"What is the best way to track Sleep?"

In Watch OS6, sleep tracking will be built in and happen automatically!

Until then, our top recommendation is the Sleep++ app (free), and enabling the Apple Health sync so it goes to Gyroscope. Other apps that are popular include Autosleep, sleep cycle, Pillow, sleepwatch, and many others. Some are more accurate than others, so if you find one app is not great at writing the data you may want to try switching to another.

Try to make sure not more than one app is writing to HealthKit at a time, otherwise you will have a lot of overlapping data and potentially incorrect totals. However, if that does happen we can still usually repair the data and get the correct sleep score.

The oura ring is also a good device, especially built to track sleep. Even if you have an Apple Watch, it can add a bit of additional HRV data (sampling every 5 minutes) rather than every couple hours.

You can connect the Oura integration in settings to load HRV data directly from them (since it isn't synced to HealthKit) — the rest of the data like sleep segments comes through Apple Health automatically. There can be a few hours of delay in syncing the HRV to Oura servers and then to Gyroscope, so you should check your final sleep score in the mid day.

Other devices like Fitbit will also sync sleep to Gyroscope, though with less detail than the recommended sources. Advanced features like polyphasic sleeps (or naps in the daytime) and HRV tracking are not supported, but sleeping at night in one session should still come through fine.

Using the resting heart rate data at night, we are still able to provide a fairly accurate Sleep Score. However, some features like the immune system monitoring in the Health Score that rely on HRV analysis won't be available.

If you don’t have any of these recommended sleep trackers (and are just using RescueTime on your computer and Gyroscope on your phone), that is fine — there are still a lot of options. In iOS14, the phone has its own sleep tracker that is built into the alarm clock. It is not always accurate, though, so will need frequent review as well to make sure only correct data is saved.

You can also use the built in Sleep AI to start detecting your sleep based on gaps in your other data.

To do this, simply open each day's daily report and you will see our estimated sleep detection if available. Then customize or save it to add the sleep to your account. Since it is missing the resting heart rate data, the sleep score won't be as nuanced — but your bedtime and sleep duration is still valuable data and better than nothing.

If none of those detect your sleep, you can always add it directly into the app from the + button. This supports all types of data entry and makes tracking as simple as choosing the start and end time.