How To Track Your DNA Appliance Usage

I have a confession to make: in the first few days of wearing my mRNA appliance, I did a really crap job of actually wearing the device for the recommended 16 hours/day. It wasn’t causing me much pain or discomfort or anything; I just wasn’t managing my time very well and making this my highest priority and this impacted my DNA Appliance compliance.

I got an email from another user who said that his approach was to put the device in every day at 5pm and take it out at 9am the next day, ensuring 16 hours use every night. This meant he didn’t eat after 5pm each day but this is a bonus because periodic fasting is actually good for your body’s growth.

I’d spent 18 months deciding what treatment to pursue for the obstructive sleep apnea that is ruining my health and destroying my life, waiting for it to be available in my home town, and then waiting for my device to arrive. Yet once it was here, I wasn’t wearing it enough.  Other things were getting in the way. They were important things, but were they really more important than my health?

Talk about self-sabotage.

I knew I needed to lift my game if the appliance was to be effective.

My provider recommended that I keep track of my appliance usage in a note in my phone and I was doing this but it wasn’t enough. It was tricky to track days when I couldn’t just put the device in late afternoon because I had a tutorial in the evening where I needed to be able to talk, and calculating different hours of use with brain fog was hard.

So I put together an Excel spreadsheet to track my daily usage more accurately.

Here’s my first week:

My First Week of mRNA Appliance Usage

The spreadsheet calculates:

• The number of hours I wore the appliance in that 24 hour period
  • Highlighted in red if it’s less than 16.
• The number of hours sleep I had that night.
• The number of hours of insomnia I had that night.
• My total wear time.
• My overall average wear time.
• A rolling 7 day average of your wear time in the last week.

It has extra columns for the number of hours slept, how many hours of insomnia I had, my total wear time, and my average wear time per day both for all time and as a 7-day rolling average.

If you want to use this spreadsheet too, you can purchase the template here.

If you have no interest in tracking insomnia, you can delete the Asleep and Insomnia columns, since technically they are irrelevant to appliance wear time. However, given that we’re treating a sleep disorder and your body does most of its growth while actually asleep, I’d recommend keeping them.

If typing 6 numbers into a spreadsheet each day sounds too onerous, I wouldn’t recommend getting the DNA appliance yet because you probably aren’t ready for it and most likely won’t end up actually wearing it enough.