The Sleep Tracking Obsession Has Started Making People’s Sleep Worse

Bought a wearable to improve my sleep about two years ago. Worst decision I made for my sleep in years. Three months in I was checking my score at 3am, lying awake calculating how many hours I had left, and treating every below-average night like a personal failure. That’s not wellness. That’s just a different kind of insomnia with a subscription fee.

Turns out this is not a personal quirk. Orthosomnia is the clinical term researchers have started using for the anxiety created by obsessive sleep tracking and it’s showing up in sleep medicine practices with enough frequency that it’s now a recognized pattern rather than an anecdote.

People are responding in ways that would have seemed extreme five years ago. Some couples are sleeping in separate rooms now, not because the relationship is struggling but because one person’s restlessness was tanking the other person’s score and the score had become the thing that mattered. The no-phone bedroom is having a genuine moment. And a quiet but growing number of people are just throwing the tracker in a drawer, not because they stopped caring about sleep but because the data was actively making it worse.

The deeper issue is that sleep is one of those things that functions better when you’re not consciously managing it. Hypervigilance around falling asleep is neurologically counterproductive in a specific way that doesn’t apply to other tracked metrics. You can obsess over your step count without it affecting your ability to walk. You cannot obsess over falling asleep without making it harder to fall asleep. The tracking creates the condition it’s supposed to treat.

The irony of the wellness industry producing a product that generates the problem it claims to solve is not subtle. Sometimes the optimization is the obstacle and the Oura ring sitting in a drawer somewhere is the healthiest outcome the device ever produced.