Beware of orthosomnia — tracker-driven sleep anxiety

What to Do

If checking your sleep score each morning causes anxiety or frustration, take a break from your tracker. Use how you feel during the day as your primary sleep quality signal, not a device metric.

Why It Works

Orthosomnia — an unhealthy preoccupation with achieving "perfect" sleep data — is a documented clinical phenomenon. Clinicians report increasing numbers of patients seeking treatment for self-diagnosed sleep problems based solely on tracker data. The paradox: the harder you try to optimize, the more anxiety you create, and the worse your sleep becomes.

Tips

• All consumer trackers overestimate total sleep time by 15-45 minutes and struggle to differentiate deep vs. REM sleep
• Use trackers for weekly trends, not nightly scores
• CBT-I practitioners note that trackers can reinforce sleep-related worry and undermine treatment
• A low sleep score on a night you felt fine is the tracker's limitation, not your body's failure