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Sleep Trackers Can Make it Harder to Fall Asleep

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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: 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.