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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 18 2020, @09:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the irony dept.

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/805291279/losing-sleep-over-the-quest-for-a-perfect-nights-rest

If you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame.

And there's a name for this new kind of insomnia of the digital age: orthosomnia.

It's "when you just really become fixated on having this perfect sleep via tracker," said Seema Khosla, medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep. "And then you start worrying about it, and you wind up giving yourself insomnia."

[...] But in an irony of our digital lifestyles, for some people, perfecting that sleep score becomes an end unto itself — so much so that they can lose sleep over it.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 18 2020, @09:53PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 18 2020, @09:53PM (#959674) Journal

    Tweedle-beep.

    Tweedle-beep. (again)

    "Hello, I just wanted to inform you that you appear to be falling asleep. Click OK to silence this notification."

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @02:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @02:29AM (#959753)

      It must be Windows.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @06:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @06:15AM (#960213)

      I figure counting/tracking all that sleep would be like counting sheep. It should help you sleep no?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 18 2020, @10:00PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 18 2020, @10:00PM (#959678)

    I used to make apnea monitors, they would alarm LOUDLY when an apnea happened, or... when the patient rolled over and detached the sensors: guess which happens more often.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by corey on Wednesday February 19 2020, @01:34AM (2 children)

    by corey (2202) on Wednesday February 19 2020, @01:34AM (#959734)

    In my opinion, these things are invented solutions to needs people never had. Yeah might be cool, interesting, whatever but so what? It makes me upset that consumertards spend their money on this junk, supporting billion dollar companies when if they sent the 100 bucks to support kids in Syria, would actually do something good for the world.

    My mother in law got a fit bit recently. She always sleeps like shit, now she's got one of these, I asked her what she learnt. Nothing, still sleeps like shit and feels tired in the day. Very interesting.

    If you actually want to know what's going on in your sleep then see a sleep specialist, who will record brain activity and other biological measures, then make an expert, informed recommendation. Or just tell you your fine, nobody sleeps perfect every night. It's life, man.

    My wife and I sleep with no phones or anything in our room, they're down the other end of the house. Sleep time is my time, my biological time. To rest and disconnect from everything and, just, sleep.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 19 2020, @03:05AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 19 2020, @03:05AM (#959762) Journal

      My mother in law got a fit bit recently. She always sleeps like shit, now she's got one of these, I asked her what she learnt. Nothing, still sleeps like shit and feels tired in the day. Very interesting.

      On the plus side, she no longer have an anecdotical shitty sleep, she can demonstrate it now the shitty sleep with hard (and irrelevant) data - this has to count for something (even if it is only the amount of disposable income that was, well, disposed of).

      Sleep time is my time, my biological time. To rest and disconnect from everything and, just, sleep.

      Totally agree. I hate to have unjust sleep.

        (grin)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @06:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @06:31PM (#959954)

      I'm a data and graph guy, and I have been my whole life. When I was in middle school, I used to weigh myself every morning and log it, then I would make graphs by hand (this was the 1970s). When my wife and I were having a problem conceiving, a doctor told us to log her body temperature every morning for multiple weeks. He just wanted the numbers, but when we went back for our follow up appointment, I had it all plotted out and it was really cool to see the sinusoidal changes because I wasn't sure that the sub-degree body temperature changes would stand out over the day-to-day fluctuations (but it did, and I even fit a sine to the data; that was when I realized that physicians have very little interest in graphs and goodness-of-fit parameters--neither did my wife, for that matter). I religiously record my automobile miles traveled and the amount of fuel I add to my tank so that I can look at my MPG over time (there is a sinusoidal dependence there too).

      Maybe I'm too much of a weirdo, but these fitness trackers are perfect for someone like me. I never got one because they were too expensive when they came out, and now I only want to log all that data if it was only logging to a computer in my possession. I have zero interest in logging that data to a server somewhere. So if they were reasonably priced, and they logged the data to a local file, I would be all over getting one and obsessing over it. Not to the point of losing sleep, but I would be having a hell of a lot of fun crunching the data in R. For me, it is the more the journey than it is the destination.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @12:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @12:38AM (#960096)

    Sleep behaves differently when being tracked? Schrodinger's Sleep?

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