Your Wearable Might Be Ruining Your Sleep

For the past few years, I’ve worn my Apple Watch to bed every night to see how well I’m sleeping. The nerd in me loves the data it spits out: how many hours of shut-eye I got, how much time was spent in various sleep stages (like REM or deep sleep) and how it compared to previous nights.

Devices like the Apple Watch measure sleep by monitoring your breathing and movement. (Sleep clinicians, by comparison, measure brain activity to determine what stage of sleep you’re in.) Wearables are never completely accurate—you could, for instance, be very still and calm while reading a book, and the device might mistake you for being asleep. But with scores of sleep data on my watch, I figured some of it had to be accurate.

I noticed that even when I managed eight hours of zzzs, I would still record just minutes of deep sleep—the kind of sleep characterized by slower brain waves and body relaxation. When I was more intentional about my sleep hygiene—sleeping in a cool, dark room and avoiding caffeine, for example—my deep sleep would sometimes improve. But there was never a consistent way to maintain it.

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Collecting all of this data, it turns out, could actually be part of the problem. In 2017, Dr. Kelly Glazer Baron, director of the behavioural sleep medicine lab at the University of Utah, coined the term “orthosomnia” to describe the overwhelm users experience by fixating on their sleep trackers. She found that the more patients agonized over tracking sleep—especially when they thought they weren’t getting enough shut-eye and tried to optimize their sleep—the less rest they got overall.

And those trackers might not be accounting for the bigger picture, says Rébecca Robillard, associate professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa and co-chair of the Canadian Sleep Research Consortium. For women in particular, device algorithms may not consider the physiological changes that impact sleep, from menstruation to menopause. Sensors on wearables may even do a poorer job measuring heart rates for people with darker skin, Robillard adds.

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It might be wise to skip the tracker altogether. Instead, Dr. Seema Khosla, medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep, says to consider a simple question: How do you feel when you wake up? “When you decide how you’ve slept, is it because the device said you slept well or poorly, or is it because you feel a certain way?” Khosla says. “Does it match with your lived experience?”

Indeed, on certain days when my deep sleep was less than optimal, I was still peppier than on days my watch told me I’d slept well. So, I started going to bed bare-wristed more often, relying on how I felt instead of how my watch told me I should feel. Even if I had a bad night, there was always tomorrow to catch some extra winks.