Display amount of minutes it took to fall asleep

[Scott809]

I use auto sleep detection and I can see my Sleep Stages chart contains the data for how long it took to fall asleep, but it is too difficult to tell how many minutes it actually took by just looking at the tiny chart. It would be nice if this stat was explicitly stated. 

[LuciaFitbit]

Nice suggestion, thanks for sharing. We look forward to hearing what other community members think.

[GershonSurge]

I'd think it would be hard for the Fitbit to tell when a person actually wanted to go to sleep. How would it know the difference between a person lying in bed watching TV and a person lying in bed trying to go to sleep?

Personally, I start a workout when I start trying to go to sleep. Then I can easily tell from the heart rate how long it took to actually go to sleep. I can also tell how many times I got up during the night. 

[Scott809]

@GershonSurge Interesting work-around. In sleep tracking, Fitbit already automatically detects how long it takes to fall asleep, and I can see this displayed in the sleep stages chart, however due to the scale, it is very difficult to discern how long that initial “awake period” is just by looking at the chart. So the data is already there, just unreadable, I am requesting it be stated explicitly. 

Your technique sounds like it may work, if you remember to set the workout, or perhaps you run into the same resolution issue when trying to read the chart. I’ll try it out tonight!

[Aureala]

It would also be useful to see at what times one is 'awake' or 'restless' in the course of the night. For example, a time pop-up, which appears whenever a particular sleep segment is selected, would do nicely.

[GJBerends]

this could be done by implementing a sleep activity. Start the sleep manually from the device and show the time between the start of the activity and the detected sleep time as time until falling asleep.

side note. I have a sleeping disorder for which the time to sleep is important because it would indicate that I need treatment. So I really hope Fitbit can find a way to get this information from user data.

[pingreeman]

This is very similar to my recent feature suggestion: https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Sleep-Monitoring-Manually-Forced-Time-Span-Start...

[MakeshiftPotato]

 I definitely think a 'Start Sleep' type option would be helpful..  Perhaps most people will be happy with the auto-detection,  but for myself as I can spend a long time trying to sleep, this would help greatly as currently the auto-detection will probably think i'm just up and about still rather than trying to sleep... 

[SantiR]

Hi everyone thanks for sharing this suggestion. This is being discussed although I do not have a firm commitment or timeline at the moment. Do continue to vote for this feature suggestion whilst it’s under consideration. Please note that if something is under consideration and chosen for development, it can be a while until it's released or until I have any news to share. Please watch this space for any updates! Thanks for your patience.

[SunsetRunner]

Yeah! That would be nice, I think I stay up til 4 in the morning so it would be nice to know that you could see that!

[PeterB1965]

I happen to do several pre-bedtime activities. So long as you offer an editable field that tracks the starting time in bed, I would be able to fill it in during my pre-bedtime activities. In any case, I'm VERY interested in tracking and reporting on the duration to fall asleep as its supposed to be a key indicator of effective sleep.

[joggger365]

I think many people would like this quantity to be tracked over time in one place, any maybe be linked to alarm times. The major reason is the time to fall asleep is an indicator of whether you are getting enough sleep or not (the FitBit app was actually where I learnt about this!). For example, the last few days I have been feeling tired. I then went through each night in the app and saw that it has taken me around 0 to 2 minutes to fall asleep lately. Had I been able to see this trend quickly, I might have decided that "ok now it seem like my body needs more sleep, let me set my alarm 30 mins later and see if that makes me feel more energized during the day". Basically I could dynamically throughout the year set my alarm so that it takes me 5-10 minutes to fall asleep (which I understand is the recommendation, or rule of thumb of getting enough sleep). Maybe FitBit could even automatically suggest wake-up times based on time to fall asleep from previous nights? This would really improve my life quality - do not waste too much time sleeping, but at the same time make sure I get enough sleep to be fully productive.

[joggger365]

One more idea to the Fitbit developers: You can look in user data for a good implementation of this feature. For example, perhaps 70% of users always set/check their alarm just before sleeping. You can then include a prompt in the alarm function to let the user confirm that they are starting the process of trying to go to sleep. This way, accuracy can be added to the "time to fall asleep" measure.