Is your sleep tracker
making your sleep worse?

The irony you probably recognise

You bought a sleep tracker to improve your sleep. Now you lie awake at midnight worrying that your tracker is about to record a bad night — and by worrying, you guarantee it does. The tool meant to help has become the problem.

This is not a quirk. Sleep researchers have given it a name: orthosomnia — from the Greek ortho (correct or straight) and somnia (sleep). It was first described clinically in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, and in the years since, the evidence that it's a real and growing problem has accumulated.

What the research shows

A 2024 cross-sectional study published in Brain Sciences surveyed 523 adults and found that between 3% and 14% showed signs of orthosomnia, depending on how strictly it was defined. Among people who owned and regularly used a sleep-tracking wearable (35.8% of the sample), those identified with orthosomnia consistently scored higher on the Athens Insomnia Scale — meaning their sleep was measurably worse. Tracker anxiety was not just a feeling; it was linked to real, worse sleep outcomes.

A 2026 nationally representative survey presented at the SLEEP annual meeting found similar patterns in the US population, with a meaningful proportion of tracker users reporting that their device made them more anxious about their sleep rather than less.

The age gap is striking too. Around 23% of users aged 18–35 said sleep apps made them stressed about their sleep, compared with just 2.4% of those 66 and older. Younger, perfectionist, high-achieving people appear to be most at risk — if you seek excellence in every area of life, sleep metrics become another thing to optimise, and a bad score becomes a personal failure.

The accuracy problem nobody talks about

Here is the part that should genuinely reassure you: your sleep tracker is probably wrong.

No consumer wearable directly measures sleep. They infer it from movement, heart rate, and sometimes skin temperature. They're reasonably good at telling sleep from wake — but the stage breakdowns that people fixate on (deep sleep, REM, light sleep) are far less reliable. Two devices worn simultaneously on the same wrist could routinely disagree significantly on the same night.

Even trained human sleep technicians scoring the same raw EEG data only agree about 80% of the time. The "you got 31 minutes of deep sleep" verdict that ruins your morning may be wrong by more than the number itself.

Why it happens — the anxiety feedback loop

Sleep is one of the few biological processes that gets worse the harder you try. The moment you lie in bed consciously trying to fall asleep — monitoring yourself, checking whether it's working, worrying about the score — you activate exactly the kind of mental arousal that prevents sleep. Your body needs to feel safe and relaxed to transition into sleep. Anxiety about sleep scores creates the opposite state.

This is also why CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia) — the most evidence-backed treatment for chronic insomnia — specifically targets sleep-related anxiety and the unhelpful beliefs and behaviours that perpetuate it. Orthosomnia is essentially CBT-I's next frontier: a new source of sleep anxiety created by technology.

How to use a tracker without it using you

Look at the weekly average, not the nightly score. One night of 5 hours is not a crisis. A week of 5 hours is worth paying attention to. Zoom out.

Stop checking first thing in the morning. Your subjective feeling of how you slept is actually a better predictor of your daytime performance than any tracker score. If you woke up feeling okay, you probably are okay — regardless of what the app says.

Turn off sleep score notifications. Most apps allow this. You can still access the data when you want it, without it being pushed at you as a morning verdict.

If your tracker is making you anxious — put it away for a while. Return to the basics: consistent wake time, dark room, no caffeine after midday. See how you feel without the data.