Your wearable data may actually be making your sleep

Your wearable data may actually be making your sleep

For Leah Martin, a 48-year-old lawyer and mom, operating on three to 5 hours of sleep felt regular until complications and fatigue made her understand she wasn’t acting at her best.

“I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t healthy,” Martin told The Post.

As a competitive runner, she’d already been utilizing devices like Fitbit and Oura to trace 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 monitor sleep may enhance conduct. But for some, it could possibly 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 together with her sleep hygiene, including white noise machines, melatonin, teas and other pure sleep aids. She wore an eye fixed masks, received blackout curtains, restricted display time and even tweaked her diet, all in the pursuit of better sleep data.

And it grew to become 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 get up and verify her tracker first factor to see how she carried out. 

Why sleep feels damaged

Martin’s experience isn’t distinctive. According to the CDC, more than a 3rd of adults get fewer than the minimal really useful seven hours an 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 light and social media often push bedtimes later, a development particularly frequent among Gen Zers. Overscheduling and work stress also play roles, as do psychological health challenges like anxiety and depression, which continuously disrupt sleep for those with insomnia. 

Leah Martin, 48, tried every part to incorporate her sleep score — and says the effort 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 part doable to enhance sleep, consultants say the strain to realize “perfect” relaxation can change into an issue, inflicting stress that can in the end result in more hassle sleeping — a phenomenon often known 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 proper psychiatric diagnosis, it could possibly 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 unsuitable — 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, founding father of Sleep Is A Skill, said, describing behaviors like checking scores instantly 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 more durable somebody tries to regulate sleep, the more they activate the stress response, turning sleep into an issue to unravel moderately than a pure course of.

Therapist Hillary Schoninger said people often discover that their very own sleep doesn’t match device data. That disconnect issues because metrics like sleep phases are among the least correct on shopper trackers, which may’t instantly measure mind exercise — that means customers may connect an excessive amount of that means to unreliable numbers.

Cindy Yan, 28, said she received to a point the place she selectively wore her Oura ring when she was being “good” about her sleep. Courtesy of Cindy Yan

When monitoring turns into score 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 making an attempt 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 score 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 carrying 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, founding father of Sleep Is A Skill, said. Monkey Business – inventory.adobe.com

Do sleep trackers ever assist?

For some people, monitoring your sleep can be considerably useful, particularly for those who don’t prioritize sleep hygiene or a daily bedtime routine. But the key to avoiding obsession is to deal with the data as a reference point without shedding sight of your personal 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 priority. Clinicians are less involved with exact measurements of sleep phases or oxygen ranges than with general sleep period 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 approach to make use of a sleep tracker is to grasp 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 present data variability, making nightly scores unreliable. For people with sure sleep situations, trackers can be particularly deceptive. 

Jackie Sumsky, a 33-year-old publicist with a genetic circadian rhythm dysfunction, 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 point, she tried to hack the conduct to enhance the numbers, only to understand the tracker wasn’t constructed for nontraditional sleepers and commenced viewing the data neutrally.

For those who discover themselves turning into obsessive, issues like taking breaks from monitoring, specializing in long-term patterns and checking in with the way you actually really feel before turning to a device for validation might help.

Matsumura also recommends ditching wearables altogether and easily journaling sleep habits without the added strain 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 grew to become fixated on her sleep score, 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.

/our

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