Should you track your sleep? It depends.

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

First of all, what do I like about sleep tracking? While it is perhaps not an accurate measure of sleep quantity and quality as attending a ‘sleep lab’, I do think it establishes a decent baseline from which sleep, and the impact our lifestyle has on it, can be gauged.

One good example of this is what happens when someone drinks alcohol. Half a bottle of wine can cause sleep scores that normally hover around the 80s (out of 100) to drop to the 60s or even lower. This sort of data helps demonstrate, in black-and-white, one of the potential downsides of drinking and may prompt some to choose their moment more carefully. In other words, if tomorrow is a ‘big day’, they may be more likely to abstain.

However, as I pointed out in my answer, sleep tracking is not all upside. As for some, it can lead to a certain type of fastidiousness or even neuroticism.

While there always was potential for this, the issue received wider recognition as a result of the observations and work of Kelly Glazer Baron and her colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois, US.

They noticed that patients were turning up to sleep clinics not because they felt tired, but because their tracker said their sleep was below par. They were essentially self-diagnosing insomnia based on tracker data, then spending excessive time in bed trying to ‘fix’ their scores. In the main, this actually appeared to worsen 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 in which she described patients who were, by most objective measures, sleeping fine [1]. 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  [2] . Among regular sleep-tracker users, between 3% and 14% met criteria for orthosomnia, depending on how strictly it was defined. Those who suffered from orthosomnia had significantly higher insomnia scores than non-cases, and anxiety about tracker scores was directly linked to worse sleep.

During my answer last week, I also cited some evidence that shows some of us can be unduly affected by our sleep score [3]. In 2014, psychologists Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal at Colorado College ran an experiment in which they told study subjects that 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 that they had managed just 16.2% (well below average). Neither figure had anything to do with 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 what is known as the ‘nocebo’ effect (essentially, the opposite of the placebo effect).

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, and the impact of lifestyle on this.

However, those who tend to be somewhat obsessive about tracking data might want to go on subjective measures alone. 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.

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