Why sleeptrackers could lead to the rise of insomnia – and orthosomnia
By Emine Saner for The Guardian
In our chronically sleep-deprived society, many are using gadgets and apps to measure the quantity and quality of their shut-eye. But they could be causing more harm than good
For more than nine months, Alex Whitecross’s routine on waking was to check the data about his sleep on his fitness tracker. And then he would feel quite anxious. “I started getting paranoid about how much sleep I was getting,” he says. Whitecross, a computer-aided-design technician from south Wales, says he bought his tracker in order to measure exercise, but became interested in the sleep-monitoring function. “I’m a lighter sleeper than my fiance so I thought it would help me, but it ended up having the opposite effect.”
Sometimes he would check it in the night and feel panicked about how many hours he had until his alarm would go off. In the morning, “I would wake up and look at it, and it would say I’d had five hours and 44 minutes sleep, and spent an hour and 25 minutes awake at night. It made me feel more tired, knowing how little sleep I’d got.”
Read the full article here to learn about how sleep trackers might be doing more harm than good…
Sleep trackers can be helpful in making an effort to get a good night’s sleep, says Hare. “They can be part of a move towards appreciating how important it is to get sleep. It’s only a problem if people read more into the data than the data can give them.”