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.”
