We’ve all been there: a groggy, middle-of-the-night realisation that, ugh, it’s time to pee again . While sometimes this is the result of a medical condition, often it’s just an inconvenient routine. In that case, there are a few simple fixes that can make nighttime bathroom breaks a lot less common.

But first, that caveat about medical issues. Definitely see a healthcare professional if you’re concerned about your sleep or your bladder. Sometimes, waking to pee (“nocturia,” they call it) happens because you’re peeing too much all the time. This can have a variety of causes, from common ones like a urinary tract infection to some serious ones like diabetes or heart failure.

On the flip side, you may be waking up because of other issues that are impacting your sleep, and then once you’re awake your brain says, welp, might as well use this time to take a trip to the bathroom. In those cases, the peeing isn’t the issue, so please seek medical help if something seems wrong. Otherwise, these tips might help:

Hydrate earlier in the day

Often we aren’t too thirsty in the morning, and maybe we’re too busy during the day to drink very much. If you find yourself drinking most of your fluids in the evening, that’s setting you up to go to bed with a full bladder. The fix here is easy: drink water earlier in the day, so you don’t find yourself filling up right before bed.

(If you chase a hydration target during the day — aiming for eight glasses, say — reconsider whether that amount of water is actually helping you. Many of us don’t need as much extra water as we think , so experiment with reducing that number to see if it helps.)

Notice we’re just changing the timing of how much we drink, not cutting water off and dehydrating ourselves. Being dehydrated can also make it hard to get comfortable at night, the Sleep Foundation notes , due to distractions like dry mouth or headaches.

Don’t drink right before bed

If you’ve hydrated throughout the day, it should be no problem to stop drinking liquids an hour or two before bed. This includes caffeine, for obvious reasons: you don’t want it to keep you awake. While caffeine is infamous for its diuretic effect (making you pee), if you’re habituated to it, the effect is pretty minimal .

And you shouldn’t have alcohol before bed if you can help it. Alcohol is definitely a diuretic, and it’s also known to disrupt sleep .

Elevate your legs

The Sleep foundation also suggests you try elevating your legs for a few hours before bed, because your body can reabsorb some of the water from your legs when you’re lying down. This can just mean sitting on the couch with your legs up; you don’t have to do a headstand. Work some quality lounging into your bedtime routine.

Make it easy to get back to sleep

Occasional bathroom trips will still happen despite our best efforts. Sometimes the problem isn’t that you had to get up, but rather that it’s hard to get back to sleep afterward.

So, do your best to make your bedroom an easy place to sleep . Use blackout curtains to keep your bedroom dark, or use a sleep mask, which is just a blackout curtain for your eyeballs. Earplugs or a white noise machine can help if noise tends to bother you. And whatever you do, do not check your phone just because you’re awake.

Consider adjusting the temperature of your house at night, since most of us find it easier to sleep in slightly cooler temperatures. Set up a nightlight or keep a small, dim flashlight by your bed so you don’t have to turn on any lights. (There are even toilet seats with a built-in nightlight for exactly this reason.)

The post How to Stop Waking Up to Pee appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

The words “sympathy” and “empathy” are often used interchangeably, but while both refer to how one responds to another’s suffering, they do not mean the same thing or offer the same experience for either you or the person receiving them.

To start, here’s what Grammarly says about the history of empathy and sympathy, and how they are connected:

Of the two words, empathy is the more recent entry into the English language. Sympathy was in use for almost 300 years before empathy ’s first written record in the nineteenth century. You might notice that both words contain -pathy , and that’s what makes them sort of similar–they share the same Greek root word pathos , which means “feelings” or “emotion,” but also “suffering” or “calamity.” But while both words deal with emotions, they are still very far from being synonyms.

What is empathy?

Empathy is the capacity to be able to imagine oneself in someone else’s situation, either because you have experienced something similar or because you can understand their feelings to a depth with which it feels as though you’re having them yourself. To be empathetic is to create a shared experience with another person.

Empathy tends to look like someone who really listens, and it can sound like, “That must be so difficult,” and “How are you feeling?” A Kids Book About Empathy (by Daron K. Roberts) explains it in a way both adults and kids can understand:

It’s when you feel with someone who is experiencing something that’s hard, sad, or scary. Empathy means you listen, don’t judge, feel with, and ask questions.

In other words, to empathise is to experience another’s emotion . It is feeling with someone.

What is sympathy?

Sympathy is less about experiencing the emotions of another person and more about feeling and expressing your concern, pity, or sorrow over their pain or misfortune. “Sympathy cards,” therefore, are aptly named because they provide a way to you to voice the sadness you feel for their experience.

When someone sympathizes, they feel bad about what someone else is going through without fully walking the emotional journey with them. Sympathy sounds like, “I’m sorry,” or “That really sucks.”

In other words, to sympathise is to commiserate with the struggle another is experiencing . It is feeling for someone.

The post How to Spot the Difference Between Sympathy and Empathy appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

Managing your business’ presence on LinkedIn takes teamwork, but unless you really know and trust your colleagues, you probably aren’t comfortable sharing the company LinkedIn page’s password with another employee just so they can post updates.

Thankfully, LinkedIn now lets you add other users as admins for any page you own. With these new admin tools, you can give someone else the ability to post updates and manage new job listings for your company from their personal account. They never have to sign into the page.

There are obvious privacy benefits to using LinkedIn’s new admin roles, but they can also help you organise your business by assigning admin privileges based on a person’s role in the company.

There are two types of admins you can create for a LinkedIn page: Page Admins , who maintain the page’s content and communication, and Paid Media Admins who can create and manage ads and sponsored content for a page. Each type has a hierarchy of roles that grant the admin different features and privileges. Here’s a quick explanation of each:

Page Admins:

• Super Admin: Has full access to all admin tools, and is the only role that can edit a page’s information, deactivate a page, or add (and remove) other page admins.
• Content Admin: Can create, post, and manage page-related updates, Events, Stories, and job listings.
• Analyst: Can access a page’s analytics tab on LinkedIn and access the page in third-party analytics tools.

Paid Media Admins:

• Sponsored Content Poster: Can post sponsored content and ads on behalf of a company through their personal LinkedIn profile.

• Lead Gen Forms Manager: Can download marketing lead data from page-associated ad campaigns.

• Pipeline Builder: Can create and edit Pipeline Builder landing pages for other Media Admins and manage leads through LinkedIn Recruiter.

LinkedIn says the new admin tools are rolling out to all users, but it may take some time before they’re universally available. However, once they are, you can start assigning admin roles to any employee, advertiser, or member associate with your page.

How to become an admin on LinkedIn

Users can request admin privileges for any page they work for or are otherwise associated with. The process is identical on desktop and mobile:

1. Add current position with the organisation on your LinkedIn profile. As LinkedIn’s support page notes , this is a required step to ensure you’re qualified to be an admin.
2. Open the LinkedIn page you’re requesting admin privileges for.
3. Click/tap the three dot “More” icon.
4. Select “Request Admin.”
5. Confirm that you’re authorised to become an Admin, then click/tap “Request access.”
6. You’ll receive a notification once your request is approved.

(Note that requesting access grants that page’s Super Admins access to your profile’s public info.)

The post Use Admin Roles to Share Access to LinkedIn Pages appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

I think we’re getting close to the point where Clubhouse — that exclusive app that lets people sit around and chat for hours, but actually with people who could be fairly well-known in an industry — is starting to feel a lot less “cool.” The social service is booming, but giving everyone access to a microphone comes with its own set of problems .

Nevertheless, if you want to check Clubhouse out after securing an invite from someone already on the service, there are a few ways you can make it less annoying to use.

Before I get to the tips , a word about those invites. As of when this was written, you could still only get into Clubhouse by being invited. And as a Clubhouse user, let me tell you that the allure of something secret is more interesting than the reality.

Clubhouse is neat, but it feels like the fad of the day — a big gathering ground for a lot of wannabe influencers, people who want to teach you to become an influencer, or people who are already so well-known that this app is just an easy and “elite” way to have a YouTube or a Twitch stream without having to make one.

Once the floodgates open and everyone wants to build their brand on Clubhouse, I think that’s going to really dilute the searchability of the service — or it’ll just become like a Twitch, in which the top 20 people in any given category are the only ones that really seem to matter, and 90 per cent of people who can’t get five people to listen to one of their hour-long chats will get bored.

So, yes. If you haven’t been invited yet, don’t sweat it. Please don’t buy an invite from someone else or, worse, get scammed into giving up your personal information or account security with the promise of a Clubhouse invite on the other side.

Our top tips for turning Clubhouse into a cool-kids club

When you finally download the app and join Clubhouse, you’ll be asked to connect your contacts to Clubhouse so you can automatically find and follow your real-life friends on Clubhouse. That’s fine. When you get to the “select your interests” section, know that you don’t have to pick anything right now. In fact, I encourage you to skip this process for the time being, lest you find your main Clubhouse feed full of junk chat rooms that you don’t care about.

You’re likely most interested in hearing your friends and other low-key celebrities you find on Clubhouse, not necessarily 800 different potential discussions about “networking.” And you can always adjust your interests later via the app’s primary Settings screen > Interests .

You’ll also be given a list of suggested Clubhouse users to follow. Here’s the part you’ll want to avoid like the plague. Don’t just follow random people because the app wants you to; follow people when they prove to you that they create interesting conversations and experiences you want to hear. Otherwise, your Clubhouse feed is going to get real junky, real quick.

After that, you’ll be asked to allow notifications from the app. Say yes for now, but know that you’ll be changing this setting soon, lest you get a ping when one of your friends starts chatting (which can get quite annoying).

Then you’ll be in the app! And the first thing you should do, before you hop into a room to listen to what people have to say, is to hit up Clubhouse’s settings (under your profile icon in the upper-right corner).

Even if you might not want to adjust your notification frequency at first, know that you have a five-tier option in case you’re feeling badgered by the app (or want a firehose of Clubhouse updates). I turned off “include trending rooms,” as that tended to be the majority of my Clubhouse spam.

If you need a Clubhouse break, you can always use the Pause Notifications feature to take a time out for anywhere from an hour to a week:

Finally, here’s where you’ll adjust your interests — as previously noted — and connect or disconnect your Twitter and Instagram accounts, depending on how much you want Clubhouse to be able to suggest new potential friends. Keep in mind that connecting either drops them into your public Clubhouse profile, and there’s no way to hide these social links as of when I wrote this.

Take special care to keep your interests light, or focused on a few subjects you truly care about, as Clubhouse will use these to populate your “Upcoming for you” feed–a list of scheduled Clubhouse chats accessible via the calendar-looking icon on Clubhouse’s main screen.

The post How to Set Up Clubhouse appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

There is a red binder in my kitchen cabinet, and in that red binder resides the following: A recipe for barbecue sauce I tore from a magazine years ago and never made. Scrawled instructions on a Post-it Note to remind me how to roast pumpkin seeds once a year. Directions from eHow on how to stir-fry “anything.” Countless handwritten recipes on a wide variety of paper, including stationary with inspirational quotes, stationary from my first newspaper job and, for some reason, Hello Kitty stationary I do not recall owning. There are recipes I use all the time and recipes I made once and promptly forgot about forever. It is a mess — and it’s the most organised system I have.

My other “systems” include: a folder in my email full of recipes I found online that I want to try some day . A board on Pinterest where I add recipes I find mostly by stalking my mother-in-law’s much more extensive Pinterest board. A recipe box that contains a few recipes I make once in a while and a whole bunch I don’t. And, finally, this family recipe book my husband and I received as a gift and have yet to write a single thing in. Not to mention the countless recipe books with bookmarked pages because I like the pasta salad recipe in one book but the lemon chicken orzo soup in another.

There are some recipes I want to preserve forever, like the printed-out email with detailed directions from my dad, instructing my 20-year-old self on how to make mashed potatoes for the first time. (“Add any additional milk sparingly,” he wisely advised, “because once it’s in there, you can’t take it out, and you don’t want runny potatoes.”) And the directions I wrote down one night after I called my grandma, just months before she died, to ask how to make her meatball sauce. But I need a better system.

The binder itself is a pretty good way to organise loose recipes, as I use plastic sleeves and dividers to keep my bread recipes separate from those for veggies, main courses, pastas, and desserts. But it quickly becomes overrun with things I want to try (but never will), and still I find myself rummaging through my email for that creamy tortellini soup recipe I sent to myself a few weeks ago.

Tell me in the comments: How do you organise your recipes, both online and offline? How long do you hang on to a new recipe before you decide you’re never going to make it, and it’s time to set it free? How often do you go through your physical recipes to purge the ones you don’t use? What apps or other online systems do you use to organise the recipes you don’t yet want to print? How do you even remember that you liked that spicy Thai shrimp you made from that one cookbook last week? How you keep track of and organise the endless recipe options at your disposal?

The post How Do You Organise Your Recipes? appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

There’s never been a shortage of fad group fitness trends — from TaeBo to Zumba to pole dancing, and everything in between. A newer fad, though, is one you may want to think twice about: twerking, which has evolved from its African roots into a growing exercise craze. And, unfortunately, the further into mainstream the dance style goes, the more it risks perpetuating a history of appropriating Black culture and earning cringes and side-eyes from sympathetic friends. To stop the cycle (or at least be more aware), you may want to take a few extra steps before paying to twerk it out in a virtual fitness class.

Know a little about what you’re doing

Popular dances often have histories that are lost along the way before becoming a mainstream trend. Twerking is one of them, deriving from West African dance where the small, isolated movements from the hips in a squatting position were often used as a celebratory dance . Once “Bounce” music became popular in New Orleans and artist Big Freida used twerking in their videos , the more modernised version of the dance began to form in the U.S. Simultaneously, Harlem twerk teams started releasing some amazingly skillful twerk videos , and eventually we got to where we are today.

Remember how to recognise appropriation

Cultural appropriation is best defined as “the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that doesn’t respect their original meaning, give credit to their source, or reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression.” Of course, just because something is tied to a specific culture doesn’t mean you can’t do or enjoy it, but how you approach it shows your level of respect for the art form. You can get a workout from twerking, but you can also learn a bit about its cultural significance before using it as cardio. Verywell Minded has a few great questions to help you gauge whether you’re appropriating or genuinely interested in something new:

• What is your goal?
• Are you following a trend or exploring the history of a culture?
• How would people from the culture you are borrowing an item from feel about what you are doing?
• Are there any stereotypes involved?

How to choose the right class

You probably wouldn’t take a Judo class from a teacher who only watched Steven Seagal movies, or learn a new language from someone who doesn’t know much about the countries or cultures where it’s spoken. If you’re interested in learning a new style of dance, start by finding a dance instructor knowledgeable about the history and significance of it. You’ll likely find a new level of respect for what you’re learning, and get a good workout at the same time.

The post Think Twice About ‘Twerk Out’ Classes appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

If you’ve found yourself having an overblown reaction to something relatively small during the past year or so, you’re not alone. We’re all juggling so much — mentally and emotionally — that it can be difficult to continuously have to process everything that comes our way. These can be anything from major threats — like the global pandemic, racial injustice and violence, and economic/financial insecurity — to your average everyday annoyances.

When faced with so much at one time, it’s easy to have big, emotional reactions to everything, even the smaller stuff. One way to help deal with this is by strengthening your emotional agility. Here are three tips for doing that.

What is emotional agility?

If you haven’t heard of “emotional agility” before, that may be because it has only been around since 2013, when leadership coaches Dr. Susan David and Christina Congleton first coined the term in a Harvard Business Review article . Basically, emotional agility is exactly what it sounds like: having the ability and skills necessary to think problems and emotions that come up through during periods of complexity and change.

As David explained in a recent episode of the Armchair Expert podcast , there are three key skills you can practice to improve your emotional agility in uncertain times: acceptance, compassion and curiosity. Here are some ways to improve each of those crucial skills, according to Vanessa Loder, a former Wall Street and Silicon Valley executive, now working as a mindfulness consultant.

Acceptance

According to Loder in an article for MindBodyGreen , emotional agility begins with recognising that you are not your feelings. She writes :

Labelling your thoughts and feelings is a powerful way to begin accepting what you are feeling without being overtaken by it. When you say, “I am sad,” you become fused with sadness. It is now your identity. You are the grey cloud of sadness. When you say; “I notice that I’m feeling sadness,” now you are more the observer. You are the sky. The grey cloud of sadness is simply passing through.

Compassion

Now that you’ve identified how you’re feeling, approach the emotions with compassion. Per Loder :

When you label your emotions more accurately, you can better understand the cause of that emotion and what you can be doing in relation to that emotion. If underneath your stress is loneliness, perhaps you are craving more intimacy and connection so it’s important to reach out and call a friend. On the other hand, if behind your stress is disappointment, maybe it’s time to have a difficult conversation with your boss or express your disappointment to someone.

Curiosity

Get curious about why your emotions are causing a specific reaction. Loder says that the next time you are processing a difficult emotion, ask yourself “What is this emotion trying to tell me that is important to me right now?” She goes on to explain :

If your emotion is telling you that you’re upset with your boss or colleague, it doesn’t mean you need to tell off your boss or suppress your anger and put on a happy face. As David says, “Emotions are data, not directives.” Instead, ask what can bring you closer to creating the career and life you love? Get curious about what value that emotion is pointing you toward. That is the power of our emotions; they are guideposts to our deeper truth.

Yes, these strategies do take some time and practice, because let’s face it: it may seem much easier to have a generic Big Feelings reaction to everything and let it get us worked up, but really, we’re only adding additional stress to our plate when we do that.

The post Use These 3 Skills to Increase Your Emotional Agility appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

We made it to the biggest sporting event of the year: Puppy Bowl XVII will feature 70 puppies from over 20 different shelters, all available for adoption, hosted by Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. Whether you’re hoping to adopt (good luck, they go fast) or just want to see them play, here’s how to catch the game.

How to watch Puppy Bowl XVII

Puppy Bowl XVII will air on Animal Planet for cable subscribers and on Discovery+ for streaming . Thankfully, Discovery+ offers a 7-day free trial, so you can use it for the weekend and cancel if you only need it to watch the game. (If you find that you love Discovery+, it’s $US4.99 ($7) a month after the trial ends.)

Who’s playing and when to watch

Starting at 2 p.m. ET on February 7, team Ruff and team Fluff will compete for the “Lombarky” trophy in the three-hour live event. You can see the puppy lineup on Animal Planet .

Host Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg will provide the colour commentary for the afternoon, with guest appearances by football announcer Steve Levy and SportsC enter host Sage Steele. Snoop and Martha’s own dogs will make a cameo, too. You can watch the pre-show at 1 p.m. ET, which will take a look at the past 16 years of the Puppy Bowl.

The post How to Watch Puppy Bowl XVII on Super Bowl Sunday appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

In the final instalment of the sleep tracking fitness challenge, I’m going to talk about my experience with the WHOOP strap. This and the Oura ring, which I covered last week , are the two big players in the recovery tracking space. Both keep tabs on your activity during the day and your heart rate at night, and aim to tell you whether you’re getting enough good quality sleep to support your athletic endeavours.

Both WHOOP and Oura more or less do what they promise. Neither is necessary to track your sleep ; low-tech solutions can do the job well enough. But if you’d like more data, either is a good device for the purpose. Both will monitor your sleep and give you a score; both will relate that score to how much exercise you’ve been getting. WHOOP may work better for you if you’re an endurance athlete or do a lot of cardio, while Oura is probably the better pick if you mainly do other types of exercise or are interested in sleep more generally. I preferred Oura’s day-to-day experience, but WHOOP’s monthly analyses are a data nerd’s delight.

Those thoughts amount to my best guide to choosing between the apps, but there are also two important questions you need to ask yourself before buying one or the other:

• Would you be more annoyed by wearing a ring all the time, or a wristband? If you have a strong preference, this is honestly the biggest factor.
• Would you rather pay up front, or monthly? Oura is $US300 ($392) (or more) for the device, but after that, it’s free to use the app. The WHOOP strap is free, but a membership runs $US30 ($39)/month for a six months — though it’s a bit less if you sign up for a longer membership.

The WHOOP’s pricing model makes me wonder: How long do you need to track your recovery? I came across several discussions on the r/whoop subreddit in which people said they only used the device for six months or a year. By the end of that time it had effectively taught them how to prioritise their sleep and balance their activity and recovery.

I didn’t have to ask myself this question, because the WHOOP folks gave me access to the app to test it out, but I find it somewhat disconcerting to ponder the existential question: H ow long I will care?

Anyway, WHOOP has some cool features.

What it’s like to wear the WHOOP strap

The WHOOP strap is a gadget that looks like a watch, except it has no screen. It’s a lightweight rectangle with an elastic strap. There are green LEDs on the skin side of the rectangle that pick up your pulse, and an accelerometer to detect motion.

The strap is meant to be worn 24/7, and it has a clever way to charge. There’s a little plastic brick that you charge separately, and then when the strap’s battery runs low, you unplug the brick from its cord and slip it onto your wristband. This way, you never have to take off the strap itself.

That said, if you get the band wet — say, if you wear it in the shower — you’re then stuck wearing a wet band. WHOOP sent me a spare one, which was handy to change into on those occasions. (Spare bands, and spare charging batteries, both cost extra.)

Using the app

WHOOP’s app is straightforward in some places and arcane in others. At first, I was always forgetting where I saw a certain number or feature. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll find that the app is full minutely detailed views and extra information.

Right up front, where you can’t miss it, are two numbers: your strain score for the day, and a recovery score based on how you slept.

The strain score is based on your heart rate throughout the day. This makes the most sense for people who do a lot of cardio, which made the app slightly awkward to use as a person who only really walks and lifts weights. If I were a runner or if I played team sports or did a lot of aerobics videos, I’d love this.

Your strain gets higher as you do more exercise, and the number is calculated in a way that isn’t particularly easy to wrap your head around. Still, bigger numbers mean you’ve spent more time with your heart rate elevated. That means that if you spent a lot of time with a high heart rate because you were nervous, rather than exercising, your strain will be high — which makes sense, honestly, because it still represents stress on your body.

Recovery is another single number, this time given as a percentage. If you are less than 33% recovered, you’re in the red; if you’re over 66%, you get green. If you’re working hard but also sleeping well, you’ll see a lot of yellows and greens, maybe the occasional red. A string of reds, on the other hand, probably means something is wrong.

As you’re looking through the app, my best advice is to mess with everything you see. If there’s a little card giving you some information, tap it; it might flip over and give you more details. When you’re looking at your recovery score, swipe up and a chart of your past week’s scores will suddenly slide into view.

The coolest surprise feature, which I didn’t notice until someone from the company pointed it out to me, is that if you turn your phone sideways you can see a screen showing your heart rate throughout the day, with sleep and exercise highlighted.

One of the most fascinating features WHOOP offers is the sleep coach. You tell it what time you’d like to wake up tomorrow, and it tells you when you should get to bed tonight. That’s not so special in itself; many apps do the same. What’s different here is that you can choose whether you want to “peak” versus “perform” versus “get by.” I don’t know how accurate the three estimates truly are, but on a gut level they felt about right. For example, on a day that my sleep need was calculated at 7:48, the recommended sleep time for peak performance was 8:33; to simply get by, it was 5:59.

You can learn a lot from the weekly and monthly reports

I found the daily screens a little confusing to navigate, but I loved the weekly and monthly reports. You don’t get the monthlies until you’ve been wearing the strap for a full calendar month, but they’re worth the wait.

These reports tell you about your trends. Since the whole point of comparing recovery to strain is to figure out whether they balance out, there are charts to show how well you aligned the two.

I mean, just look at these:

By far the coolest graph in the set, and probably the coolest feature, is the correlation matrix you get from the daily journal feature.

To use the journal, you need to open the app each day (or find the clipboard icon on a past day’s screen) and answer a little survey that you’ve set up for yourself. Basically, you’re choosing variables to look at, and the monthly report will tell you whether those variables correlate with good sleep or poor sleep. I chose several, including whether I had had alcohol and whether my stress was particularly high. You can use the journal to evaluate supplements you’re taking, to see if your hydration levels affect your sleep, or to see if your recovery score changes when you’re on your period. The only catch is that the app needs a mix of yeses and nos (five of each, minimum) to be able to calculate correlations. Anyhow, here’s one of mine, for alcohol:

I think every sleep expert I’ve ever interviewed has mentioned that people rarely believe alcohol affects their sleep , and are astounded when they start paying attention and find out that it does. It’s interesting to see the data right in front of me.

Now, these are correlations , distinct from causation. I know that I tend to stay up late on nights I have alcohol, and that these nights tend to be at the end of a training week, when I’m already more likely to be under-recovered. If you meditate or take a supplement on nights you expect to have difficulty sleeping, that thing could show up with a negative correlation even if it really does help you sleep. So it’s important to be thoughtful about how you interpret your data.

All that said, the standard caveats apply: I wouldn’t rely on any consumer sleep tracking device to tell me for sure whether I’m getting enough of a given sleep stage (remember, Oura tells me I always get too little REM sleep , and WHOOP routinely tells me my REM is on the high side). I use the data from sleep trackers to help guide my medium and long term planning, rather than as a prompt to skip workouts. Still, I think both devices work well to help you see those patterns, each in its own way.

The post What It’s Like to Track Your Recovery With the WHOOP Strap appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .