Sleep Tracking: Should You Track Your Sleep?

I gave a keynote last week for a client, and during the Q&A at the end, I was asked about sleep tracking. The person wanted to know whether she should track her sleep or not. As is often the case, the answer I gave was, “it depends.”

The Benefits of Sleep Tracking

First of all, what do I like about sleep tracking? While it may not be as accurate as attending a sleep lab, it does establish a decent baseline. From there, we can gauge our sleep and see how our lifestyle impacts it.

One good example is what happens when someone drinks alcohol. Half a bottle of wine can cause sleep scores that usually hover around the 80s (out of 100) to drop to the 60s or even lower. This data clearly shows one of the potential downsides of drinking. It may prompt some to choose their moments more carefully. If tomorrow is a big day, they might decide to abstain.

The Downsides of Sleep Tracking

However, as I pointed out in my answer, sleep tracking isn't all upside. For some, it can lead to a certain type of fastidiousness or even neuroticism.

This issue gained wider recognition thanks to Kelly Glazer Baron and her colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois, US. They noticed that patients were showing up at sleep clinics not because they felt tired, but because their tracker said their sleep was below par. They were self-diagnosing insomnia based on tracker data and spending excessive time in bed trying to ‘fix’ their scores. This often worsened their sleep.

Dr. Baron coined a term for this: orthosomnia. It comes from ortho (correct) and somnia (sleep) — the compulsive pursuit of perfect sleep, driven by device data. She published a paper describing patients who, by most objective measures, were sleeping fine. One man, averaging nearly eight hours a night, felt pressure every evening to hit the eight-hour mark his tracker seemed to demand. Another woman woke each morning anxious about whether her overnight scores had been good enough.

A 2024 study confirmed that orthosomnia is not a rare phenomenon. Among regular sleep-tracker users, between 3% and 14% met criteria for orthosomnia, depending on how strictly it was defined. Those suffering from orthosomnia had significantly higher insomnia scores than non-cases. Anxiety about tracker scores was directly linked to worse sleep.

The Impact of Perception on Sleep Quality

During my answer last week, I also cited some evidence showing that some of us can be unduly affected by our sleep scores. In 2014, psychologists Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal at Colorado College ran an experiment. They told study subjects they had been connected to a device that could measure sleep quality from brain waves. They then gave everyone false feedback: one group was told they had achieved 28.7% REM sleep (above average); the other was told they had managed just 16.2% (well below average). Neither figure related to how the students had actually slept.

Here’s the kicker: Students who were told they'd slept well performed significantly better on tests of attention and information processing. Those told they'd slept poorly significantly underperformed, mimicking the cognitive effects of genuine sleep deprivation, despite having had exactly the same sleep.

The perception of poor sleep was enough to produce the symptoms of poor sleep. This is an example of the ‘nocebo’ effect — essentially, the opposite of the placebo effect.

General Advice on Sleep Tracking

With all this in mind, my general advice is that sleep tracking can be a useful guide to the quality and quantity of our sleep, as well as the impact of lifestyle on this. However, those who tend to be somewhat obsessive about tracking data might want to rely on subjective measures alone.

Signs of Inadequate Sleep

Some symptoms that suggest sleep is not adequate include:

• Waking to an alarm

• Snooze function use (and abuse!)

• A feeling that you ‘have’ to get up, rather than feeling ready to

• A need to catch up on sleep

  
  

I go into more depth about this in my forthcoming book – The Performance Prescription: The Science of Healthy High Performance – which is out in August.

Conclusion

In conclusion, sleep tracking can be a double-edged sword. It offers valuable insights but can also lead to unnecessary anxiety. So, consider your relationship with sleep tracking carefully. If it helps you make better choices without causing stress, it might be worth it. But if it leads to obsession, it might be better to step back and focus on how you feel rather than what a device tells you.

References:

1. Baron KG, et al. Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far? J Clin Sleep Med. 2017;13(2):351-354

2. Jahrami H, et al. Prevalence of Orthosomnia in a General Population Sample: A Cross-Sectional Study. Brain Sci. 2024;14(11):1123

3. Draganich C et al. Placebo sleep affects cognitive functioning. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014;40(3):857-64