Many Samsung Health users seem to be sleeping on the Sleep Coaching feature – bad pun intended, no regrets. Sleep Coaching is a neat tool that can help you get better rested by becoming more mindful of your habits and other factors that have a negative impact on your sleep. Or at least, that's the theory behind Sleep Coaching. In practice, I've tried it a couple of times, and I didn't gain much from it for one simple fact: it's forgettable, especially if you don't get enough sleep.
Sleep Coaching revolves around giving you short daily lessons about human biology while sleeping, the circadian rhythm, the effects a person's diet has on their sleep, and all sorts of other related information. These daily lessons come in bite-size capsules, making it easy for everyone to keep up and, day by day, slowly change their habits based on what they're learning.
Again, that's the theory. But herein lies my issue with Sleep Coaching. I keep forgetting to check the daily lessons every day, and I always seem to be falling behind to the point where I feel like resetting and starting over.
We need daily reminders for Sleep Coaching
I can't keep up with the coaching because, paradoxically, I sometimes have trouble sleeping. And going out on a limb here, I'm going to say people who don't get enough rest tend to forget about minor tasks such as checking the Sleep Coaching screen in Samsung Health every day.
I've reset the Sleep Coaching feature a couple of times and started all over again. The first time I tried using this feature, I fell so far behind with the daily lessons that, by the time I remembered the feature existed, it felt like I was cheating my way through the lessons and misinforming the virtual coach in order to catch up.
You see, even though the Sleep Coaching UI lets you go back to previous days and read sleep lessons you may have missed, sometimes, the virtual coach throws you a curveball. It asks you to provide an answer regarding the quality of your previous night's sleep. It may ask if you feel sleepy “today” or inquire about your morning.
By the time I catch up on these mandatory quizzes, it's all in the past, and I, for one, can't remember how I slept or how I felt waking up in the morning five days ago. If you're anything like me, at that point, your only realistic option is to pick an answer randomly so you can move on to the next lesson, which means you're cheating yourself out of sleep coaching.
But that's cheap and feels like it renders the Sleep Coaching feature useless (or less useful), so your other option is resetting the Sleep Coaching feature and trying again from day 1, hoping this time, you won't forget to read your lessons every day.
All in all, this could be a personal problem. But I feel like Sleep Coaching has the potential of helping me sleep better, yet, so far, it failed to do so because it's lacking in one simple area, i.e., it can't send daily reminders.
You could say it's my fault because I'm forgetful, and you may be right. But maybe it comes with the territory of being fatigued. And perhaps now that I've written this story, it'll help me better remember to attend my daily lessons.
No matter how you want to look at it, I'm saying that Samsung Health can send push notifications for numerous features and fitness parameters. And I don't see why the app doesn't give us the option to enable daily notifications for Sleep Coaching. And, no, it makes no difference if you turn on notification categories like “Sleep,” “Challenges,” and “Coaching and insights.”
