of what we should expect.
Pokémon Sleep is surprisingly consistent at tracking sleep
Immediately, I checked whether Pokémon Sleep hits the first two points of my criteria. Namely, how long do I sleep?
Both apps present their data differently, making it hard to compare directly. For example, Fitbit doesn’t include brief moments of wakefulness in your total sleep time. If you want to compare apps as I did, you must manually adjust your data to accommodate these differences.
I didn’t expect Pokémon Sleep to match my Pixel Watch’s data for falling asleep or waking up consistently, but I hoped it would be reliably inaccurate, keeping differences between the apps clear, like consistently showing I was waking up earlier than I was or falling asleep later.
After six days of tracking data, I found that:
- Pokémon Sleep recorded me falling asleep an average of 23 minutes later than the Pixel Watch/Fitbit app.
- Pokémon Sleep recorded me waking up an average of 17 minutes earlier than the Pixel Watch/Fitbit app.
- Pokémon Sleep recorded me sleeping an average of 40 minutes less than the Pixel Watch/Fitbit app.
While Pokémon Sleep didn’t manage to identify exactly when I fell asleep or woke up, the consistency of its results meant I could easily use this data to track trends in my sleep time. But what about while you’re asleep?
Pokémon Sleep manages to track the key elements of the sleep cycle
During your sleep, you’ll go through several rounds of a sleep cycle. Each cycle consists of four stages which can be simplified into three: REM, Light, and Deep sleep. Dedicated sleep trackers usually categorize your sleep into these three, as does Pokémon Sleep (although it classifies them as Dozing, Snoozing, and Slumbering, respectively).
An average night’s sleep cycle should be roughly 50% light (Stage 1 & 2 NREM), 25% deep (Stage 3 NREM), and 25% REM. To know if Pokémon Sleep tracks your sleep cycle correctly, its data should roughly match this pattern.
In the screenshots below, you can see two days of sleep cycle across both apps.
Above: My sleep cycles for Monday and Tuesday nights in the Fitbit app. Below: My sleep cycles for Monday and Tuesday nights in the Pokémon Sleep app
When converted to a chart, we can see how these compare to each other and typical patterns:
Again, while Pokémon Sleep doesn’t precisely match Fitbit’s results, neither does it offer radically skewed results.
If you subscribe to Fitbit Premium, you can access reports and sleep recommendations based on your sleep data. It’s a handy way to improve your sleeping habits. Unfortunately, Pokémon Sleep doesn’t offer anything beyond the raw data. The only motivation it provides for getting better rest is to record rare Pokémon, just like the rest of the franchise’s games.
Pokémon Sleep rewards you for healthy sleep habits
As we’ve seen, Pokémon Sleep’s data, while not as accurate as a dedicated sleep tracker, records surprisingly reliable data about your sleep. But it isn’t a Pokémon-themed sleep tracker; instead, it’s like Pokémon Go, where the relevant activity is used to trigger events in the game.
Pokémon Sleep crunches all the sleep data we’ve discussed and converts it to a Sleep Score. The better you sleep, the higher the score. This score is then multiplied by your Snorlax’s Strength (increased by cooking meals during the daytime) to produce a Drowsy Score. You’ll encounter rarer sleep styles of visiting Pokémon the higher this score.
And that, just like every Pokémon game, is the point. Collect as many of the critters as you can. Pokémon Sleep is unique with its biscuits, sleep styles, and Helper Teams, but the result is the comforting and familiar reward of filling your Pokédex.
Pokémon Sleep is a game first, sleep tracker second
A week of using Pokémon Sleep impressed me, but there’s one major drawback. You must leave your phone face down on your mattress to track your sleep. It’s easy to knock off if you’re an active sleeper, and my phone (Pixel 7 Pro) felt hot when I picked it up in the morning. If you already have trouble with your phone overheating, using this app may not be wise.
But overall, Pokémon Sleep does an adequate job of tracking sleep, and the Pokémon collecting aspect is charming, despite being overly complicated at times. Give it a go, and who knows, maybe the potential of seeing Pokémon sleep in unique ways will spur you to healthier sleep habits.
