Here’s why your fitness tracker assigns you a ‘sleep animal’

If you use a fitness tracker or smartwatch from one of a few prominent manufacturers — Google, Samsung, or Xiaomi — you’ve probably noticed that your sleep habits are described in a kind of strange way. Each of these companies assigns an animal whose sleep patterns loosely resemble the wearer’s: Google’s Fitbit has giraffes, dolphins, and parrots; Samsung compares wearers to lions, penguins, and sharks. But what’s up with this trend, and what are these animals actually describing?

What are sleep animals, and where did they come from?

Fitbit began testing its Sleep Profile Animal feature in beta in 2021, but Samsung was the first to fully roll out a sleep animal feature in early 2022 in an update to the Galaxy Watch 4. Fitbit followed soon after in June of the same year. Xiaomi’s Mi Band trackers offer a similar feature.

For its part, Samsung didn’t go into much detail around the rollout of its Sleep Symbol Animals, which are still part of Samsung Health and assigned for users who wear a Galaxy Watch or Galaxy Ring to bed for at least a week. Google was a little more forthcoming in its announcement: at the time, it said that Sleep Profile Animals make “sleep data even easier to interpret,” giving the inherently abstract concepts around sleep health a handful of familiar, approachable avatars. Fitbit’s spin on the feature requires 14 nights of sleep data.

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Regardless of which manufacturer’s sleep animal feature you’ve interacted with, the core conceit is the same: they all analyze various components of your sleep habits — your schedule, how long it takes you to fall asleep, how often you wake up throughout the night, et cetera — and based on that data, place you into one of several buckets that broadly corresponds with the sleep habits of a cute animal character.

Getting Fitbit’s dolphin categorization, for example, means you “tend to fall asleep later than most and sleep for less time overall,” a description that sort of resembles real life dolphins’ habit of getting roughly four hours of sleep at a time. It’s not really a one-to-one comparison, though — dolphins typically rest one hemisphere of their brains, then the other, resulting in a total of eight hours of partial sleep.

Of course, our tendency to compare our behavior to other animals’ predates modern tech; Merriam-Webster puts the earliest known instance of describing someone who stays up late as a “night owl” in the late 16th century. But the basis for the modern trend of fitness trackers describing defined sleep patterns as aligning with one of several specific animals is more recent.

In his 2016 book The Power of When, clinical psychologist Michael Breus, PhD, describes four broad categories of sleep patterns as different animals: lion, dolphin, bear, and wolf. (Breus’s Sleep Doctor website features a quiz you can take to learn which of the four categories you fall into, but be advised it’s one of those long surveys that asks for your contact information at the end before showing your results.) Google hosted Breus for a lengthy talk about the book in 2017.

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What do sleep animals actually mean?

Sleep animals, both in Dr. Breus’s work and in various wearable health platforms, are a metaphor to describe a person’s chronotype, or their tendency to follow similar patterns of waking and sleep over extended periods of time. Chronotypes are closely related to the concept of circadian rhythm, where organisms undergo changes that correspond to a 24-hour cycle, even when removed from external cues like visible daylight.

The animals serve as sort of mascots for different chronotypes, describing what can be a complicated idea in an approachable and fun way. As Fitbit research scientist Karla Gleichauf said, “We needed to find a way to translate this sort of ‘mathy’ information about sleep types into something that’s more identifiable.” Go to sleep late but wake up early? You’re a hedgehog. Fall asleep at an average time, but tend to wake up briefly overnight? That’s a parrot. Google also says describing patterns in animal terms helps users frame their sleep habits in more neutral terms; as Fitbit product manager Elena Perez put it, “there aren’t often inherent negative associations with a dolphin or a hedgehog.”

Some trackers eschew the animal framing in favor of a more clinical approach. Oura, for example, launched a chronotype feature last year that categorizes wearers as one of six types: early morning, morning, late morning, early evening, evening, or late evening. Regardless of how your fitness tracker describes your chronotype, the end result is the same: you get a better understanding of your sleep patterns, which can help you make better decisions about your health and productivity. The cute animal characters some trackers add on top are a bonus.