One of the health features that has had a big update in iOS 16 is the Sleep Tracking feature.

It will now give you a lot more details about your quality and duration of sleep.

Here’s how it works…

So to begin we need to make sure we’ve enabled our watch to do sleep monitoring.

So on the Apple Watch app scroll down until you get to Sleep and make sure this setting is turned on.

Of course, you’re going to need to wear your Apple Watch to bed for this to work – but don’t worry because it will go into Night Time mode so you won’t get notifications and your screen won’t come on.

In fact, if you’ve got an alarm set, your watch will gently buzz on your wrist rather than making a noise to wake up the whole room.

Now, all that’s left to do is have a nice cup of hot chocolate and go to sleep.

Oh morning time!

Okay, let’s jump back into our phone and find out just how well we slept.

So I’m going to go into the Health App this time, and at the bottom I’m going to go to Browse.

From here scroll down until you find Sleep and then straight away you’ll get this colourful graph showing your last night’s sleep.

Just like everything in the Health App you can scroll sideways to view different days, but the interesting thing here is rather than just showing you time in bed and time of sleep like it used to be on iOS 15, we now get different stages of sleep as well.

We’ll have a look at what those mean in a moment, but as I scroll down the page you’re going to get more information about how well you slept and how your vital signs changed over the course of the night.

For example your Respiratory Rate, your Heart Rate as you were sleeping – those sort of things.

Okay, let’s go back up to the top and we’re going to click on the Show All Data.

From here we can see the exact amount of time, both in percentage and minutes, that we spent in the different stages of sleep.

Whether that be awake, or rem sleep, or core sleep, or deep sleep.

You can also look at your duration and you can make comparisons between the time you were asleep and what your heart rate was doing at the same time.

Now Sleep Tracking is nothing new on the Apple Watch in the Health App, but the amount of detail you get now is quite different to what you had before.

If I switch into weekly view and then scroll back a few weeks to before I installed iOS 16 and watchOS 9 you’ll see I get this turquoise blue bar.

It just shows you if you’re asleep or if you’re awake, and to be honest it was never that accurate.

Now as I scroll forwards you’ll see this much more rich, colourful data picture showing up.

And with this information I can now see just how many times those annoying cats have woken me up during the night!

I can also look at this data on my Apple Watch too, so on the watch itself go into the Sleep app.

As you scroll up and down this page you’ll get more information just like you would do on the phone – and then you’ll get that nice colourful graph.

But it’s much more convenient sometimes having that with you on the watch.

And that’s a quick look at the new Sleep Tracking feature in iOS 16.