The surprising reason a sleep tracker can wreck a good night’s sleep

You wake up to your 7 a.m. alarm feeling relatively refreshed and ready to tackle the day ahead. But when you check your smartwatch, you’re surprised to see a low sleep score staring back at you.

You start trying to remember the night before. Did you toss and turn more than you thought? Why is your watch telling you that you’re exhausted when you feel fine? When your head hits the pillow that night, you lie wide awake worrying about getting a good night’s sleep until the wee hours of the morning.

If this scenario feels familiar, you may have orthosomnia, a fixation on achieving “perfect” sleep, often fueled by sleep trackers, that tends to result in worse sleep.

“Orthosomnia is, at its core, a form of insomnia triggered by obsessive tracking of sleep data and the use of sleep wearables,” said Andrew Spector, a sleep medicine specialist at Duke Health in North Carolina. “It’s essentially trouble falling asleep for artificial reasons.”

Many people rely on technology to fix their problems, but as it turns out, in this situation, these gadgets may backfire. Read on to learn more about orthosomnia and what to do if you think you might have it.

What causes orthosomnia?

At the root of orthosomnia is the popularity and ubiquity of sleep trackers. And while they can be useful tools at times — for example, some can screen for signs of sleep apnea, such as breathing disturbances — they can interfere with your ability to listen to your body, according to Amy Morin, a Florida-based psychotherapist and author of “The Mental Strength Playbook.”

“Instead of thinking about how well rested you feel, you might look at an app or device to tell you if you’re getting enough sleep,” Morin said. Over time, this can undermine your trust in how you feel after a night of sleep and lead you to put too much weight on what a tracker says. “This can cause increased anxiety about sleep and can lead to more sleep problems,” she said.

For instance, you may start to depend on tech to tell you how you feel, as opposed to listening to your own body’s cues, according to Morin. People are impressionable, and if your wearable is telling you that you didn’t get enough sleep, you might start to convince yourself that you’re more tired than you actually are.

“You may start to feel sluggish. Then, you’ll act sluggish. Consequently, you’ll become sluggish,” Morin said. This may lead you to pass up an opportunity to do something later on in the day because you’ve allowed your tech to convince you that you’re too tired, she said.

Additionally, someone who wakes up feeling well rested but sees their sleep tracker telling them they woke up often during the night may spend all morning thinking about how they’re going to feel exhausted later, Morin said. They then may be so worried about getting adequate rest that, ironically, they can’t sleep when they try to wind down for the day, Morin explained.

Keep in mind that sleep trackers aren’t always accurate. These devices base their metrics on imperfect factors such as how much you moved during the night, Morin said. “That doesn’t always correlate to actual sleep time or sleep stages,” she said. “It’s important to know that these devices are just estimating how much sleep you got, and they’re not pinpointing your stages of sleep accurately.”

People with anxiety or perfectionism may be especially susceptible to orthosomnia, according to Morin. “They may want perfect sleep, and a tracking app may create stress that shows them not every night is going to be perfect,” Morin said.

How do you know if you have orthosomnia?

According to Spector, a telltale sign of orthosomnia is checking your sleep tracker immediately after you wake up and analyzing all the data.

“Your sleep tracker will give you a summary of your night. If you look at the summary and move on with your day, that’s fine,” Spector said. “But are you going minute by minute through the night and analyzing the little details of the report? That’s a red flag to me.”

Another indication of orthosomnia is not being able to get to sleep because you’re worried you won’t get a good sleep score that night, Spector said.

You may also start thinking about getting a good sleep score as your reason for wanting to sleep well as opposed to the actual benefits that come with adequate shut-eye — including improved mood, better focus and reduced risk of health conditions such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Tips to manage orthosomnia

There are a few ways to manage — and overcome — orthosomnia, according to experts:

Establish good sleep hygiene habits, like avoiding screen time before bed, creating a bedtime routine that helps you wind down and ensuring your room is dark and quiet, said Morin.
Focus on tuning into your body and recognizing when you need more rest and adjust your bedtime accordingly, according to Morin.
Recognize that your beliefs about sleep will greatly impact your performance, Morin said. If you assume a difficult night’s sleep will make it nearly impossible to function, you’ll have trouble functioning, she said. If, however, you believe you can still function just fine after a rough night, you’ll probably do much better.
Consider therapy if sleep becomes a source of anxiety that you can’t manage on your own, Spector said.

If you find yourself obsessing over your sleep data, try ditching your tracker for a month, Morin suggested. During that time, focus on good sleep hygiene and pay attention to how your body feels.

Once you can more confidently trust your body, you might decide to reintroduce wearable tech. Or, maybe you’ll realize you don’t really need it after all.

“Wearable tech is helpful if it gives you information you need to make the best health decisions. But it becomes a problem when it interferes with your ability to read your body’s cues,” Morin said. It’s unrealistic to expect perfect sleep every night, and accepting that might put your mind at ease just enough for you to drift off easily.