The Anxiety of Tracking Your Sleep

You wake up feeling fine. You check your ring, or your watch, and it tells you that you got forty-one minutes of deep sleep and a readiness score of 58.

You now feel worse than you did ninety seconds ago, and nothing about your night has changed.

The condition has a name

In 2017, researchers led by Kelly Baron published a case series in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine describing patients whose sleep problems were being driven, or made considerably worse, by their pursuit of perfect sleep data. They called it orthosomnia — from ortho, correct, and somnia, sleep.

The pattern: someone starts tracking, sees imperfect numbers, becomes anxious about them, tries harder to sleep, and sleeps worse. The tracker then reports the worse sleep, which increases the anxiety.

The measurement changed the thing it was measuring, which is a problem physicists have been complaining about for a century.

What the devices are actually good at

Let's be fair to them. Consumer wearables from companies like Oura, Whoop and Apple are genuinely useful for timing — when you went to sleep, when you woke, how consistent you are across a week. That data is reasonably reliable and consistency is the thing that matters most.

They are also good at showing you something you'd otherwise miss: that the alcohol on Thursday shows up on Friday, that your bedtime drifts an hour later every weekend.

What they are not good at

Sleep staging. Telling you how much deep sleep or REM you had.

Determining sleep stages properly requires measuring electrical activity in the brain — that's what a sleep lab does, with electrodes. A wrist or a finger is inferring stages from movement, heart rate and variability. It's an educated guess, and the guessing is weakest exactly where people pay most attention.

So the number that ruins your morning is the least reliable number on the screen.

The deeper problem

Sleep is one of the few things that gets worse when you try harder at it. You cannot will yourself to sleep, and effort is arousal.

A score turns sleep into a performance with a grade attached. Then you get into bed carrying the intention to do well, which is the single least helpful mental state available.

What we'd suggest

• Look at the week, not the night. One night's data is noise. A pattern across two weeks is information.
• Don't check it before you've decided how you feel. This is the one that matters. Notice your own state first, then look — otherwise the number writes your morning for you.
• Ignore the stage breakdown. Use bedtime, wake time and total duration. Those it can measure.
• Take a fortnight off it. If your sleep improves when you stop measuring it, that is itself the result.

The honest test

Do you wake before your alarm sometimes? Do you get through the afternoon without fighting your eyelids? Do you sleep dramatically longer on a free morning?

Those three questions tell you more than any score, they're free, and they don't need charging.