Could Tracking Your Sleep Actually Make Insomnia Worse?

Jennifer Heimlich
·5 min read

Michael Houtz; Getty

Picture this: You’re lying in bed wide awake and completely still. You might be more comfortable if you rolled over, or went to the bathroom, or got a glass of water. But you don’t, because that would mess with the numbers on your sleep tracker—which you already know are going to be crappy, and thinking about that is making it even harder to fall back asleep.

“People get so obsessed with their sleep data and this pursuit of perfect sleep that they can't sleep,” says Shyamal Patel, PhD, senior vice president and head of science at ŌURA, which makes a popular sleep-tracking ring. Psychologists and sleep doctors have encountered this phenomenon so often that they’ve even come up with a name for it: orthosomnia.

Even if we don’t realize it, gamifying our sleep to try to hit the highest score night after night can backfire—particularly among those of us who are prone to anxiety or obsessive perfectionism. Clinical psychologist Kelly Glazer Baron, PhD, lead author of the scientific paper that coined the term orthosomnia, says that seeing black-and-white numbers leads some of us to put so much pressure on ourselves to get “perfect” sleep that we can’t even get “good enough” sleep.

“For some people, it really can create an anxiety spiral that makes things worse,” says NYU Langone Health clinical psychologist Thea Gallagher, PsyD. “We're a data-informed culture now, and it can be helpful, but then sometimes it can become obsessive and exacerbate anxious thoughts that are already there.”

There aren’t any official numbers on how common orthosomnia is, or even a definition of the exact parameters that mark it (although Dr. Baron says there’s a team in Norway currently working on that). But a 2023 survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that only 77 percent of those who have sleep trackers find them useful. Among that other 33 percent are users who can’t sleep as well because they’re too wound up trying to produce certain metrics on their Apple Watch or Whoop.

Why It's not worth obsessing over sleep stats

Experts say we should treat our sleep trackers like TikTok videos—potentially interesting sources of info, but ones that are meant to be taken lightly. Most devices today are reasonably accurate at estimating the amount of sleep you get at night. But claims about measuring each stage of sleep are overblown, according to Kenneth Sassower, MD, a sleep medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “There's no way that it will be telling you about REM sleep with the kind of sleep trackers that most of us have,” he says. Some trackers do use heart rate variability as a way to indirectly measure sleep quality. But even then, Dr. Gallagher says most of her patients don’t fully understand how to interpret what that’s telling them.

Either way, knowing how much REM sleep you’re getting isn’t as important as you might think it is. “There's not a lot of significance in knowing how much of this stage or that stage [you get],” Dr. Baron says. Different people naturally get different amounts of REM, and “it doesn’t suggest there’s a problem.”

What is a problem, however, is if you think you’re getting bad sleep. “One of the things we actually know is that our beliefs about our sleep have an impact on our mood and how we feel,” Dr. Gallagher says. Say that you wake up feeling fairly well-rested, then look over at the stats from your tracker and see you only got six hours. Well, then you’re more likely to end up cranky and craving a nap.

Dr. Sassower says he gets patients who book an appointment with him, thinking they need a sleep intervention purely because of what they’re seeing on their sleep trackers, not because of how they feel. “They’re like, ‘Well, Doc, I thought I was doing well, but look at this metric,’” he says. Others can’t even tell him how they slept last night without looking it up—they’ve come to rely on an app to tell them how tired they are.

What to do if your sleep tracking is getting out of hand

If you suspect your relationship with your tracker is getting toxic, Dr. Gallagher suggests asking yourself why you want this data in the first place. “What do you hope to find out or achieve, or what would be interesting to you?” she asks. Are you seeing helpful patterns—like fewer wake-ups on nights you skip those beers—or is it just giving you something negative to ruminate on?

Some people find they need to ditch their tracker altogether. Others just need some space. Dr. Sassower suggests only checking the metrics once a week—that will give you a better sense of your general trends over time which is what matters most anyway. It’s easiest to do this with a tracker like the Oura Ring that doesn’t come with a screen right on the device. “One thing that I have personally tried sometimes is actually leaving my phone out of the bedroom,” admits Dr. Patel.

More than anything, remember that there’s only so much a sleep tracker can do for you. “Sleep is not something you can fully control,” Dr. Baron says. “You can do everything right and still have a bad night's sleep sometimes and really have no idea why.”

Originally Appeared on GQ

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