Sleep used to be the part of the day when you stopped trying. Naturally, we found a way to turn it into another performance metric.

There is something deeply funny about waking up feeling perfectly fine, checking your sleep score, seeing a 62, and immediately deciding you're exhausted. Five seconds earlier, you were okay. Then your wrist informed you that you had a terrible night.

Apparently you woke up seven times. Your REM sleep was disappointing. Deep sleep could have been better. Your “readiness” is questionable.

Well, shit. Better cancel leg day.

We've reached a strange point with sleep. Something humans managed to do for several hundred thousand years without a dashboard now comes with charts, scores, temperature graphs, recovery metrics and morning notifications grading our performance.

And to be fair, some of this stuff is genuinely useful. Seeing that you consistently sleep less after drinking alcohol is useful. Realizing your bedtime has somehow drifted to 1:37 AM every night is useful. Noticing that six hours in bed isn't magically becoming eight hours of sleep is definitely useful.

The problem starts when observation quietly turns into obsession.

There is actually a name for this

Researchers coined the term orthosomnia in 2017 after sleep clinicians began seeing patients who were increasingly preoccupied with getting their wearable sleep data “right.” The word basically means correct sleep, which sounds ridiculous until you realize how easy it is to do.

You buy a tracker because you want to sleep better. Then you start checking it every morning. Soon you're comparing Tuesday's deep sleep with Wednesday's. You're changing your bedtime. Changing the temperature. Googling whether 48 minutes of REM is terrible. Staying in bed longer because the app says you didn't get enough sleep.

Eventually, you're lying there thinking: I need to fall asleep.

And anyone who has ever tried really hard to fall asleep knows how that usually goes.

Sleep researchers describing orthosomnia have documented exactly this kind of behavior: people becoming increasingly concerned with improving or perfecting their tracker data, sometimes even when the numbers don't line up particularly well with clinical measurements.

That's an important distinction. Your watch is measuring you. It isn't performing a sleep study.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has warned for years that consumer sleep technology shouldn't be used by itself to diagnose or treat sleep disorders. These devices can be useful, especially for spotting patterns, but the data needs context. More recently, the National Sleep Foundation reached a similar middle ground: consumer sleep technology has real potential, but understanding what these devices can and cannot tell us matters.

In other words, you don't need to throw your tracker in the ocean. Maybe just stop letting it ruin your breakfast.

The sleep score has a psychological problem

Numbers feel authoritative. “Didn’t sleep great” is a feeling. “Sleep score: 58” feels like evidence.

That's probably part of why these devices are so compelling. They turn something fuzzy and subjective into something beautifully measurable. But sleep isn't one number. And neither is health.

You can see the same phenomenon everywhere now.

There are legitimate reasons to measure every one of these things. But eventually you run into a weird paradox of modern health:

We have more information about ourselves than any generation in history, and somehow that information can become another thing to worry about.

Sleep may be particularly vulnerable because effort itself can become counterproductive. You can decide to go for a walk. You can decide to eat vegetables. You cannot grit your teeth and sleep harder.

The boring stuff keeps surviving

This is where wellness content becomes slightly annoying because the fundamentals refuse to become obsolete. You probably don't need seventeen sleep hacks. You need:

And perhaps most importantly, you need to stop treating one imperfect night like your body has entered a state of emergency.

There are obviously real sleep disorders, and persistent insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness, loud snoring, breathing interruptions or other ongoing problems deserve actual medical attention. A wearable can give you information. It can't replace that evaluation.

For everybody else, your tracker is probably most useful when you zoom out. Look at weeks instead of Tuesdays. Look for obvious patterns. Use the data to ask better questions. Then go live your life.

Because if your bedtime routine requires 11 products, four apps, a spreadsheet and mounting anxiety about whether tonight's REM percentage will satisfy you... I suspect we've slightly lost the plot.

And if you woke up feeling great this morning? Maybe enjoy that for thirty seconds before checking the score.

Sources & Further Reading