Guide
Orthosomnia: when a sleep tracker keeps you awake.
A sleep tracker is meant to help you sleep better. For some people the score becomes the problem: they lie in bed longer to raise it and believe it over a sleep lab. Sleep researchers in Chicago gave that a name.
In short. In 2017 sleep researchers in Chicago described three patients whose trackers had become part of their insomnia, and called it orthosomnia: a preoccupation with perfecting the sleep data. All three spent too long in bed trying to raise their totals, which can make insomnia worse, and one held on to the tracker’s verdict after a sleep study in the lab disagreed. The researchers do not reject trackers. They suggest using them for patterns, above all time in bed, and checking how you feel by day.
Three patients
- A man of 40 felt irritable, tired and forgetful only on days after the tracker showed less than eight hours. He felt pressure every night to reach eight hours on the tracker, and his goal was at least eight hours of deep sleep.
- A woman of 27 brought printouts of restless nights to her appointments. Her restless legs were treated, and a sleep study in the lab found plenty of deep sleep. She still asked why her tracker said she slept badly.
- A man of 69 saw restless periods in his data and told his neurologist; a sleep study found severe sleep apnoea. Treated for it, he still felt his sleep was poor, spent eight and a half to nine hours in bed, and kept coming back to what the tracker said. His insomnia did resolve in the end.
Why the score can backfire
All three, the authors write, spent too long in bed in the hope of raising the tracker’s total, which sleep therapists advise against, and it may have made their insomnia worse. The trackers of the time judged sleep from movement, not brain waves, so they could not tell light sleep from deep: lying still while reading a phone in bed could count as light sleep. Yet the data felt truer to the patients than tests built for the job. Rings now add pulse and temperature, and still estimate sleep stages rather than measure them: how close they come to a sleep lab.
What the researchers suggest
- Look at patterns. Use the data for the shape of your nights, especially how long you spend in bed, rather than the exact minutes asleep.
- Write it down. Keep a sleep diary alongside the tracker.
- Check the day. How you feel and manage by day is often less tied to last night’s number than people expect.
- Try it without. If the tracker seems to feed the worry, compare a stretch with it and a stretch without.
- Keep the phone out of bed. Night-time checking, notifications and screens are part of the picture: bedtime mode on your phone.
What it does not show
Three cases are not a study of how common this is, and the authors could not tell whether the trackers caused the trouble or brought it to light. One patient credited his tracker with the path to his apnoea diagnosis, which came from a sleep study. The useful reading is narrow: a tracker is a tool, and a score that makes you anxious is a sign to use it differently.
What we take from it
The first Lychnos Ring does not track sleep. For the sleep trends we are working on for a later model, our aim follows this paper: weeks before single nights, and no nudge to stay in bed longer. It is in development: why our first ring skips health.
Source, read 4 November 2026: Baron and colleagues, orthosomnia: are some patients taking the quantified self too far?, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2017. General information, not medical advice.
Questions
What is orthosomnia?
A term sleep researchers coined in 2017 for a preoccupation with improving or perfecting the sleep data from a wearable tracker. It joins ‘ortho’, correct, and ‘somnia’, sleep, after orthorexia, an unhealthy fixation on eating well. It describes three patients; it is not a formal diagnosis.
Should I stop wearing my sleep tracker?
Not necessarily. The researchers suggest an experiment that also works at home: compare how you sleep and how you feel by day with the tracker and without it. If poor sleep goes on, talk to a doctor; the patients in the paper were treated with cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia.