Sleep Latency

Sleep latency is the time between settling down to sleep and actually falling asleep. Somewhere between ten and twenty minutes is usually described as normal for a healthy adult.

Consistently taking much longer than that is the most common complaint in insomnia, and the usual causes are mundane: light in the evening, caffeine later in the day than you think, alcohol, an irregular bedtime, or lying in bed doing things other than sleeping.

The opposite is also informative. Falling asleep in under five minutes most nights is generally a sign of being short on sleep rather than a sign of being a good sleeper, because a rested person takes a little while to drop off.

What it is not

It is not the same as the time you got into bed, and a tracker that starts its clock when you stop moving will report a shorter latency than you experienced. It also does not measure time awake later in the night, which sleep efficiency covers instead.

Where you see it in FitnessSyncer

Where a connected tracker reports it, sleep latency appears with the rest of that night's sleep data and can be charted over time on your Dashboard.