Your wearable data may actually be making your sleep worse | Latest Tech News
For Leah Martin, a 48-year-old attorney and mom, operating on three to 5 hours of sleep felt regular until complications and fatigue made her notice she wasn’t performing at her best.
“I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t healthy,” Martin told The Post.
As a aggressive runner, she’d already been utilizing devices like Fitbit and Oura to observe fitness and soon discovered herself fixated on her sleep scores.
“I wanted that 100%,” she said. “I always wanted to be the optimal sleeper. But what got me there sometimes wasn’t healthy.”
Wearables that observe sleep may improve conduct. But for some, it may flip into an obsession called orthosomnia. NY Post/Jared Larson
Over the many years during which Martin describes herself as a “terrible sleeper,” she experimented with her sleep hygiene, including white noise machines, melatonin, teas and other natural sleep aids. She wore an eye masks, obtained blackout curtains, restricted screen time and even tweaked her diet, all in the pursuit of better sleep data.
And it turned exhausting.
“I do feel like the tracking, unlike other steps to create a positive sleeping environment, was detrimental,” Martin said. “I would check the tracker during wake-up periods, which definitely didn’t help with sleep. I would worry about how much sleep time I was getting, what cycles I was in, or missing.”
In the morning, she would wake up and test her tracker first factor to see how she carried out.
Why sleep feels damaged
Martin’s expertise isn’t distinctive. According to the CDC, more than a third of adults get fewer than the minimal really useful seven hours a evening.
“We’re spending more time on our phones, and that light exposure diminishes melatonin production,” Dr. Andrea Matsumura, a sleep medication doctor, said.
Blue mild and social media often push bedtimes later, a development particularly common among Gen Zers. Overscheduling and work stress also play roles, as do mental health challenges like anxiety and depression, which incessantly disrupt sleep for those with insomnia.
Leah Martin, 48, tried every thing to embrace her sleep rating — and says the trouble was “detrimental.” courtesy of Leah Martin
And wearable health trackers have made people more conscious, and sometimes more anxious, about the size and high quality of their relaxation.
“People are simply becoming more attentive because they can now track their sleep,” Dr. Alon Avidan, director of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center, said.
While it may really feel intuitive to do every thing doable to improve sleep, consultants say the stress to obtain “perfect” relaxation can develop into a downside, inflicting stress that can finally lead to more bother sleeping — a phenomenon identified as orthosomnia.
What is orthosomnia?
A time period first coined in 2017 by scientific researcher Kelly Glazer Baron, orthosomnia describes an unhealthy preoccupation with perfecting sleep.
Though not a formal psychiatric diagnosis, it may trigger elevated anxiety, extreme monitoring and inflexible bedtime routines, according to Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The rise of wearable trackers like Oura, Garmin and Whoop has unintentionally fueled that fixation, consultants say, inflicting some customers to deal with sleep as one thing to carry out.
“They often become concerned when their data shows a problem, especially when they compare their results to someone else in the household,” Avidan said.
“Sleep is a passive biological process, not a skill to be perfected,” Liz Ross, a scientific psychologist, said. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Nearly half of Americans have used a sleep tracker, according to a 2025 American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey, and 55% of customers say they’ve modified their habits because of the data.
“Sleep is a passive biological process, not a skill to be perfected,” Liz Ross, a scientific psychologist at The Coping Resource Center, said. “When people begin grading or striving to improve nightly sleep scores, it often increases worry and pressure at bedtime.”
What’s going incorrect — and why the data isn’t foolproof
While anybody can fall for the score-chasing lure, consultants say people who already battle with insomnia are particularly weak.
“People start treating a wearable like the authority on whether they slept well,” Mollie Eastman, founder of Sleep Is A Skill, said, describing behaviors like checking scores immediately and worrying about REM (the sleep stage during which we dream) or deep sleep.
“I sometimes found myself canceling plans or skipping a glass of wine just to protect the number. It mostly just gamified which days I decided to wear the ring.”
Cindy Yan
The rumination itself, she notes, turns into counterproductive. The tougher somebody tries to control sleep, the more they activate the stress response, turning sleep into a downside to resolve slightly than a natural course of.
Therapist Hillary Schoninger said people often discover that their own sleep doesn’t match system data. That disconnect issues because metrics like sleep phases are among the least correct on shopper trackers, which may’t immediately measure mind exercise — that means customers may connect an excessive amount of that means to unreliable numbers.
Cindy Yan, 28, said she obtained to a level where she selectively wore her Oura ring when she was being “good” about her sleep. Courtesy of Cindy Yan
When monitoring turns into rating chasing
Cindy Yan, a 28-year-old wellness entrepreneur and co-founder of The Protocole, said working in health and longevity made it straightforward to get swept up in attempting every new gadget.
“The typical lineup looks something like an Eight Sleep, a Whoop or Oura ring, an Equinox membership, peptides and a stack of supplements,” Yan said. “I jumped on the Oura ring bandwagon.”
She started checking her rating every morning, and felt validated when the numbers climbed. But life in New York meant busy work hours, social obligations and late nights, which hindered her outcomes. She started sporting the ring selectively on “good” nights and leaving it off when she knew she’d be out late to keep away from seeing her numbers drop.
“I sometimes found myself canceling plans or skipping a glass of wine just to protect the number,” she said. “It mostly just gamified which days I decided to wear the ring.”
“When we shift the focus from ‘winning sleep’ to using the day as a tool for overall health and well-being, tracking can be incredibly helpful,” Mollie Eastman, founder of Sleep Is A Skill, said. Monkey Business – stock.adobe.com
Do sleep trackers ever help?
For some people, monitoring your sleep can be considerably useful, particularly for those who don’t prioritize sleep hygiene or a common bedtime routine. But the key to avoiding obsession is to deal with the data as a reference level without dropping sight of your own organic cues.
“When we shift the focus from ‘winning sleep’ to using the day as a tool for overall health and well-being, tracking can be incredibly helpful,” Eastman said. “It can function like a check-engine light. It can flag patterns you might otherwise miss.”
Working with a doctor who can precisely interpret the data and decide whether or not something wants additional investigation is also a concern. Clinicians are less involved with exact measurements of sleep phases or oxygen ranges than with general sleep length and consistency, according to Avidan.
“I like to use these devices to estimate sleep duration and sleep regularity, because that’s the number one issue,” he said.
Jackie Sumsky, 33, said she tried to “hack” her tracker, targeted more on the numbers than her precise sleep. Courtesy of Jackie Sumsky
The best manner to use a sleep tracker is to perceive its limitations. “Metrics such as sleep stages, efficiency, or awakenings are estimates, not direct measurements, and they naturally fluctuate from night to night,” Ross said. “Human sleep is inherently variable, and that variability is completely normal.”
Consumer devices can also lag or show data variability, making nightly scores unreliable. For people with sure sleep circumstances, trackers can be particularly deceptive.
Jackie Sumsky, a 33-year-old publicist with a genetic circadian rhythm disorder, discovered that her Oura ring often misreported her sleep because her schedule falls outdoors conventional nighttime hours.
“My sleep score is deflated even when all the other bars are completely full,” Sumsky said. At one level, she tried to hack the conduct to improve the numbers, only to notice the tracker wasn’t constructed for nontraditional sleepers and started viewing the data neutrally.
For those who discover themselves changing into obsessive, issues like taking breaks from monitoring, focusing on long-term patterns and checking in with how you actually really feel before turning to a system for validation can help.
Matsumura also recommends ditching wearables altogether and merely journaling sleep habits without the added stress of fixed metrics. “That gives me a much better idea because they’re relying on their own perception.”
Schoninger agrees. “There’s a mind-body connection that we’re missing,” she said. “At the end of the day, a device isn’t going to tell you how you feel when you wake up and put your feet on the ground. When we try to force something, that’s usually when it backfires.”
For Martin, the mom and lawyer who turned fixated on her sleep rating, giving up her metrics obsession and focusing instead on merely getting relaxation made all the distinction.
“I’m not worried about it. I know if I feel good, that’s what’s important,” she said.
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